Autobiography… Of A Pen?
When you have no life story to write about, would you be able to write your life as an inanimate object?
When I was in school we had a writing assignment for our English class, which was to write an autobiography of an object.
This was when I was eleven years old, the equivalent of the 6th grade if based on the school grade levels in the US. I grew up in Malaysia and English was a second language for many of the citizens here.
The teachers were introducing this to us as a different writing style, and being 11-year-olds we were not that well versed in the life stories of our elders nor could we really write much about our own young lives.
So, the teacher requested that we each chose an inanimate object to write about, for example, a pen, she said.
Now the issue here was not the written autobiography itself.
The problem was this writing assignment turned out to be pretty difficult for me.
Because we had to write from the beginning of the pen’s existence, up to its demise.
Since young, I had already developed a really strong sense of empathy, and to write about the death of a pen as though it was alive and had feelings was pretty hard for me.
