Writing Prompts: Too Personal?

Sometimes the things you want to write about are just so personal, but that is what is floating around in your head and those intimate ideas seem to want to land on paper. I have an issue I’m trying to work out, but it’s too personal to delve into in a blog post. And this brings to my mind the graduate writing class I taught yesterday to pre-service English and History teachers. 

We were trying out a spoken word poem called “Knock, Knock” by Daniel Beaty. In it, the young boy is reaching out to his father who is in jail. He longs to see him and have the kind of father who would be there for him. And 25 years later he writes a letter (within the poem) that he wished his father would have and probably should have written him, giving him instructions on life and how to fight against racism and missed opportunities. 

In the book Teaching for Joy and Justice by Linda Christensen, Christensen presents a lesson plan for this poem. After watching the spoken word video and reading the poem, she asks students to write a letter from someone, perhaps a parent. In this letter she suggests they address what you need to hear from them, the advice you wish you’d been given, or the obstacles you might face in life and how to overcome them. You could write: Dear_____, For every lesson I failed to teach, hear these words… 

After my students wrote their letters, I asked for volunteers to share. One man shared a hilarious piece, writing the letter from the perspective of a restaurant worker directed at the couple at Table 78. It was simultaneously funny and ironic in tone. He said he chose this topic because if he’d written it from a person in his family, it would have been too intense and perhaps dark. After we gave feedback on the fabulous details he included and his wonderful writing style, I asked for other volunteers, and the class went silent. One woman after a short pause said she’d really like to share but it’s just too personal. Others concurred and a few wrote about it later in their takeaways from the class. 

One suggestion I made to perhaps avoid the “too personal,” is that you could switch it up and write from a character’s perspective:  Write a letter from Ponyboy’s (deceased) father from The Outsiders in which he tells Ponyboy to pursue his love of reading and movies and avoid the gang life.

I had also written a letter previous to this class, from my mother, expressing ideas I wished I had known and she had told me about as a kid. It was personal, and yes, probably too personal to share with a class. 

And so the obvious lesson learned from this is sometimes the thoughts that you really want to write about should be written but not necessarily shared. This is true of writing with a class, as well as writing a blog post.