Chapter 3: Reflecting on an Experience

Reflecting on an Experience

One of my greatest pleasures as a writing instructor is learning about my students’ life journeys through their storytelling. Because it is impossible for us to truly know anything beyond our own lived experience,^[1] sharing our stories is the most powerful form of teaching. It allows us a chance to learn about others’ lives and worldviews.

Often, our rhetorical purpose in storytelling is to entertain. Storytelling is a way to pass time, to make connections, and to share experiences. Just as often, though, stories are didactic: one of the rhetorical purposes (either overtly or covertly) is to teach. Since human learning often relies on experience, and relating an experience constitutes storytelling, narrative can be an indirect teaching opportunity. Articulating lessons drawn from an experience, though, requires reflection.

Reflection is a way that writers look back in order to look forward.

Reflection is a rhetorical gesture that helps you and your audience construct meaning from the story you’ve told. It demonstrates why your story matters, to you and to the audience more generally: how did the experience change you? What did it teach you? What relevance does it hold for your audience? Writers often consider reflection as a means of “looking back in order to look forward.” This means that storytelling is not just a mode of preservation, nostalgia, or regret, but instead a mechanism for learning about ourselves and the world.

Techniques

“Looking back in order to look forward,”^[2] or

“I wish that I knew what I know now when I was younger”^[3]

As you draft your narrative, keep in mind that your story or stories should allow you to draw some insight that has helped you or may help your reader in some way: reflection can help you relate a lesson, explore an important part of your identity, or process through a complicated set of memories. Your writing should equip both you and your audience with a perspective or knowledge that challenges, nuances, or shapes the way you and they interact with the world. This reflection need not be momentous or dramatic, but will deepen the impression of your narrative.

Reflection relies on what I call the diegetic gap. Diegesis is a term from the field of narratology referring to narration—the story as it is portrayed. In turn, this gap identifies that time has passed between the plot events and your act of writing. Simply put, the diegetic gap is the distance between you-the-author and you-the-character:

Because we are constantly becoming ourselves, shaped by our relationships and experiences, “you” are a different person at all three points. By looking back at your story, you can cultivate meaning in ways you could not during the events or immediately following them. Distance from an event changes the way we see previous events: time to process, combined with new experiences and knowledge, encourages us to interpret the past differently.

As you’ll see in the upcoming activities , looking back through this gap is a gesture akin to the phrase “When I look back now, I realize that…”^[4]

Wrap-up vs. Weave

Students often have a hard time integrating reflective writing throughout their narratives. In some cases, it is effective to use reflection to “wrap up” the story; it might not make sense to talk about a lesson learned before the story has played out. However, you should try to avoid the “tacked on” paragraph at the end of your story: if your reflective writing takes over at the end of the story, it should still feel like a part of the narrative rather than an afterthought. In other words, you should only reserve your reflective writing for the last paragraph or two if the story has naturally and fluidly brought us across the diegetic gap to present day.

You may notice that your choices in narration, including point-of-view, tense, and scope, will influence you’re the way you develop reflective writing.Instead of a wrap-up, though, I often challenge my students to weave their reflection in with the story itself. You can see this at work in “Slowing Down” and “Parental Guidance” in some places. However, to see woven reflection applied even more deliberately, take a look at the model text “Blood & Chocolate Milk.” This author explicitly weaves narration and reflection; while your weave doesn’t need to be this obvious, consider how the author’s choices in this essay enhance both the narrative and your understanding of their family dynamic.

Spelling it Out vs. Implying Meaning

Finally, you should be deliberate about how overt you should make your reflection. If you are trying to connect with your reader, sharing your story so they might better know you, the world you live in, or even themselves, you need to walk the fine line between subtlety and over-explanation. You need to be clear enough that your reader can generalize and relate. Consider the essay “Comatose Dreams” in the previous section: it does exceptional work with implication, but some readers have trouble knowing what they should take away from the story to apply to their own lives.

It is also possible, though, to be too explicit. Take, for example, Charles Perrault’s 1697 publication of a classic folk story, “Little Red Riding Hood.”^[5] As with many fairy tales, this story is overtly didactic, stating the following moral after Little Red Riding Hood’s demise:

Moral: Children, especially attractive, well bred young ladies, should never talk to strangers, for if they should do so, they may well provide dinner for a wolf. I say “wolf,” but there are various kinds of wolves. There are also those who are charming, quiet, polite, unassuming, complacent, and sweet, who pursue young women at home and in the streets. And unfortunately, it is these gentle wolves who are the most dangerous ones of all.^[6]

I encourage you to discuss the misogynist leanings of this moral with your class. For our purposes here, though, let’s consider what Perrault’s “wrap-up” does, rhetorically. With a target audience of, presumably, children, Perrault assumes that the moral needs to be spelled out. This paragraph does the “heavy lifting” of interpreting the story as an allegory; it explains what the reader is supposed to take away from the fairy tale so they don’t have to figure it out on their own. On the other side of that coin, though, it limits interpretive possibilities. Perrault makes the intent of the story unambiguous, making it less likely that readers can synthesize their own meaning.

