Outdoor writing students need to be trained to find material about their own lives that they will share with others in writing. Telling stories to friends is easy and natural, but when someone in authority says, “Today we’re going to write about ourselves,” students freeze up, forget that they have a life, and can’t think of a single story. Even on threat of death or a bad grade they are unable to open up.
Why write about self at all? Natural history essays are about the environment, not about self, so why not just use field journals to record facts and impressions about the outdoors? While this is a discussion for another post, in short, meditating on self can result in self discovery. Also, all material is shaped by our vision, which is shaped by our experiences. This is true even when we are trying to be objective. Even if a story or description comes from something observed, read, or overheard, it is still transformed as it passes through the screen of a person’s mind. Finally, the border between experience and meditation is fuzzy; we evaluate as we experience and we transform the experience as we write, sometimes exploring completely new sensations. So articulating experience can make it clearer.
Based on these assumptions, the following exercise, which students or clients can record in their journals, will help students re-explore their own lives. It can take some time, so it’s best done in stages or when you have a morning or afternoon you can give to writing practice.
First, read the phrases from the chart below out loud, giving examples from your own life, and have students write a phrase or sentence which describes a person, place, event, or value in their pasts. For example, when I prompt students to think of a place heavy with memory, I generally write the phrase “Greenjacket is heavy with memory.” I explain to students that Greenjacket is our family ranch in western Utah, and I have had hundreds of essential experiences in that place. This part of the process of mining memory opens doors in the students’ minds because it uses generic phrases (a place heavy with memory) to get at specific stories (the time my cousins and I ran around in the snow naked at Greenjacket). It models the movement from general to specific and vice versa that writers use daily in their work. This part of the mining exercise takes anywhere from ten to thirty minutes, depending on how much discussion there is with each item.
When students have completed this list of sentences or phrases, it’s important to let them try out telling the stories orally before they begin to write. It is a rare student, if you can find one, who doesn’t find talking easier than writing. So a good next step is for students to take turns telling one of the stories that this mining exercise brought to the surface. They must choose for themselves which story they tell, because some of the stories may be private or embarrassing and students must never be forced to disclose something they don’t want to. This telling is better in small groups, probably groups of four, so that everyone has a chance to tell. After each student has taken a minute or two to tell the story, others in the group should respond. This response makes the story a public object, gives value to the telling, and helps the process of meditating on experience.
A third stage (after recording phrases and expanding one or more of the phrases into oral story) is to actually have the students write out one or more of the stories. To write out one story on a page or two of journal takes 5-15 minutes for beginning writers. It’s good to then have volunteers read the expanded story and allow others in the group to comment on the story. They can say what the story showed them about the writer, what it made them feel, or what it made them think about in their own lives. Later students can be assigned to write out one, some, or all the stories. The way I generally do this is to give students the assignment (due in a few days) to write a 10-page autobiography. If they write fast, they can do this in about two hours. The idea is to write quickly not carefully, to vomit words on the page. I tell them that they can use this list as an outline, but that it would be even better if they just write off the top of their heads and only use the list when they get stuck. This gives them a safety net (the list) but allows them to explore their lives following only their whims, where their own interests lead them, which is what a writer does.
So here is the outline. I tell them that all stories have all four components—place, people, event, and values. This again helps them to see how stories work so they can more freely create stories from their own life and meditate on these stories.
Places Describe:
- a place heavy with memory
- a place you've traveled to
- a place where some trouble happened
- a place where a family story happened
People Describe:
- a person who has influenced you
- a sticky relationship
- an interesting character
- a group you’ve served in some way
- someone you admire and want to emulate
Experiences Tell the story of:
- a first (first kiss, first time to drive the car, first use of drugs)
- a difficult decision
- a rite of passage
- an embarrassing moment
Values Speculate on:
- your code for getting by (for example, “I don’t sweat the little stuff.”)
- how your values were formed
- what bothers you in society (for example, pollution, politicians, hypocrisy)
- what you like about living in this time in history
Have fun!