Your writing experience

You may think that you have no writing experience, that you have not written since school.  That may be true if writing was only essays and dissertations. If you think about it a bit more, you will find that your everyday life has many elements of writing:

Most people write to-do lists at the beginning of the week or the day, and grocery lists for the supermarket. Whereas it seems a bit simple, imagine if you gathered all the lists you have written throughout a year – it would amount to a lot of words, and it would also tell a story, or many stories, about the events of your life in that year: where you went, the people you saw, the work you did from your to-do list, but even your grocery list would tell stories of times alone and times with visitors, celebrations and birthday cakes.

Maybe you write a journal or diary, which is also daily writing, and even if letters are not so common these days, many of us write emails, text messages, WhatsApp messages, small texts on social media on a daily basis.

If you look at all the pieces of writing you do, you will find that you write differently depending on the topic, the intended reader of your text, and the medium.  Your emails are probably a little more structured and formal than your text messages, your posts on social media may be more carefully worded for different audiences (people you may not know very well, for example).

Exercises: Think about all these lists, messages,  and other pieces of writing you do every day for discussion in your Zoom session. Where and when do you write?

As an exercise in creative writing, look at the grocery lists above, and tell the stories that they suggest or look at your own grocery lists if you have them, and think about what stories they could tell.

– OR –

write a grocery list that tells a story about a specific day (maybe a birthday, or a celebration, a family reunion)

– OR –

imagine a story told through grocery lists or to-do lists.  How could slight changes on a list tell a specific story?