Activities

What My Childhood Tastes Like^[7]

To practice reflection, try this activity writing about something very important—food.

First, spend five minutes making a list of every food or drink you remember from childhood. Mine looks like this:

– Plain cheese quesadillas, made by my mom in the miniscule kitchenette of our one-bedroom apartment

– “Chicken”-flavored ramen noodles, at home alone after school

– Cayenne pepper cherry Jell-O at my grandparents’ house

– Wheat toast slathered in peanut butter before school

– Lime and orange freezy-pops

– My stepdad’s meatloaf—ironically, the only meatloaf I’ve ever liked

– Cookie Crisp cereal (“It’s cookies—for breakfast!”)

– Macintosh apples and creamy Skippy peanut butter

– Tostitos Hint of Lime chips and salsa

– Love Apple Stew that only my grandma can make right

– Caramel brownies, by my grandma who can’t bake anymore

Then, identify one of those foods that holds a special place in your memory. Spend another five minutes free-writing about the memories you have surrounding that food. What makes it so special? What relationships are represented by that food? What life circumstances? What does it represent about you? Here’s my model; I started out with my first list item, but then digressed—you too should feel free to let your reflective writing guide you.

My mom became a gourmet with only the most basic ingredients. We lived bare bones in a one-bedroom apartment in the outskirts of Denver; for whatever selfless reason, she gave four-year-old the bedroom and she took a futon in the living room. She would cook for me after caring for other mothers’ four-year-olds all day long: usually plain cheese quesadillas (never any sort of add-ons, meats, or veggies—besides my abundant use of store-brand ketchup) or scrambled eggs (again, with puddles of ketchup).

When I was 6, my dad eventually used ketchup as a rationale for my second stepmom: “Shane, look! Judy likes ketchup on her eggs too!” But it was my mom I remembered cooking for me every night—not Judy, and certainly not my father.

“I don’t like that anymore. I like barbecue sauce on my eggs.”

Reflection as a Rhetorical Gesture

Although reflection isn’t necessarily its own rhetorical mode, it certainly is a posture that you can apply to any mode of writing. I picture it as a pivot, perhaps off to the left somewhere, that opens up the diegetic gap and allows me to think through the impact of an experience. As mentioned earlier, this gesture can be represented by the phrase “When I look back now, I realize that…” To practice this pivot, try this exercise.

1. Over five minutes, write a description of the person who taught you to tie your shoes, ride a bike, or some other life skill. You may tell the story of learning this skill if you want, but it is not necessary. (See characterization for more on describing people.)
2. Write the phrase “When I look back now, I realize that.”
3. Complete the sentence and proceed with reflective writing for another five minutes. What does your reflection reveal about that person that the narrative doesn’t showcase? Why? How might you integrate this “wrap-up” into a “weave”?

End-of-Episode Voice-Overs: Reflection in Television Shows

In addition to written rhetoric, reflection is also a tool used to provide closure in many television shows: writers use voiceovers in these shows in an attempt to neatly tie up separate narrative threads for the audience, or to provide reflective insight on what the audience just watched for added gravity or relevance for their lives. Often a show will use a voiceover toward the end of the episode to provide (or try to provide) a satisfying dénouement.

To unpack this trope, watch an episode of one of the following TV shows (available on Netflix or Hulu at the time of this writing) and write a paragraph in response to the questions below:

• Scrubs[i]
• Grey’s Anatomy
• The Wonder Years
• How I Met Your Mother
• Ally McBeal
• Jane the Virgin
• Sex and the City

• What individual stories were told in the episode? How was each story related to the others?
• Is there a common lesson at all the characters learned?
• At what point(s) does the voiceover use the gesture of reflection? Does it seem genuine? Forced? Satisfying? Frustrating?

Dr. Cox: “Grey’s Anatomy always wraps up every episode with some cheesy voice-over that ties together all of the storylines, which, incidentally, is my least favorite device on television.”

Elliot: “I happen to like the voice-overs on Grey’s Anatomy, except for when they’re really vague and generic.”

Voice-over (J.D.): And so, in the end, I knew what Elliot said about the way things were has forever changed the way we all thought about them. – Scrubs