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A
Prompt for Finding Essay Topic Ideas You can discover new writing ideas and personal philosophies by playing with word definitions and etymologies. At www.yourdictionary.com, linguists maintain a page about word
definitions and histories. I
signed up on the web to have these words and
stories about their usage emailed to me each day. Some
of the words are ones that I’ve never heard or even read. Others are words I
use everyday and never think about. After a while, I began using the
information I was receiving as prompts for freewrites, and I found that my
freewrites opened my thoughts up and helped me find
writing topics, ideas, and notions I wanted to explore through essay writing. First,
I wrote about the words and the associations that came up for me, and then I
read over my freewrites and articulated key perceptions I found in the writing.
Finally, I wrote several sentences describing what an essay opening with such a
key perception might be about. Through this process, I created kernels that I
could later develop into full essays. It may seem random to take on essay development in this way, but it is my
experience that when I surprise myself, I work well and end up writing with
energy and passion. Following
are several of the words I worked with, my freewrites and the kernels. ***
Hep
US
English has three very similar words, all of which came to be related to music:
hup, hep, and hip. Their origins cannot be established but all three have been
around since the turn of the 20th century. The first one is used in timing
cadences for marching or playing in a band: "Hup, two, three, four; hup,
two, three, four." "Hep" became very popular among jazz musicians
in the 40s and 50s, meaning "in the know, in tune with the latest
style." The term "hep cat" came to be used to refer to those who
were hep. By the late 50s, preferences among youth and rock musicians shifted to
"hip" with the same meaning. My freewrite: Hup,
two three four. Hup, two three four. I hear myself seriously walking
to school and chanting these sounds with my three kindergarten friends. It is
1953. My father and my friends’ fathers are four and five years out of
the service, still very young men, and dedicated to raising their families in
the peaceful times they fought for. We live in the kind of complex called garden
apartments where four unit brick buildings of colonial style on the outside are
arranged around courtyards for blocks and blocks. I live in a downstairs unit.
Jackie lives across the hall and David, a little older than us, lives in one of
the upstairs units. Karen and Jerry live in a building bordering the next
courtyard. Hup, two three four. Hup, two three four.
Jackie and I call for Jerry and Karen. Hup, two three four. Hup,
two three four. We have crossed Stuyvesant Avenue with the crossing guard. Hup,
two three four. Hup, two three four. We are almost to Franklin Elementary.
Mrs. Hendricks will give us paper and paint. We’ll take a nap on the
little rugs we set out for ourselves. We’ll retrieve our sweaters and jackets
from the low hooks inside the wooden sliding door closets in the classroom.
Hup, two three four. Hup, two three four. We don’t know
about the beat generation starting in New York, or even much about the sound of
jazz, because though our fathers and mothers love Louis Armstrong and Frank
Sinatra, now they watch TV instead of listening to the radio. We won’t
know hep from hip for a long time, but we will soon hear Elvis Presley’s songs
on the loud public address systems of the trucks that come to our neighborhood
with a ride on them called “the whip” that we ask our parents for money to
take. Hup, two three four. My generation—from military rhythms to
the hippie falling out of line of the 60’s to raising whole earth children in
the seventies and eighties and meeting our grandchildren in the 2000’s. Hup,
hup, hup. -- As
I assess this freewrite with the rhythm I’ve leaned upon and repeated, I
wonder if I want to write about missing the beat generation of the 50s while I
grew up not 20 miles from its epicenter in Greenwich Village. Father
Knows Best and Dinah Shore saw to that (as well as my father, who was the
antithesis of a beatnik!). But along with my peers, I was flung into the
hippie era as a freshman at the University of Wisconsin in 1966 and it has taken
me, along with the others, decades to understand how we got there. I look
at my 29-year-old adult daughter, now a new mother, and notice that she has not
experienced the angst I did in my twenties. From the hup, hup, hup, which
is how we ended marching in the drill team I joined in high school, let me
explore…. ***
Mother
(Noun)
of course means the female parent, the one who gives birth to and/or permanently
nurtures, comforts and protects a child. As befits the term, the linguists
wrote, mother “is the progenitor of a large and meaningful word family.” When
Saddam Hussein challenged the US to the "mother of all battles," we
all knew exactly what he meant because of the primordial force of motherhood
throughout our language: Mother Earth, Mother Nature, Mother of God, Mother
Goose (the originator of all children's stories since the book's first printing
in 1719), the mother lode, the motherland—even the motherboard in your
computer. Mothers are all associated in all our minds with our origins and what
is essential, crucial, and most important. I
think that the mention of Saddam Hussein and pending war in a definition of the
word mother pulled a higher diction from me than I might have otherwise used in
a freewrite. My freewrite: Mother,
thy primordial force, who givest and does not take away. Mother, birther
you must be of the planet and of us all, who sees to diversity and fruitfulness.
