Coming up with a topic to write about as my first paper has proved to be more challenging than I had originally anticipated. I feel like there are two prominent ideas that come to mind when someone is asked to write a story of creative nonfiction. One is to shy away and close yourself off from anything too deep or personal. It's not always easy to share your inner most thoughts with a class full of somewhat strangers. However, the polar opposite thought might occur and that is to immediately and right out the gate jump to the deepest, most personal and revealing tale about yourself that you can. While this might seem like the "right" thing to do, if one does it simply to be a spectacle, I feel as though that is being disingenuous and that is not what the genre is all about. I could talk about a lot of dramatic things that happened to me during my relatively short years of living, but the question of whether I should or not jumps to mind and makes me nervous.
Having done that exercise last week and thinking about what I saw in my head leads me to think I should write about my mother and certain experiences that took place with her. I can think of one conversation in particular that might make for a decent story. The tale of a boy coming out to his mother is something I'm sure someone might want to read about but, and probably more importantly, it might something that I HAVE to write about given the fact that I haven't been able to get it out of my head since last week. It's not an extraordinary story, but it's something.
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