Autobiographic Narrative Non-Fiction Step 3

Pennywort growing in terrace wall, Newquay, Cornwall

Step 3. After you have typed-in and posted your second blog entry from your fieldwork, please return to your journaling and document just two of your key thoughts on this process of inquiry. In particular, can you now count the windows or whatever was the quantitative question that you set yourself back in Step 1?

We are at the stage now of activating deliberate recall and telling, to see how your memory generates narrative from recent experience, from notes, from your imaginary, and, you are allowed to consult other sources now to verify any points, eg dates, spellings, plant identification sites. 

Third and final blog post in this exercise

Now, for your third and final blog post, I want you to move into the past tense to tell your reader what you did. How you went, how you found the exact spot in the field. How you moved. Be strict with your tenses, check them, put them back into the past when they try to creep into the present. 

Use: I went. I walked. I sat. While I was turning the corner. What did you discover? What did you experience? Our 2023 Routledge book for travel writers has a discussion on using tenses during autobiographic recounting by bloggers if you want to work more with tense in travel writing experiments.   

Put simply, tell me about the time you went to do your fieldwork.

Back to Step 2 if you need to re-visit - click here

Again, please share the link or the story from your post in the Comments below. Comments, Follow and Share all work a little better if you are logged-in to a Google Account. 

If you need to see Step 1 again, please click here 

As inspiration, see how Simone de Beauvoir has rendered a simple street scene into a literary text in her autobiography: 

Once again I wandered after midnight in the mild September air. The bistros closed early, but when we left the terrace of the Rhumerie or the smoky little red inferno of the Montana, we had the sidewalks, the benches, the streets'. (Simone de Beauvoir, opening pages of Force of Circumstance 1963)