If your goal is to become a better writer, you need to practice. Here’s your writing assignment for today: write a short paragraph describing an early memory.
Memory is one of the writer’s most important tools. Being able to explore one’s own memories and to use them to give depth and details to one’s work is invaluable. It keeps your writing from being all surface detail.
A memory is more than merely what happened. It is not history. It’s the filtered emotions and perspective that can help take your writing to a level that really connects with your readers.
In this assignment, select an early memory and write a few paragraphs about it. Show why you selected this memory, why it’s important, and what it means to you.
Here’s my example:
It’s hard for me to separate my early memories from my imagination of what those early memories should have been. One in particular seems more like a scene from a movie than something that is really mine.
I remember reaching up to try and open the mailbox, stretching up and not being able to reach it. But I remember it from outside myself, seeing a small boy, bundled up against the cold prairie wind, standing on his tiptoes. The brown and white two-tone mailbox sits on that rough fencepost at the end of our long driveway beside the football-field size rectangle of our front lawn. And the blacktop road behind me smells darkly of the oil that was spread on it the past summer to keep down the dust and maintain the blacktop. Someone must be with me, but I can’t see or remember who it is. It is a memory of stretching, yearning, and not being able to see what’s in that box.
What is strange to me is this image is in my memory, but it’s more of a photograph, a single framed image, a tableau. This is a far different life in the distant past and sometimes I forget that this child is me. It’s not a memory of comfort or of home, but something more puzzling. Did I really ever live far out on that country road?
You may leave your completed assignment in the comments section below.
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