Personal Writing- Travel Writing

1. Personal Writing- Travel Writing

2. Agreements for Free Writing • Keep writing for the whole time! • Use the menu for ideas and inspiration • Don’t worry about spelling, grammar, and handwriting • You will be asked to share with a partner, but not the whole class (unless you want to) • Do not disturb your neighbors at all- allow people the space and freedom to think and write.

3. Free Write Options • Write about a time that your perspective changed, or was shaped due to an experience you had. • Make a list of experiences and then write about a time you learned a valuable lesson from a travel/adventure/life experience. • Write about an awesome travel experience (near or far) that you grew from. • These can be comical, serious, heart felt, thought- provoking, simple, complex…and on and on.

4. My examples: • I learned to listen to myself and to stay true to myself during a failed deep dive attempt in Egypt • I learned the importance of a smile while walking down Willamette Street in Eugene. • I learned to be more prepared with a map and water in Meteora, Greece • I discovered an awe for the world when taking a stroll in a Fijian village. • I confirmed my belief in ghosts when I lived in Alaska • I realized that I do NOT like frogs legs while visiting Paris.

5. Essential Questions • How do our experiences change our perspectives? • How can we use our stories to learn about ourselves and to teach others?

6. Personal Narrative: Travel Writing • Story about yourself where you learned something about yourself, another, of the world; a time your perspective changed • Focuses on a single event (not an entire day, or week, or trip)- LESS is MORE! • Uses vivid and compelling setting, sensory details, dialogue, voice, imagery. • Is an experience that you truly care about; one that seems to have left a mark in your life and your knowing of life.

7. Planning: Find a system that works for you!

8. Joseph Heller’s Catch 22

9. Jack Kerouac: The Town and the City

10. Mind Mapping • Setting • Character • Conflict • Background info • Dialogue • Moment of realization! Moment of Change!

11. What do these have in common? • “Nine years earlier, on a solo trek up the Arun Valley in remote northeastern Nepal, I’d wandered into a tiny village called Num.” • “I thought after the feast of chicken feet here in Vientiane, Laos there could be no further gastronomic traumas for me.” • “There is really only one sensible way to get from the south to the north coast of Papua New Guinea, and that’s the comfort and safety of an airplane”

12. How about this one? • “Three huge feathered creatures stare me down, unafraid”

13. How do we start? Purposefully! Hook your reader’s attention • Establish your first setting by using sensory details • With action! Start in the climax and then back off…this keeps the reader in suspense! • With internal dialogue or dialogue (helps to establish character) “ I must be insane”, I murmured to myself. What tone might this take? Fear? Humor? excitement? • With a hook that sets up for the focus of the piece:

14. My 3 hooks • The thin autumn air in the Alaskan outback brings so much: blueberry shrubs with blood red leaves, marmots and critters scurrying to store food for the impending deep freeze, and even the possibilities of ghosts. • After five months in the Alaskan wilderness I thought I saw it all…grizzlies, wolf packs, mountain sheep, moose families, golden eagles...but I was wrong. I still had not seen a ghost. • “It must be a bear….right? It must be”, I murmured to myself. The crisp air chilled my bones… or was it the thought that I’d rather be seeing a bear than the ghost of Fanny Quigley.

15. Your turn! Three hooks: • 1. • 2. • 3.

16. Writer’s Workshop Menu • GO back to brainstorming • Plan out your details • Start writing the introduction