Name_______________________________

Date__________________________

Assignment 2: Write a story of something that happened in your life.

It should be 1st person, where you are telling the reader what happened to you
It should have some dialogue, where you use quotation marks to show people talking to each
other.
You need to choose a time in your life that you remember very clearly an event like a
birthday, graduation, date, vacation, funeral, confirmation, baby shower, quinceaera, etc. or it
could be a time period like a year in school, a relationship you had, a family situation that
lasted for weeks or months, a sports season, etc.
Here are some questions to get you thinking about what parts of your life you can write about.
o What were you like as a baby?
o Where did you live when you were very young?
o Did you ever move somewhere?
o Do you have any brothers or sisters? When were they born? How did you act towards
them when you were little? How do you act towards them now?
o What types of activities did you like when you were a child? Did your parents do this
with you? What did they think about the things you liked to do?
o Did you read at an early age? When did you learn how to read? What books did you like
as a little kid?
o What was your first experience with school like? Kindergarten? Elementary school?
o Who were some of your friends growing up? Were they important to you? If you had
any conflict, describe what happened?
o What was it like in your house growing up? What emotions did you feel when you were
in your house and what made you feel them?
o How does your family get along? What types of things does your family do together?
o What were different holidays like in your home?
o What were your birthdays like?
o What were some positive and negative experiences you had in school?
o What was middle school like?
o What romantic relationships have you had? Were they positive? Negative?
o Have you had any strong friendships in your life? What are they like?
o Have there been any bad experiences in your life that youve always wanted to talk
about, but have never had the opportunity? Writing about them can be a good way to
think through something and figure out how you feel about it.

Step 1: Who is your story about? ____________________

Step 2: What is the setting or settings for your story (Where does it happen?)
Step 3: How does your story begin? _____________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________________________
Step 4: What is the central conflict in your story? __________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________________________
Step 6: How does your story end? ______________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________________________
Step 7: Who are the characters in your story? _____________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________________________
Step 8: Summarize what happens in your story ____________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________________________
Step 9: On looseleaf, try writing your story.
When you think you are done with your story
Step 10: Proofread your story by reading it OUT LOUD to yourself (quietly so others cant hear).
Step 11: Fix any of the small mistakes you found while reading it over, for example:

Leaving out commas

Leaving out periods
Not starting every sentence with a capital letter.
Not making everyones name have a capital letter
Having a question, but forgetting to end it with a question mark
Having someone speaking, but forgetting to start or end the quote with quotation marks
A spelling mistake
Repeating the same word accidentally
Leaving out a word in the middle of a sentence
Using words like thing and stuff that arent specific enough

Step 12: Re-write it more neatly than the first time, with all your mistakes fixed.
Step 13: Find someone else who is done to peer edit your story you should also peer edit their story.

Step 14: When you get your feedback from your editor, get a laptop and type up your story with any
changes youd like to make.
Step 15: Email your story to Feinberg and print a copy for your portfolio.