Mother, flesh from which my flesh sprung, flesh of a grounding in life and
of continuing. Mother, mother, more-there. I turn to you now when
the world is darkened by those who believe in their godliness and rights to kill
others who believe in their own godliness. I turn to you now when the
godliness of so many is intent on destroying the fruits and the seeds you have
grown for us, that you have given us to grow for ourselves. Mother of more
and all that will come, fertile mother of us all, what comfort is there at your
skirts? What can you offer? Oh first goddess, how are you different from
the gods? -- Spurred
on by the fact that “mother” is the name of the primordial force of our
origins, I see that I am praying for guidance, for insight, for a way toward
comfort. The world is uncomfortable now with religious and ethnic wars, on
each side in the name of what is holy and sacred and right. A mother must
care for all of her offspring, whatever gender, whatever ability, whatever
disability. What can I propose to the world from my own sense of mother
and mothering? How close up and how far away can I look to find what I can
offer? I think I shall start with an anecdote about watching my own
daughter become a mother, through pregnancy and then birth and then nursing.
I shall write about her child, whose paternal grandparents are from
southern India. I shall write about their union and the birth of their
child as a mothering toward what the world can be. ***
Panjandrum
This
noun is usually preceded by "Grand" or "Great." It is a mock
title for a high-ranking, super supercilious, self-centered person, say the
linguists. When the actor Charles Macklin retired from the London stage in 1753,
he opened The British Inquisition, an entertainment in Covent Garden. His show
featured a lecture by Macklin each evening followed by a debate. When Macklin
claimed as part of a lecture on memory that because of his training, he
could remember any text he had read just once, fellow actor and playwright
Samuel Foote composed a piece of nonsense with many made-up words to challenge
Macklin. Most of Foote's invented words did not catch on, but panjandrum
survived. “Which
of the Grand Panjandrums upstairs decided that a company picnic would boost
employee morale?" is the linguists’ suggested usage for the word. Or as
they write, “This word works great in political discussions, too: ‘Nothing
brings the Great Panjandrums back to Washington like a vote on congressional
salaries.’” My freewrite: Oh,
today I am a Grand Panjandrum. I have feasted on provolone and sourdough
bread with roasted turkey and freshly made cranberry sauce. There was
rosemary herbing the butter I drew for the asparagus steamed fresh from the
farm. Oh, today I am a Grand Panjandrum sitting on my deck in the sunshine
overlooking the new resident family of rabbits hopping about from under bushes,
listening to bees buzz among the purple blossoms of the ceonothus shrub far
enough to my side that this is music to my ears. What important work must
I do from my lofty position? What must I bother myself about? Why,
none and nothing, of course. I am not a diplomat or a president or
ambassador! I am a Grand Panjandrum, loftier than a princess! No
expectation held of me but to please, please, please myself and be pleased! -- I
reread this freewrite and see I am celebrating amidst the small and nearby.
I see that I could write an essay about how to feel higher than a kite,
more spoiled and grand than a princess who seems to be dependent upon others for
pleasure. I could write about how this silly nonsense word has given me
permission to become such a thing and therefore the opportunity to see what is
around me and what brings so much pleasure if I don’t overlook it. ***
Caboose
A
caboose, the linguists write, “is a car attached usually to the rear of a
freight-train and used by the crew as living quarters. The caboose used to
be the ship's galley (another home-away-from-home). It has also referred to an
outdoor oven or fireplace, conjuring up images of cooked food eaten in the great
outdoors with friends.” The
linguists quote author Donald Dale Jackson as saying that the caboose on a train
was the "cabin car, crummy, way car, van, ape cage, throne room, hack,
buggy, the office, shanty, monkey house, bedbug haven and ever-so-humble
home." Metaphorically, the word can mean "the last" or
"hindmost: " But the Yourdictionary.com linguists hope that what
they call “the more homey meaning of caboose” will come to gain favor.
