Personal Reflective Narrative Assignment and Checklist

Using the poem, cartoons and short stories as jumping off points, reflect on a meaningful childhood experience that changed you. You will then write a short story in first person detailing and reflecting upon this experience. Your story should include three aspects:

1. Details describing the event – How old were you? Who else was involved? What happened? How did you react?

2. How you felt at the moment – Scared? Angry? Invincible? Idealistic? Guilty? Embarrassed?

3. Reflect on the experience – How did you grow and change? What did you learn? Do you have any regrets? How would you do things differently now?

These should not be three distinct parts, but should be interwoven in a logical way. The story should be three to four pages, double-spaced. (If I ever use this lesson when I teach, I will write my own short story to pass out to students as an example.)

The narrative aspect should:

□ Emphasize one important moment in your life

□ Establish a main idea; there is a point to the story. What is the question your story is trying to answer about your life? In other words, what purpose does telling this story serve?

□ Include specific, compelling details about yourself, the setting and other characters

□ Use telling examples to support your ideas and help the reader better understand what is happening and the importance or meaning of such events

□ Organize events in the most appropriate order to reveal how one event leads to or causes another.

□ Include dialogue and sensory details to help the reader see the story as it unfolds. What did you see? Smell? Hear? What did say and think?

□ Speculate about your motives. Why did you act the way you did?

□ Consider multiple perspectives. How did others react? What might they have been thinking?

□ Draw conclusions: How do you feel now? How has the event changed you?

□ Use an appropriate tone and mood. Does the story lend itself to a serious tone? Humorous? Sarcastic?

□ Choose a style – voice, language, sentence patters – appropriate to your subject and theme

The reflective aspect should:

□ Consider or respond to a significant event or idea and what the idea means to you and the larger world. Why is this story worth telling?

□ Answer the question, Why? And So what?

□ Be anchored in small, even familiar details or occasions that you make more meaningful

□ Incorporate a variety of forms, including narration and description

□ Make it clear not only what the event means to the you, but what it might mean to the reader.

** the checklists are largely pulled from Jim Burke's Writing Reminders