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Lesson 2 · Writing from Experience

Stage 1 — Finding and planning ideas

📝 This is a lesson blueprint — the plan to build into a full interactive lesson. Adjust and add to it freely.

The Text

Hard Times

Charles Dickens

In the grim industrial town of Coketown, the fact-obsessed Thomas Gradgrind raises his children to value cold reason over feeling and imagination. Dickens contrasts hard facts with fancy, exposing the human cost of treating people as mere statistics.

Activity Ideas

The commonplace notebook.
Finding details others would not notice.
Using other subjects: art, music.
Art: Famous paintings selection / Write like the painter
Music terms selection / Literary use

Key Terms

Personal experience

Events, places, emotions, or observations from your own life.

Autobiographical influence

When a writer draws on their own life without necessarily writing a true autobiography.

Transformation

Changing real experience into fiction by altering details, characters, events, or mood.