`` Very Good Lives : The Fringe Benefits Of Failure And The Importance Of Imagination Essay

Charlotte rejects her mother’s ideology from a young age, and has the perspective to see past the illusions of perfection her mother creates, and Miss. Hancock gives her the weapons to fight her mother. In seventh grade, Miss. Hancock teaches Charlotte about the metaphor, sparking the creativity within Charlotte her mother shunned. The metaphor becomes a symbol throughout the short story, but it also develops into something deeper. The metaphor becomes an allegory of Charlotte 's rebellion against her mother’s influence, and her future. Writing is an outlet, an opportunity for Charlotte to express and understand herself. The form of expression was a gift from Miss. Hancock, who arms her with the power of creativity. “‘My home,’ I said aloud, ‘is a box It is cool and quiet and empty and uninteresting. Nobody lives in the box,” Charlotte says in seventh grade. She has a complex understanding of herself, and is able to articulate her frustrations through metaphors. After graduating out of Miss. Hancock’s seventh grade class, the story picks up introducing the reader to Charlotte as a

Write or Wrong Identity by Emily Vallowe is a short literacy narrative about Emily trying to discover if she is really a writer or if she just believed what a teacher or parent told her. While writing her narrative Emily gave several details from the beginning of her writings to now. She explains that her mother still has some of the books she wrote as a kindergarten student. Throughout the entire text Emily continues to repeat the same phrase “I am a writer” and the more she writes it seems like she becomes less certain of this statement. By the end of the narrative Emily has stated that by the time she reaches her 90s she does not know if she will still be questioning herself as a writer or if she

During the course of a person’s life, a decision is made as to which direction their life should follow. Most people are encouraged by their loved ones to make this choice for themselves. When Kelly Cherry was twelve, she announced to her musically devoted, string quartet violinist parents that she was going to quit piano lessons and become a writer, in response, “[her] mother said that she would rather kill [her] than have [her] turn out like [her] big brother, a beatnik. She ran to the kitchen to get [a] butcher knife” (“Kelly Cherry”). Needless to say, she was not supported in this career path. Throughout the course of her early writing career, she would hear that she “had no talent for writing” (“Kelly Cherry”). Still, she continued to write, occasionally quitting again and again, like a smoker, only to pick it up again (“Kelly Cherry”). Continually she told herself, “You are not a writer” until one day she revised this to, “If you don’t write your books, no one else will” (“Kelly Cherry”).

Joel Kupperman in Six Myths about the Good Life: Thinking About What Has Value evaluates that humans as a whole want more comfort and pleasure in life as he it “may represent a tendency that is wired into normal human nature” (Kupperman 1). Through the explanation of pleasure as well as its arguable counterpart, suffering and the discussion of their values in addition to the counterargument of hedonic treadmill, Kupperman’s views about the role of pleasure in living a good life can be strongly supported and evaluated.

Writing is often considered mundane and banal to some students. In fact, people have even written things down since the beginning of time. I dreaded writing until I had Mrs. Dunlap for 4th block English during my 8th grade year at Mount Juliet Middle. This is the story about how she made me the writer I am today with what I like to call ‘Write’speration.

Despite being shown any attention for her writing, Cineros shows a great deal of determination without encouragement from her father. She tells us that we may not receive support from those that we care about, yet we can still reach our goal. She reaches out to those who have been or feel neglected by society. Or

Writing may be an enthralling experience for one and a clever way to decompress for another. In general, however, writing has different purposes for a variety of people. “Why I Write,” written in the late 20th century by Terry Tempest Williams, describes various reasons for writing narrated from a female’s perspective. The short essay begins in the middle of the night with a woman engulfed in her own thoughts. She abruptly goes forth by reciting the multiple reasons why she continues to write in her life. Through a variety of rhetorical devices such as repetition, imagery, analogies, and symbolism, Terry Tempest Williams produces an elegant piece of writing that offers the audience insight into the narrator’s life and forces the audience to have empathy for the narrator with the situation she is incurring.

Rebecca Stead is fame as an American writer of fiction for children and teens. The achievement of her novels is not doubtful. She was born on January 16, 1968 and raised in New York City. Vassar College was the institution where she acquired her bachelor’s degree in 1989. Moreover, she has started to write since she was a child but she altered her career to become a lawyer. However, Stead started to become of writing subsequent to the birth of her two children. Her inspiration of writing children’s novel was from her son and her collections of story stories on her laptop. One day, her 4-year-old son by chance pushed her laptop out off the dining-room table and destroyed her piece of writing. Stead was very angry with her son and she went to the bookstore to find books which can inspire her to write. From that moment, her motivation and loving in writing began to boost up, and her debut novel was First Light which won The New York Best Times. Due to her great spirit in writing, she won The American Newbery Medal in 2010, Winner of the Boston Globe –Horn Book Award for Fiction, IRA Children’s Book Award for Young Adult Fiction, A Parents’ Choice Gold Award Winner and A National Parenting Publications Gold Award for her second novel, When You Reach Me, followed by achieving Guardian Prize in 2013 as the first winner for her third novel, Liar & Spy.

