NAME NARRATIVES -
Narrative writing is the telling of a story. In this assignment you will be telling the story of your name.
If you did not have a name, how could you identify yourself? If you had no name, who would you be?
Your name is extremely important. It is how others identify you.
1) Research your name. What does your name mean? Use the Internet or ask your parents.
2) Find out if any famous people share your name.
3) Ask your parents why they chose your name. If you were named for a relative, find out an interesting story about that person. If there is a famous person with your name perhaps you could tell an interesting story about that person.
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Then read the following story by Sandra Cisneros---
"My Name," from The House on Mango Street .
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In English my name means hope. In Spanish it means too many letters. It means sadness, it means waiting. It is like the number nine. A muddy color. It is the Mexican records my father plays on Sunday mornings when he is shaving, songs like sobbing.
It was my great-grandmother’s name and now it is mine. She was a horsewoman too, born like me in the Chinese year of the horse-which is supposed to be bad luck if you’re born female-but I think this is a Chinese lie because Chinese. Like Mexicans, don’t like their women strong.
My great-grandmother I would’ve liked to have known her, a wild horse of a woman, so wild she wouldn’t marry until my great-grandfather threw a sack over her head and carried her off. Just like that, as if she were a fancy chandelier. That’s the way he did it.
And the story goes she never forgave him. She looked out the window all her life, the way so many women sit their sadness on an elbow. I wonder if she made the best with what she got or was she sorry because she couldn’t be all the things she wanted to be. Esperanza I have inherited her name, but I don’t want to inherit her place by the window.
At school they say my name funny as if the syllables were made out of tin and hurt the roof of your mouth. But in Spanish my name is made out of softer something like silver, not quite as thick as sister’s name Magdalena, which is uglier than mine. Magdalena, who at least can come home and become Nenny. But I am always Esperanza.
I would like to baptize myself under a new name, a name more like the real me, the one nobody sees. Esperanza as Lisandra or Maritza or Zeze the X. Yes. Something like Zeze the X will do.
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Now write your own Name Narrative based on the one done by Sandra Cisneros. Use your imagination! The following ideas may help you get started:
My name means___________ (literal meaning of your name)
It means __________ (emotion)
It is like the number __________
It is like the color ____________
My name sounds like ____________
It (is/was) the name of __________(someone you were named for/or someone famous) Tell a story about this person.
At school they say my name _____________
I would like to name myself _______________
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REVISION TIPS---
#1- Adding details--
Read over your rough draft and underline one sentence that seems particularly interesting to you. Write that sentence on a clean sheet of notebook paper. Now add details to the sentence.
Example: Suppose you underlined this sentence: "My name means patience."
You might add the following details: "I always help my mom with my baby sister. She says that I have a great deal of patience, because my sister always wants me to play with her and read her books. Sometimes I want to play with my friends, but I try to take a little time with my baby sister each day. I want her to know that she is special to me."
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#2
Writing a good lead--
Here are four possibilities for leads:
1) An image
2) A question
3) An action
4) A surprise
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Mrs. Whitehurst's Name Narrative
Because my mother believed in fairy tales, and perhaps because she wanted to give me the gift of glamour, she borrowed my name, Paulette Lucille, from two smiling movie stars in a worn copy of a Photoplay magazine. Then she took me home to my grandfather’s house where the air was saturated with cigar smoke and country music. The first man in my life, my grandfather fed me the juice from honeydew melons from his coffee spoon when I was only six weeks old.
At school I envied the Lindas and Sandras with their popular names and their matching sweater sets. I watched them as they raced home after school to their two-story houses surrounded by tall pine trees that swayed with the wind and red roses that climbed trellises that reached into the sky like Jack’s beanstalk. I heard their jump rope chants on the sidewalk. I saw them with their daddies in the Sixth Avenue Pharmacy on Saturdays where they whined for scoops of chocolate ice cream on brown sugar cones.
Carefully, I printed my name in perfect manuscript letters across the top of my paper in my first grade class. My name means patience and perserverance. It is like the number three, sprinkled with fairy dust and hope. It is the click of the castanets of the flamenco dancers twirling across my black and white television. It is the hint of possibility, the awareness of what might be.
It is the love of lost souls, lost causes, and late bloomers. It is the love of my mother’s fairy characters alive in my own life.
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