Writing the Stories of Their Lives

Last week was mid-term portfolio week in my composition class.  I read and graded twenty folders from a colleague’s section of the course, as well as several other portfolios where another reader was required because the grade was in dispute. I spent my weekend in intimate association with the workings of first year college students’ minds, and I came away thinking.
 Perhaps because I was not reading my own students’ folders, I was able to see the ways in which the different writers approached their subjects more clearly. Often the writing was plodding and labored.  I could see where the writer would lose sight of the subject or drown in a sea of detail.  Sometimes the writing was sparse and it was evident that the writer had struggled to fill the required number of pages. Yet, while reading some of them, I was pleasantly surprised at the degree of control the writers had over their material.  The differences in the ways in which they would approach their subjects were striking.
Most composition students begin the semester with very little control.  You get the impression, reading their work, that the topic leads them rather than their directing the flow of the material.  They begin their papers, about the Phish concert they attended, for example, by telling their readers how they got their tickets and how they made plans to share rides.  Sometimes the accounts include descriptions of the various drugs they did on the trip, and the parking lot scenes at the actual concert grounds.  They go on to give scant description of the actual concert itself.  The word awesome appears frequently in this part of the paper.  And they conclude by telling their readers it was an incredible experience they will never forget.    Their papers about their athletic careers often plod year by year from junior recreation league in elementary school to every middle school and high school season and conclude with the statement that a particular sport is very important to their lives and they wouldn’t be the person they are without it.
 I do not doubt the sincerity of these accounts.  Nor do I doubt that the writers are exploring what is for them, a significant experience, and that they are doing so to the best of their ability.  What bothers me about these papers is the idea that the material seems to be controlling the writer, rather than the writer controlling the material.  I see little evidence of the writer’s having made conscious choices.  One sentence seems to follow another with a kind of inevitability, not of choice, but of chronology.  Every part of the paper is given equal weight.  The writer clearly did not envision any other possibilities.  What was on the page seemed to constrain them rather than free them.
 Some papers were strikingly different, and this kind of difference is the main leap I often see between the mid-term and the final portfolios in a composition class. Some writers have made the switch to a position where they are clearly in command.  They have made choices.  One such paper, entitled “Hannah’s Angel” tells the story of the author’s experience with a bad relationship in high school told from the point of view of her guardian angel.  Clearly this writer had considered her topic and made some decisions about how to present it.  I envision this writer, whom I have never met, chewing the end of her pencil and sitting before the blank page playing out the different possibilities in her mind.  Another paper was a mock feature article designed to show the author’s acting career.  He writes of his hometown through the eyes of the reporter who has come to interview him about his hypothetical star status and his upcoming picture  Yet another begins with a hole he observed in an otherwise well-dressed man’s sweater in a line at a rather exclusive store.  He runs through different stories of how the hole could have gotten there, transitioning from one to the other with the phrase, “but maybe that’s not how it happened at all”.
 All of this set me wondering.  In composition, most of our students are writing the stories of their lives.  When we tell them they may write about whatever they want to write about, they naturally gravitate to the area where they have the most authority, their personal experience. They are documenting their own history, or presenting their thoughts on the daily events of their lives. They are, in effect, presenting themselves. In composition, if we succeed, and most often to at least some extent we do, we help them to gain a larger measure of control over their own writing.  That’s really what it’s all about.
From the very beginning of the course, we ask them to think about what they have written and to consider other possibilities.  Before they even begin to write, we teach them to brainstorm, to map, to play different leads.  We ask them to consider the effects their words might have on different audiences, how much to tell the reader and when, how to show enough to allow the reader to feel what they felt.
When we ask them to write them from another point of view or to contemplate another perspective, we are literally asking them to rewrite and reconsider their own history.  They begin to think of their lives as a story they are composing.  They become aware of different ways of beginning and ending a story, of how to present it from different points of view, of how to probe the metaphor and meaning behind everyday occurrences.   They learn to use their writing to extend their thinking, to take things to another level.
All of this makes me wonder about how this affects their actual lives.  Do our students also begin to see that they have control over the meaning they attach to these stories and even over how those stories turn out?   Do they begin to consider other points of view besides their own?  When I read a piece as confidently written as “Hannah’s Angel”, I envision a writer with control not only over her material, but over her life.   The words come at me with purpose.  If not every one of the words is there for a reason, at least the paper is headed in that direction.  I feel, as a reader, that I am in competent hands.  There is a thoughtful intelligence in charge. Does the author feel that way about her life?  I wonder.
Over my years of teaching composition, I have come to have tremendous respect for the power of personal writing.  I know of no better way to help students to learn to think critically about their experience in the world.  Just the act of putting their experiences down on paper, the discipline of laying it all out in sentences and paragraphs leads to reflection upon those experiences.  Once writers begin to discover the power of planning and of revision, and ever-expanding number of possibilities begins to emerge.  The world itself begins to open up.
If writing is intimately connected to thinking, as I believe it is, then are we not participating in the creation of thoughtful human beings? It becomes so much more than words on the page. We are changing the ways in which people think about their lives.  What greater work could we do?