Exercise #3 – Writing about Place

For your next essay assignment, I will ask you to write about a specific place you have been. This could be a favorite place that you visit often, or a place you have travelled to. This exercise will hopefully get you started on that essay, so keep that in mind as you begin.

Using Gretchen Legler’s essay as a model, write about this place in five parts. One paragraph each is fine, but try to make each part as different as possible. In other words, write about this place in five different ways.

Here are some questions to get you started:

1. What was the worst thing that ever happened at this place?
2. What was the best thing that ever happened at this place?
3. What emotions describe this place?
4. What colors do you think of when you think of this place?
5. Write five words that define this place. Now, choose one of these words and focus only on it. (Think of Legler’s “wind”.)
6. What happened at this place 100 hundred years before you were born?
7. When you were last at this place, what things in your life were you thinking about?
8. Read any books lately? Can you relate this place with something you’ve read?
9. If this place could talk, what would it say? What questions would you ask it?

Don’t feel that you need to answer all of these, or any of them at all. And feel free to adapt them, or to write your own. The goal is to find new and fresh ways to write about the place.