As the only child in a family of six brothers, Sandra Cisneros writes about her experiences as a to-be writer. Towards the end of the short story, Cisneros reveals that she feels accomplished as a writer. This is due to a moment she had with her father when he read one of her stories and enjoyed himself while reading it. Although she had this short moment of pride and attention, she grew up in more of a stern household. This is evident by the tone the author uses throughout the story.

Her father had loved literature his whole life. Once a book fell on he floor he would pick it up, pat it lovingly and place it back where it belonged. Once he was done with a book he would pass it on to someone who he believed would love it as much as he. It was the greatest way he could show affection, sometimes she believed the only way, the only passion that seemed to colour his once vibrant soul, that seemed to soften a face twisted and distorted by pain. Her mother had left them many years ago, and as she had stolen out silently into the darkness of that warm October night without any sort of warning, she stole pieces of their lives. Tahlia and her father were like a ruined jigsaw puzzle, whose pieces no longer quite fit. She took

Hundreds of students, parents, and faculty members gathered and created an audience to witness J.K Rowling’s speech at Harvard University in 2008. J.K Rowling is a well-known author, famous for her Harry Potter book series, and much more. Rowling’s speech was well thought out, and delivered excellently, with three main points she addresses throughout the speech. The three points being: failure can lead a person to success, never give up hope on your dreams and aspirations, and lastly Rowling emphasizes the importance of imagination. Sometimes we fail to see that the obstacles in our life help shape the road to our success in the future, and Rowling points out to us that failures and obstacles is what helped us become successful , and to never ignore that.

Rowling invites responders to consider the culturally unpopular notion of failure as a means of realising our full potential. Rowling’s lowered head and personal anecdotes climaxing in “I was the biggest failure I knew” establishes her previous assumptions that aligned with society’s, of failure as negative. Consistent first person highlights her evocative personal discovery, illustrated through the determined tone as “failure became the solid foundation for which I rebuilt my life.” Personification of failure exaggerates the far reaching and transformative benefits that her discovery had on her individual life. Just like Nasht invites his audience to vicariously discover humanity’s insignificance, Rowling engages her contemporary audience

The concept of living “the good life” means something different for everyone. There is a general understanding that living “the good life” is associated with unyielding happiness and lasting satisfaction. The exact meaning of this desired life was pondered by thinkers and philosophers for hundreds of years. They constructed principals of behavior, thought, and obligation that would categorize a person as “good”. Although some of these ancient philosophies about “the good life” had overlapping ideas, their concepts varied widely. This contrast of ideas can be examined through two major characters in two famous works: Aeneas in “The Aeneid” and Socrates in “The Apology”. Aeneas exemplifies the philosophy that the direct route to “the good life" is through faith, trust in the Gods, and family, while Socrates in “The Apology” emphasizes free will, and vast knowledge of life.

Rowling, also, presents a more serious tone to the audience. For example, in her two main points of the “benefits of failure” and the “importance of imagination”, she tries to motivate those watching that failing is a part of life and she has failed many times. She tells us “Failure taught me things about myself… found out that I had friend whose value was truly above the price of rubies.” (Rowling). Using the same tone, she provides the audience with the “importance of imagination”. Since she is giving a speech to such an elite school, she believes they have not experienced failure but the fear is what scares them. The fear is of them failing when they are becoming a Harvard graduate. She thinks they have forgotten about how important imagination is by saying, “We do not need magic to change the world, we carry all the power we need inside

In 2008, author J.K. Rowling wrote and gave a commencement speech to the graduating class of Harvard University. Rowling aptly named the speech “The Fringe Benefits of Failure, and the Importance of Imagination”. In this speech Rowling tries to convey the message that failing can be beneficial or an individual and that people should not be afraid to use their imagination. Rowling begins the speech with a reflection on what went through her mind while writing the speech and how the process affected her. During this time Rowling asked herself what she wished she had known at her graduation and came up with the two main ideas of this speech; the merits of failure and significance of imagination. Rowling explains the benefits of failure by using her own personal failure of living in poverty with her daughter and what that failure taught her. For the significance of imagination, Rowling describes it not in terms of how it helped her out of poverty, but of how it opens up people to the world and other individuals around them.