Blog #7 - Experience Writing First Essay

For my first personal essay, I decided to write a memoir about a turning point in my life when my boyfriend and I broke up. I wrote it as if I was writing in my journal but for an audience to read. I wrote about how this experience helped me realize how to be patient and that everything happens for a reason. I decided that I wanted it to be an example of "accumulation" because the story chronicled different days that came together in the end.

As I prepared to write this story, I looked at my personal journal and read past entries. I took different moments throughout this period of my life to include in the paper. This essay was originally supposed to be about kickboxing and what I learned from it (which kind of related to the breakup) but this first essay turned out to be about what I learned personally and how it gave me more faith to just believe in what God could do for me.

I realized alot of things about myself as I wrote this essay but I feel like the entire story wasn't told properly - it can be better. Based on my conference with Dr. Chandler, I feel like that this essay needs more scenes wherein I'm realizing that this relationship wasn't going to work out. I need to change my focus so that my audience can relate to my story because I feel that the first draft was lacking that.

When I revise this essay, I would like to focus more on my discovery of what love is. During the conference, I realized that I couldn't see what love was all about until I got out of the relationship. I also realized that when I was in the relationship, all I wanted to do was to keep the "love" even though it wasn't the real kind of love that's described in the Bible.

For my second essay, I have two ideas on what I want to write about - either kickboxing or experiencing a hurricane when I was younger. If I write about kickboxing, that will relate to my first essay since both of them happened almost at the same point in my life. If I write about the hurricane, I would like to model it after "Biography of a Dress" by Kincaid because it will be written during the present as I look back at what happened to me when I was younger and how it has shaped the way I view life and the world in general.