SONYA HUBER: Assignment Ideas
 
 
                 

Opa Nobody * Order Information * For Teachers
Assignment Ideas * Research Links * Book-Length Creative Nonfiction

Four Assignment Ideas for Creative Writing with History:
Timelines
Conversations
Artifacts
Imagined Scenes

1. Timelines: Use a spreadsheet to match up events in your personal chronologies with historical and current events. Here is a link to my timeline file, which I used as I was researching this book to explore connections between my family's lives and larger events. I used an Excel file, with the first column containing a running list of years. This can end up being a pretty large document if you're studying several generations, but you'll be surprised at how much of this space you can fill. The second column can be the major life events in a person you're focusing on (yourself or someone else). The third column can be for major life events in the immediate circle of friends and family surrounding this person, because these intersections of lives create so much change in our own lives. The last columns can be devoted to local, regional, national, and international events. If you are researching an aunt with a stamp-collecting obsession, devote one column to the events in the world of stamps (conferences, controversies, etc.) Look for intersections and try to write on what they might have meant to the people involved.

Also see Writing True: The Art and Craft of Creative Nonfiction, ed. Mimi Schwartz and Sondra Perl, p.42, for a similar timeline assignment.

2. Conversations: Using your spreadsheet as a guide, generate some questions you might ask family members or friends who might be familiar with one of these intersections. Ask for an interview, and talk with that person about the experience of the intersection: "What was it like when your dad lost his job during that huge upswing in the economy?" "Do you remember what people did when President Kennedy and Grandpa died on the same day?" The goal with these questions is to find stories, big or little, that capture the ways in which peoples' lives naturally contain references to other lives and to history and current events.

3. Artifacts: If you're writing about a family member or friend, choose an artifact you might be somewhat familiar with and describe it in as much detail as possible. You might choose, for example, a plate that belonged to your grandmother that your mom has always displayed in her living room. Ask to see this plate, and record every element of your interaction with this object. How does it feel to ask? What does mom do when I ask to see it? What does the room look like with the plate removed from the wall? What's your first instinct when you touch it--to tense up as though it might break, or to hold it comfortably? What is the manufacturer's name on the back of the plate? What material is it made of? What memories does it evoke for you? The act of consciously examining objects as artifacts--rather than just drawing from memory about them--can spark associations but can also train us to pay attention and to realize that we always have more to learn, even about what seems familiar.

                 
                 
                 
                 
                 
                 
                 
                 
                 
                 
                 
                 

4. Imagined scenes: Write a scene, starting with the words "I imagine..." that captures some element of what you have researched. Imagine your grandmother making food for dinner one evening and serving something special on the plate. What might she have been thinking about? How might her body have moved across the kitchen? What from the newspaper that day might have caught her eye, and what might she have been worrying or wondering about? Don't worry about whether or not you can verify these details. If you'd like, you can start every sentence with "I imagine." Then write a response to your scene. Does it seem realistic? What have you invented and why, and what new questions does your scene raise? Writing these "I imagine" scenes can allow us to try to enter into the heads of other people--not as they really were or are--but as composites of our memories of them and facts we can find about them. The exercise is a fascinating way to reveal what you know about a person, what you don't yet know, what you wish was true but isn't, what you wish you could ask that person and should ask someone else, and what you will never know.