Every once in a while a writer in my memoir classes will suggest a writing prompt for me to consider. I like that — their ideas clue me in on what they’re especially interested in writing. Only problem? Too often their prompts are too specific.
A prompt one of my writers suggested during our recent spring session made it crystal clear what they wanted the class to write about. “It’s about sex,” they wrote in an email message to me. In case I didn’t understand what they meant, they added one more line. “Losing one’s virginity, to be exact.”
The quality of a prompt can make or break a class. I pride myself in assigning prompts writers can approach in different ways, and I consider it my job to motivate them to look at prompts from many angles. After all, part of the fun of coming to class each week is hearing the unexpected directions writers go with the assignment. An excerpt from the online Memoir Teacher Masterclass I’ve put together helps explain:
Example: If I were to assign “First day of school” for a September class, we’d spend our time together hearing story after story of walks to school, teachers, classrooms. Instead, I might assign “First Class” as a back-to-school prompt. “Have you taken any classes outside of regular school” I’d ask, suggesting they use their 500 words to describe the first day. “Or how about this: Did you ever sit in first class on a plane? On a train? What was that experience like?”
Some writers might return with essays about their first day of school, and others might write about returning to college as a young adult after dropping out. Others might write about sitting first class on an airplane, or even serving in the military, “private first class.”
Mixing it up like that makes the class more stimulating.
What could be more stimulating than hearing essay after essay about “Losing One’s Virginity,” you ask? After pondering this for a while, I responded to the writer who suggested the prompt to assure them I’d use the idea sometime during the Spring session. “I’ll word it a little differently, though, “ I wrote. “You’ll see.” So in the same way I switched “First Day of School” to “First Class” I broadened “losing One’s Virginity” to…drum roll, please…
Where do Babies Come From?
Perfect prompt to assign for the week of Mother’s Day! In class I credited the writer for inspiring the prompt and suggested many ways writers might approach it. How did they learn where babies come from? Did their junior high or high school teach sex education? “If you lived on a farm, or if your family bred dogs or cats or goats or pigs, did anyone tell you what was going on there?” I asked, encouraging any of them who had witnessed a live birth to write about why they happened to be there to watch.
Writers came back the next week with stories of milking cows on their family farm, moonlighting at a hospital maternity ward, and learning about sex by reading the instruction manual Kotex provided in boxes of tampons. One writer explained how the progressive church she and her husband, a pediatrician, attended had enlisted him to come up with a sex education curriculum for young members. “Our national denomination invited him to be on the task force developing a new sexuality curriculum,” she wrote. “This was a huge focus for him for six years in the 90s.” The woman who wrote the piece is a retired educator, and in the end she and her husband were both involved in piloting the new curricula.
A writer who’d lived in Seattle in the late 1960s read a piece about volunteering to help pass Referendum 20, which legalized abortion in the early months of pregnancy. Fifteen other states had liberalized their abortion laws by that time, but Washington was the first state to do so through a vote of the people. With abortion rights in the news lately, that essay gave us lots to talk about afterwards.
As for the writer who’d suggested “Losing One’s Virginity” as a prompt in the first place? The student didn’t seem to mind at all that I’d broadened the theme a bit.
What can I say? It triggered another topic that was very stimulating.
Interested in starting a memoir-writing class of your own? Check out my Masterclass program.
Well done Beth. This gives great insight into the responsibility of leading a memoir class. And, I have to say, few of us would ever have been able to introduce the ambiguity you did. There is a very important divide between personal experience (exposure) and conceptual awareness. You were right to broaden the subject. I’m guessing the person who introduced this topic didn’t write about his first sexual encounter, but about something more informative. But that, as you said, is another topic.
OOPs…it could have been a her instead of a him. Sorry for jumping to that conclusion. LOL
Oh, Mel, that was intentional. I took advantage of the 21st-Century pronoun discussion and referred to the writer as “they.” And guess what? that writer did indeed write — and read outloud — an essay about losing their virginity. I’m telling you, you oughta join a memoir-writing class. That, or teach one yourself. It can truly be stimulating!
I agree with Mel’s point. “There is a very important divide between personal experience (exposure) and conceptual awareness”. As they say, a memoir writing is not about the writer but about the human element that many could relate to, learn from. I honestly don’t know what I’d write about if I’m give that prompt.
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