20-1 Narrative Assignments You must complete TWO of the following assignments.

One of your chosen assignments must be a nonfiction option, and one must be a fiction assignment. You will have one day for each assignment to complete a rough draft. You will then choose ONE of these two rough drafts to edit, polish, and create a good copy of it. Lab time is booked for Thursday, assignment is due the day you are back from spring break (Monday, April 7). 1. 5 Minutes (Non-Fiction) Create a narrative describing 5 significant (best, worst, important, transformative, etc.) minutes of your life from the last 2 years. This narrative should be as detailed as possible! Include ALL the information that another person would need to know in order to feel like they were experiencing these minutes just as you had. Consider your 5 sense what are you smelling in these minutes? Hearing? Tasting? Feeling (literally)? Seeing? Describe these things in as much detail as possible! Consider your emotional connection to the situation: what are you feeling? Why? What is the context (what has happened before) to produce these feelings or connections for you? Consider the other people who were present: why were they there? What were they doing?

If this assignment only takes you five minutes to write, you HAVE NOT completed this assignment well or effectively!

2. This is What They Know (Non-Fiction) Write what you know. Howard Nemerov (often attributed to Mark Twain) Create an account of a story that you have been told many times, perhaps by a family member, coworker, friend, etc. Write the story from their perspective (not yours), as you believe they would have experienced it. You may want to interview this person to gain a greater understanding of their experience (great reference them at the end to give them credit). Be sure to consider the questions above in this piece give as complete and accurate an account as possible, and explore the motivation/ outcomes/ context that surrounded or resulted from this event. How did this event/ experience change this persons life? Why is it a story they tell often? Why has this experience stayed with them so concretely?

This exercise will allow you to develop your skills of empathy and understanding as well as your writing abilities.

3. This Is The End (Fiction) Life as you know it has ended. Choose an end for life as humanity currently experiences it: this might be a zombie apocalypse, a plague or pandemic event, related to climate shift, or any other kind of event that would alter the way humanity currently functions. You must describe the event, and create a way for a reader to access and understand this event (characters experiencing it, someone reporting about it, a historical account of this event, etc.).

4. Fairytale Counter narrative (Fiction) Choose a fairytale or parable that you are familiar with, and rewrite it from another characters perspective. This character might have a very different role in the original story (antagonist, villain, minor supporting character, etc.), but should become the significant/ main character (protagonist) in this counter narrative. Retell the fairytale as seen/ experienced from their perspective. People should be the protagonists of their own lives; give this character the opportunity to become so. Examples of this kind of counter narrative are available from Ms. Harrison. Gregory McGuire is an author who is well-known for this kind of counter narrative work (the writer of Wicked, which become a Broadway musical in it he tells the story of the Wicked Witch of the West, who Dorothy kills in The Wizard of Oz. In this counter narrative, the witch Elphelba has a very different experience/ life than what is told in Dorothys version).

Advice in writing: *Be sure to include the story elements we have looked at, and be sure to have a point sometimes in writing fiction, we get so caught up in description, that we lack purpose or progression in our writing, and the story falls flat. ** I encourage you to have another person read and edit your story it can be very helpful to have another set of eyes/ another persons perspective in your writing. Maintain ownership, but be open to suggestions and improvements to make your story stronger.