Narrative Book Overview
During the course, you will be writing a number of different stories, all of which will be collected into a narrative book at the end of the course. We’ll share these narratives together in class as a community of writers, reading drafts at various stages. We’ll also discuss the craft of writing powerful narratives.
Freedom of Expression
I want to encourage you to feel free to experiment with your stories. In fact, I want you to feel safe to write anything you’d like to for this class. Use this class as your one chance to do writing in which you are unconstrained.
Stories
Here are some of the stories we will work on:
- early school story
- object story
- creativity story
- sensory story
- education story
- important story
Story Framing
During the course, we’ll spend time talking about how to frame stories, that is, how to link narratives to outside sources, especially academic sources. People often wrestle with this issue of framing as they write their papers, however, especially if they are writing their first narrative paper. So, while I certainly encourage you to work references into your paper if you can do so in a meaningful way (footnotes, for instance, are a nice way to include citations without breaking the flow of your piece), you are NOT required to include any references if you don’t want to. In fact, you might even find it liberating to write a paper where you deliberately try not to make references. On the other hand, I do want you to know up front that it is easiest to publish narrative research in academic journals if you include outside sources; publishers and journal editors are definitely biased in favor of reviewing the relevant literature.
Take a Chance & Trust Yourself
I want you to believe that this is a chance for you to experiment, to make mistakes, to try something new. I’d prefer that. I’m not looking for you to create perfect, polished stories (I can help you move toward that later). Instead, I want you to stretch yourself, push yourself, try to really learn. So, you might find that writing about a story which is nagging at you, but which you can’t quite understand, would be a great learning opportunity. In my experience, stories that seem important to us, though we’re not really sure why, are, ultimately, the best stories for us to write because they hold keys to our understanding of the world. (Of course, I should warn you, those stories are often quite a lot of work to write.) What I’d love best, then, is for you to write a stories which teach you about yourself. If you can achieve that, you’ll have taken a key step into a narrative life.