Paper #1-Memoir

Paper #1: Personal Memoir

All of us have been through incidents that we thought would make a good story—events from our lives that we find memorable and that we want to share with someone else. As a result, memoir essays are good opportunities for writers to experiment with style, language, tone, and other devices that are intended to keep their readers reading. However, there is a larger point to a memoir—we want our readers to come to understand what drives us, what motivates us, what we are passionate about. We want them to get to know us better, and to do so by introducing them to the stories that have shaped us. In Anna Lisa Raya’s “It’s Hard Enough Being Me,” the author uses several examples from her college experiences to talk about how she came to understand the nature of ethnic identity. In “Shooting An Elephant,” George Orwell looks back on an incident from his youth, and shows how this incident helped him to understand the “true nature” of imperialism.

For this essay, you want to show a reader some theme or principle that is important to you, or articulate some sensibility or outlook on life that you have, by using “evidence” from your life that illustrates it. What you want to “convey” with your story is up to you—you may want your reader to laugh at the ironies of life, or help them to understand something much more complicated. However, there has to be a “point” to the story you are telling. Even entertaining stories help their readers learn something or understand something that they didn’t know before they read the story.

How to begin? Before you start writing, think along these lines:

• What is something—some theme or idea—that is intensely personal to me? What do I feel or believe that I have a personal stake in? What is a sensibility or a point of view on life that I want others to come to understand?
• Then ask yourself, what stories, incidents, or events from my life make this theme or idea so very personal? What have I gone through that helps me (and can help others) to understand just what drives me, or what I’m passionate about?
• Finally, ask yourself: how best to tell this story (or these stories) in a way that shows a reader how my story conveys my theme?

Once you have settled those questions in your mind, and considered a specific story that can do what you need it to do, you must do this:

• Write an essay in which you use that story to prove to an audience what your personal involvement is in that larger theme. What is your story an “example” of? How does this story help a reader to understand your theme or idea?

Your readers are your classmates and me—people who come from different backgrounds and have varied interests but share certain experiences in common (higher education, life at UT, life in the 21st Century, experience of important current events, etc.). As serious as this essay sounds, feel free to come up with something funny—remember, even if the “point” isn’t to make us laugh, humor is a great way to hold your reader’s attention.

Remember, though: we won’t know if your story is “the truth” or not, and you don’t have to tell us what “really” happened. Feel free to embellish, invent, pad, and re-write events from your life if you think that they will make a good story, or if you think that your amendments will better “prove the point” you are trying to prove. The purpose of this exercise is to show how stories can prove something to an audience—you don’t have to make it a therapy session!

A strong memoir will:

• Begin with an introductory paragraph that sets up the story to come for the reader. Not all memoirs begin this way, but remember to consider what Trimble says about strong “openers.” You want to draw your reader into the story and give the reader some explanation of what this story is going to prove.
• Describe the setting and characters. Give us what we need to know about them in order to appreciate your story fully.
• Use dialogue where necessary to show us things about the characters and their situations. A lot can get revealed in conversation—by what’s said and how it’s said. You should read your dialogues aloud to make sure they sound genuine. Use slang, contractions, and other speech patterns that your characters actually used, or that sound appropriate to the characters. Choose the snippets of dialogue that best help you tell the story.
• Always work toward the development of your central theme.
• Maintain a consistent point of view.
• Keep the writing engaging. Descriptive details, vivid vocabulary, pacing—draw from these (and from our class glossary, if you like) and other techniques to keep your readers reading.
• Use an organizational pattern that suits your purpose (chronological is what a lot of people do, but you can also tell the story by interspersing past and present events, so long as you do this in a way that makes sense). Consider the ways that the writers we’ve examined organized their essays, in particular they way that they gravitated between recounting the “plot” of the story and their own narrative reflections on it.
• Follow the accepted conventions of grammar and mechanics, except where dialogue is called for—or where you’re making choices on the basis of style.

Grading Criteria:

I will be looking for the following in this essay:

• An introductory paragraph with a clear thesis statement that sets-up the essay to come for your reader
• Well-formed body paragraphs that are each about a specific idea
• Use of personal experiences to help prove some larger point
• A conclusion that sums up the essay, and that leads the reader “out”
• Clear and precise prose—grammar, and mechanics
• Varied, lively, and interesting style
• Insight, reflection, and originality

Length: 3 to 4 pages
Double-Spaced, 12pt Times Roman font

Due Dates:
Student Showcases (selected students only):
Tuesday 1/29 (selected students—e-mail to me by 8PM)
Sunday, 2/3 (selected students—e-mail to me by 8PM)
First Draft Due: Wednesday, 2/6
Final Draft Due: Monday, 2/18