Writing about a significant experience or ethical dilemma:

A part of our mind, the part that was trained in school, feels we should know what we have to say before we write it down. However, in writing the personal essay and poetry, we can't know what we have to say; we must write in search of new meaning or fresh articulation of an insight. We must begin not knowing where we are going or what we will find. When we write, we may write ourselves down many blind alleys before we find the street that will take us where we want to go, but when our essays are finished, they read as if we our search proceeded seamlessly. Everything we touch on takes the writing's speaker as well as the reader further toward meaning and insight.

To write well, we must come to the page as explorers, investigators, people willing to find a new way, even among the familiar routes. We must be patient with ourselves when we write images and phrases that delight us but are not ones that lead us further into the emerging story. We must realize that seeking an abundance of images helps us find the most important ones. We may write with phrases we don't quite like but are ones we recognize as being in the vicinity of our story and therefore ones we must work on. Sorting this all out, we find the road on which the reader will eventually journey and in the end, we make it appear as if there were never any turns or trails we took but the ones we have in our final drafts.

Realizing the difficulty of this task combined with our training to feel comfortable as explainers and not discoverers in writing can keep us from starting and continuing our work.

Over the years, I have developed prompts for helping writers develop some degree of comfort as they start the journey of writing toward something they can't know until they've written it. Recently, I was asked to apply these prompts for high school students who are writing their college application essays. Writing about oneself is hard, and for those who don't normally do it, harder still. Where you do you begin and what is important to say? How do you put yourself on paper without sounding boring and mundane or conceited and inflated? How do you figure out what exactly to write about?

The application essay questions that the schools ask do in fact provide focus. A favorite of mine is the one that asks students to write about a significant experience and its impact on them. Though many can think of experiences they have had and could write about, finding the compelling story inside that experience is often daunting. As poets and essayists, we know this feeling. We have had to learn to look for the place from which we have something to say from our experience that will move others, whether the significant experience we are writing about is earth shattering or quiet: divorce, the death of a loved one, the purchase of a pet, meeting a celebrity, a conversation we had with a stranger, watching our children accomplish something however large or small, or observing a plant coming into bloom.

As I wrote to help the high school students, I began wondering what essays might come from those of us beyond our school years, if we decided to sit down and write from that time in our lives when we were moving toward our adult lives. What essays would we write if we thought about an experience that we had that changed our lives before we applied to college or went to work or married.

Perfect phrases for freewriting on a significant experience As teens, we had experiences that altered our lives, encouraged value setting and changed our goals. Sometimes those experiences were filled with grief, such as losing a loved one, watching a friend or family members deal with someone's illness, or having to move from a beloved community. Sometimes they were athletic experiences that involved training and commitment that shaped an outlook. Sometimes they were sponsored trips and activities that broadened views into how the world works and how the world's people overcome challenges. Sometimes, they were experiences gained by working toward a fundraising goal or policy-setting goal with others. To write about such an experience means to relive it on the page and draw lessons from it, which illustrate how you changed and grew.

Here are some phrases that are perfect for helping you as you begin to conjure up your story for the page. They may not appear in the finished work, but they will help you begin getting your experience on the page.

Perfect Phrase: "This is a story about…." When you need to remember the images and details of an experience, it can be helpful not to worry about chronology and narrative as you begin writing, because fresh to the page, you might become stymied by wondering how to fit everything together. In that state, you might inadvertently start squelching details so you won't have more than you think you can handle on the page. However, at the start, having more detail than you might be able to use and choosing from a wealth of information is more helpful for writing a compelling essay. When you start deleting information too soon or even before you start writing at all, you rarely arrive at the best information.

Therefore, repeating this phrase, "This is a story about…." and making a list using the details and images of your experience will help provide a framework that relaxes the mind and allows your images to come to more easily mind.

If, for instance, if you are writing about being in an international delegation of students you might write:

This is a story about high school seniors who come from many countries–Japan, England, Canada, the US, Brazil and Kenya.

This is a story about a conference room at the Brussels Holiday Inn.

This is a story about some of us liking coffee and some of us liking tea.

This is a story about trying black tea when I usually still drink milk.

This is a story of making a twelve-hour trip and wondering if I would be able to speak with others when I arrived.

This is a story about saying hello in English and not knowing what word I would hear back.

Using the "this is a story about …" phrase will help you keep writing until your list takes you deeper and deeper into the experience you have chosen to write about and you are recalling more and more particulars. Be sure to use the names of people, snippets of what you heard, and colors from the experience among other details and images.

After you have immersed yourself in the remembered experience, you might try writing lines that address the impact of that experience on you:

This is a story about learning about differences.

This is a story about learning how alike we are.

This is a story about learning about the way we want to connect, to share who we are, hoping we will make a difference.

