You Did What?

(Adventure Report)

In this experience, you’re going to have an adventure and then write about it.

An adventure is doing anything you would not do in the normal course of your day-to-day life. Seeing a movie is not an adventure. Horseback riding may be an adventure, unless you’re a rodeo rider or cowpoke.

An adventure need not, and in this case should not, be physically dangerous. I assigned this in a class once, and a student’s adventure was trying to jump over a moving car. (He had ambitions to be a Hollywood stuntman one day.) He cleared the hood but hit the windshield, breaking it and his arm.

Don’t do that. Whether something is an adventure depends on the individual having it. It could be adventurous to ride an elevator for a couple of hours facing the other people in the cab rather than the elevator doors.

Whatever adventure you choose, just make sure it will not do physical or emotional harm to you or anyone else. There are plenty of adventures to be had without doing damage.

AUDIENCE

The audience is interested in hearing about your adventure. They bring an initial curiosity to your report, but that doesn’t mean their curiosity extends all the way to the end.

Your job is to make your adventure come alive for the audience. You’re not going to tell them what you did. You’re going to show them.

PROCESS

1. Choose an adventure.

Again, it doesn’t need to be life changing or earth shattering, just something you haven’t done before that you’d like to do.

2. Have the adventure.

Resist the urge to capture the experience in photos or video. When you’re taking photos or video, you’re taking photos or video, not having the experience. Try to be as present and aware as possible during the adventure. Take in the experience.

Immediately after your adventure, you’ll want to capture the sensory experience of the adventure in your notes. What did you see, smell, taste, touch, and hear on your adventure? What was it like? (Consider metaphors that may describe your adventure.) How did the adventure make you feel?

Sometimes it helps to write these impressions down in a rush, not worrying about sentences or grammar but simply trying to put yourself back in the experience and to capture the sensations for later consideration. No one but you will ever see or care about this part of the process.

3. Write an adventure report.

A journalistic—who, what, where, when, why—approach to writing the adventure often works well, though you will want to be mindful about how you answer these questions, the order, the length, and the detail. Your goal is to engage the reader with the story of your adventure enough to get them to read to the end.

Think about making the adventure come alive on the page by using the sense details you captured in your notes. It will likely take a couple of drafts to get the report down and polish it to the highest possible shine. Length matters here. You want to capture the adventure without blabbering on too long.

4. Share your adventure report.

Find a reader. If you can, find five or ten readers. Have them read the report once, and when they’re done ask them to respond to the following questions:

1. On a scale of one to ten, where one means it was similar to slogging through foot-deep mud, five equals meh, and ten means it reminded you of what it must be like to effortlessly fly through the sky on the back of the winged horse Pegasus, how did you feel as you were reading this report?

2. After finishing the report, without looking back at it, what’s the most memorable scene, image, or part of the experience? What stands out in your mind in hindsight?

REFLECT

What part or parts of your adventure report do your readers recall after reading? What “sticks”? What details are most likely to stand out in their minds? Was there a common thread in the responses? What explains the stickiness of certain parts? What role do the sense details play?

If nothing was particularly sticky, why do you think this was the case? What could be done to enhance the stickiness?

REMIX

Rewrite your adventure, only this time as a script for a thirty-second ad attempting to “sell” people on taking the same adventure. Even if you don’t recommend people repeating your adventure, for the purposes of this experience you must pretend it’s not only worth doing but people would really be missing out if they didn’t try it.

If you’re not familiar with the format for a commercial script—and odds are you aren’t—you should avail yourself of the many online resources that will give you templates for how it should look.