They propose, "Mum's kitchen was the caboose of our house, the place
where weary offspring came to eat, talk and relax from their everyday
worries.” My freewrite: Wasn’t
the Little Caboose a story I knew and loved as a child? Do all children
identify with the little, last car on the train—something like themselves
among the adults in their family. And to think the caboose was a kitchen. I
don’t remember if the story I loved had anything to do with the inside of that
last car, but a kitchen! Batter on a spoon, popping sounds of oil, smells
that made your mouth wet with waiting, cakes fluffy and high cooling on the
counter, my father’s jelly omelets, and later his shredded cabbage for a
marinated salad. My mother crashing around in the pots and pans looking
for the right pan for cobbler or cookies, meringue pie or twice-baked potatoes.
The kitchen, place where company preferred to sit around the little round
gold-flecked Formica topped table. The kitchen telephone was always ready,
hanging on the wall, its cord like the looped braids of straight haired girls at
school or some days tangled and curly like my own. The kitchen, not last
but center. -- When
I think about writing an essay after rereading my freewrite, I think I was in a
secret kitchen cooking up my ideas about the world and myself from there. I
will re-read Little Red Caboose and maybe The Little Engine
That Could. I think there are metaphors there for growing up, for how
we learn to think of ourselves and what we learn to treasure and what drives us.
I note that so much language we use for descriptions of our personal
journeys is from trains: derailed, on track among them. Now I have
caboose. I will look into this. ***
Using
the words I’ve shared as prompts or using ones you find in a dictionary or get
e-mailed to you if you sign up with Yourdictionary.com, try writing for ten or
twenty minutes per word. Then try your hand at writing the articulations of key
perceptions you see yourself moving toward. You might want to start a computer file or a notebook for these words,
their definitions and etymologies, your freewrites and your “key-perception
articulating.” You may have good luck doing the freewrite on one day and then
looking back at it on another day to see where your mind was going. On a
third day, you might want to develop a draft of an essay and then go on to
extend and polish it. Give yourself some hours to sleep on things and you
will be less attached to the way the words first came out and more interested in
exploring where you are going in your thinking. You may observe a trend
establishing itself over many freewrites and use several of your key perceptions
to formulate the subject of an essay and its content. If you make this word practice part of your writing time, you will be mining your mind and heart for material you may not have known you wanted to write about. Out of surprise, you will create strong writing. ** Sheila Bender is a poet, essayist, author and
publisher of WritingItReal.com, an online subscriber-supported instructional
magazine for those who write from personal experience. She has written for The
Seattle Times, The World, and Poet Lore Magazine, among other
publications. Her work also appears as a chapter in Marry Your Muse by
Jan Phillips, and she has served as a columnist and feature writer on writing
personal essays, journaling, and writing poetry for Writer's Digest Magazine.
Her many books on writing include Writing Personal Essays: How to Shape Your
Life Experiences for the Page, Keeping a Journal You Love, A Year in the Life:
Journaling for Self-Discovery, Writing Personal Poetry: Creating Poems from Life
Experience, and Writing in a New Convertible with the Top Down. She
is on the faculties of the Colorado Mountain Writer's Conference and the La
Jolla Writer's Conference and serves as a visiting instructor to many more
programs. Sheila holds a Masters of Arts in Creative Writing
from the University of Washington and a Masters of Arts in Teaching from Keane
College in New Jersey and has helped hundreds of students begin to write,
continue and publish. Her work with teachers in the Los Angeles Unified School
District, the Tucson Unified School District and the Bellevue, Washington
Unified School District has changed the way many teachers approach writing and
literature in the classroom. Among her favorite achievements is coaching people
in writing personal statements for college and graduate school applications,
where subtle persuasion is of the utmost importance. In her current courses and
articles, she combines over two decades of teaching and writing experience with
cutting edge exercises from her previous books and from her newest articles and
manuscript. For more information visit her websites at www.sheilabender.com and www.writingitreal.com. |
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