This is a story about being given a responsibility and finding out that I will hold that responsibility as an important one for years.

Next, take these phrases one by one and write more about that part of the experience.

Perfect Phrase: "When I…" You can do the same kind of work by starting with other phrases repeated in a list:

When I _______, I did ______ When I _______, I thought_______ When I ________, I said ________ When I _________, I remembered_______

The more lines you write, the more material you will have to choose from and the more interesting ideas and images will occur to you. When you are listing and not judging the value of what you are writing, you will uncover gems that you will put to good use in your essay.

Perfect Phrases for Gathering More Specific Images from Your experience Think about a place that you can imagine you are writing from to tell the story you want to tell. In the example we are using, it could be from your chair in the conference room, from the airline seat on your way home or from your computer as you type an email to your new friends. In your mind, put yourself there and then begin telling others what you can do from the place where you are.

Perfect Phrase "What I did…." The perfect phrase for gathering this information is, "What I did when…"….". For example:

What I did on my flight home from the international conference:

I wrote about our days in the conference room in my notebook.

I remembered Kyoko telling us about her mother's tea ceremonies, the way the first person to drink apologizes for going before the others.

I continued making plans to find out more about US colleges for Nigel from Kenya.

I looked out the window and saw how the clouds remind me of the linen table clothes we had each day in the conference room and the way we felt important because of them, no longer just kids, but people the world really needed.

Perfect Phrase "In this moment, I sensed …"

Another way to gather more specific images is to remember moments from the experience you are writing about and slow them down by taking time to involve the five senses.

Here are the perfect phrases for doing this:

I saw… I felt … I listened… I tasted… I smelled…

Here's an example using the conference event:

When Kyoko described the impact of Hiroshima on her grandparents and their town, I felt my sweaty palm in my lap as I thought about the intense heat of the blast. I listened and heard the tears in her voice, her grandparents' pain still inside of her. I tasted the tea before me with sugar in it, and thought about the way Kyoko was not bitter. I smelled the starch in the linen tablecloth that covered the conference table and I thought about how stiff we are when we become immune to the pain of others.

When you have gathered more specific images you are even deeper into your experience. You will be writing it on the page as if you are living it. This will make it much easier to find that fresh moment of insight for yourself and your readers as you continue to write and form your essay.

Phrases for further researching your experience and its meaning To find and articulate the meaning in your experience and make the insight compelling to the reader, you must find out more about why you are writing about the particular experience you chose. Here are phrases that work to help you do this. These phrases may very well help you to write the ending of the essay when you are putting the elements of your essay together:

In the months following my experience, …. Each year as I look back on my experience, … It hasn't been that long since I had the experience, but I…. Having this experience has changed me in these important ways…. Phrases for writing a thesis sentence and being sure about your topic Now that you have much of your experience conjured on the page, it is time to articulate in one sentence why you are writing about the experience you have chosen. This sentence will guide you as you ultimately put your essay together.

A sentence that does this work is what English rhetoric texts call the thesis sentence. In the case of writing from personal significant experience, it articulates the reason you are writing about this experience, what you have learned and what readers know about you. For instance, in the example we have been using, some thesis statements might be:

Because I served as my high school's delegate to the International Students' Conference in Belgium, I have a renewed my sense of purpose and dedication, and, therefore, in college, I wanted to devote my out-of-class time to helping those in immigrant communities overcome obstacles as I learned more about their cultures and broadened my own outlook.

Since my experience as my high school's delegate to the International Students' Conference in Belgium, I focused my goals on becoming a foreign policy maker and future ambassador; I was excited about pursuing international studies and a year abroad program, which led to my marriage to a Frenchman and the use of my diplomacy to navigating our cultural differences.

Since serving as my high school's delegate to the International Students' Conference in Belgium, I began a fundraising drive in my town for money to help a village in Kenya grow crops; today I own a factory in that village and keep many people employed.

After serving as my high school's delegate to the International Students' conference in Belgium, I was sure that I wanted to work for the Peace Corps after my college graduation and my overseas experience have made all the difference.

I know the time I spent at the International Students' Conference in Belgium solidified my interest in journalism and helped me see how to become involved.

Here are some phrases that will help you start your guiding or thesis sentence:

Because I ________, I now know this:

Since my experience, I have come to believe ________ and plan on _______.

After I ______, I have set my goals to ________

The farther we are from our school years, the more we might enjoy writing from a significant experience in our youth, whether it involved travel or was being suspended from school, taking the time to talk to the widower down the road the other kids thought was too scary or dropping ballet for tap.

When something you've not thought to write about comes to mind, sit down and start the litany: This is a story about….

It won't be long before you are transported back in time and not very much longer before you know how something from long ago made all the difference in the world.