Narative essay help.

Question

Imagine that you are attending the Barnard College Graduation Ceremony as a guest of a graduate. You are a member of the audience (not a graduate) as Toni Morrison delivers this speech. Write a fictionalized narrative in which you describe the experience and setting in detail as well as your own point of view and reactions as you witness the speech.

Answer 1

Hi Ashton,

Happy to help with this prompt! Although I'm not allowed to actually write such a narrative on your behalf, I can give you some suggestions as to where you might start.

As a general rule, it's helpful to do a bare minimum of research before you write about something, even if it's some kind of creative writing. You'll want to have concrete details in which you can anchor yourself, no matter how fanciful the narrative. I would suggest looking up a couple of examples of graduation speeches so that you can get a sense of what they're like. A few famous ones include the writer David Foster Wallace's speech at Kenyon College, commonly referred to as "This is Water" (Here's a link to it: https://fs.blog/2012/04/david-foster-wallace-this-is-water/), or Sacha Baron Cohen's speech as Ali G at Harvard's commencement (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GUCy75CA3Aw). You might also consider actual speeches that Toni Morrison has given, including her Nobel Prize lecture, but also the commencement speech that she delivered at Wellesley in 2004 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SAJH03U7aHM).

Once you have a sense of what you're going to be describing, you'll want to settle on what's going to happen. Do you want to follow the predictable arc of a commencement speech, or throw in some surprise details? Will Toni Morrison actually deliver the expected discourse, or will she be interrupted by the untimely arrival of extraterrestrial visitors? How you proceed is up to you, but it will determine your point of view.

Having determined what's going to happen in the narrative, you should figure out who you're writing as. Are you a proud parent? A bored sibling? A friend who is as "mashed" (drunk) as Ali G claims to be in his speech? Not only will this affect your voice as a writer, but it will determine what you focus on, right down to details of description (a bored sibling, for instance, is more likely to fixate on the funny facial hair of a college dean, while a proud parent might be too busy taking pictures of their graduate). Bear in mind that your narrative and your narrator ought to complement one another; if you've opted to write this narrative from the perspective of a bored younger sibling, it's likely not worth structuring a narrative in which Morrison waxes poetic on the virtues of justice and equality.

In all, as long as you've rooted yourself in a general understanding of A) a commencement speech and B) who Toni Morrison is, and you've made sure that narrative and your narrator fit together, you should be just fine! If you have any further questions, let me know. Hope this helps!

Best,

Nissim