Writing Exercise: Autobiography

Writing Exercise: Autobiography

  • Submitted By: daculahaha
  • Date Submitted: 12/13/2008 6:56 PM
  • Category: English
  • Words: 303
  • Page: 2
  • Views: 2

This topic requires you sit, observe, and write. You must locate a bench someplace nearby and sit there for a minimum of one hour observing and taking notes on what passes before you. From these notes you must shape an essay of your observations. Using specific and vivid detail, describe what you observed. You should choose a bench, or location, where there is a lot of activity, such as a local park, mall, lobby, waiting area, or street. This is an exercise in description, so please be sure you closely describe what you observe. This is also another exercise in selection and arrangement, since you must carefully choose the details that best depict your setting and observations.
No autobiography can ever be truly comprehensive. Like all art, writing an autobiography requires the careful selection and arrangement of materials. In a sense, by selecting and arranging autobiographical writers create fictional characters out of the raw materials of their lives. If you were going to write an autobiography, what scenes and situations would you choose out of raw materials of your life? What events or experiences from your life would you select, and how would you arrange them? Consider how you would like your autobiography to reflect your identity. What would go in your autobiography? What would you leave out? Put together a list of experiences and events that you think would best present who you would like readers to perceive you to be and discuss why you have made these choices—how these events and experiences reflect who you would like to be for readers. Describe what you creative non-fiction self-representation would look like. Please note: I am not asking you to write an autobiography; rather, I am asking you to write an essay on how you would write an autobiography.

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