Original Prompt, Week 1

This is a prompt from Jo Ann Beard's "The Fourth State of Matter." In this essay, Beard tells about the murder of her friends and colleagues on a college campus. Interestingly enough, however, this horrific experience is not the sole subject of her essay. In her essay, Beard most definitely describes certain memories of her friends and describes, in rather muted detail, her friends' deaths, but much of the essay focuses on her husband who left her but continually calls and keeps himself fresh in her mind, her aging and dying collie, the family of squirrels that made a home in her spare bedroom and the friend who helped her get rid of them, etc. The tendency when thinking and writing about a traumatic experience would be to focus on that experience to the exclusion of other surrounding details, but here, Beard focuses on these other details and keeps herself from over-sentimentality and lends HER experience, more individual and personal, to what was a story on the news to most anyone else. It seems that this technique could prove quite useful in the writing of "big" memories and events. Think about some pivotal, horrific, or even sublimely happy event in your life and instead of focusing on the details of that one moment, focus on the life you lived around that event, the smaller details of your day, what you were doing a week/month/day/year before, who was close to you at the time, where you were and any time you may have been there before, etc. In short, focus on any detail that does not immediately link to the "big" experience and, in essence, write two or three, or even four, stories, only one of which is the "big" experience just to see how they may connect or throw one another into sharper relief.