How Friends and Family Fit into Different Writing Genres

Learning about different genres is very interesting. Dramas, poems, and yes, even essays posses unique possibilities for writing about friends and family. As easy as writing about friends and family may seem, it can also be difficult at the same time.

A drama about family has the potential to be very heartfelt. Picking a specific event that happened to show the overall tone of a person in the family, or an event that included more then one person, could give you an overview of that particular family's demeanor. If the family is known for being very overbearing, or a specific person in the family is known to be overbearing, the drama should reflect that when being written. My grandpa is the overbearing person in my family. If I were to write a drama about my family, I would make sure that it included an event that showed his toughness, and or intimidation. The drama should give the reader an overview of how the family works.

Poems can be quite an effective way to talk about friends or family. So many emotional things may happen in a person's life, that could be easily conveyed in a poem. I use the term easily only for the fact, that the person living the life knows the details of certain events, not because poetry is easy to write. Poetry in my case is one of the more hard things to write. In Composition 101 this week we read a poem about a brother watching his gay brother die of aids. In not too many lines, we felt emotion through him. We seen what it was like to go through such a traumatic event in his life. The emotions felt by the brother for putting him on the outside when he was alive, it was quite moving. My brother is not gay, but he does make decisions that are questionable to me sometimes. I could write a poem about how much he can frustrate me, or at the same time I could describe how he makes me laugh a lot. It really depends on what message I would want to be sending to the reader at that particular time. Poems are not the easiest things for me to compose, but they are able to really bring out emotional statements.

The first impression many people get about an essay is that it will be a boring read. That is not always the case. In the event that friends and family are being written about, it really could get quite interesting! A writer could convey a general demeanor of a person from an essay. An essay about how a friend is supposed to act in a crisis would be a good example. It could really help someone deal with a friend's situation that they are going through in life. At one time in my life I read an essay about abortion, when my friend was talking about doing it. It had both argumentative points and I told them both to her. It was not my decision to make for her, but the essay helped make me aware of the different perspectives of the situation. Essays are not as boring as we are lead to believe, it is more of like a prejudice decision we make before we read them.

Friends and family are not the easiest to write about, but there would be a lot of subject matter to pick from. My family would most likely not appreciate me disclosing heavily embarrassing moments to people we do not know, but some families embrace that. Having so much information about families and friends is a good thing, but the bad thing is you have to know where their lines are drawn. When the lines have been defined, then that is where it would be figured out what genre that your story would best fit into.