Make It Unique. Make It Your Own.

Last weekend I re-watched “With Honors,” the 1994 film starring Joe Pesci and Brendan Fraser. If you haven’t seen it, “With Honors” is about a Harvard senior who develops a relationship with a homeless man who unexpectedly lands up with the draft of his senior thesis.  In order to get his thesis back, a page at a time, Monty, played by Fraser, has to do things for Simon, played by Pesci.  An unexpected friendship develops between the two.

There’s a scene about one hour and 15 minutes into the movie where Simon shares a copy of the obituary he’s writing for himself with Monty.  You see, Simon is dying of Emphysema and therefore he’s collected other people’s obituaries from the newspaper and has pinned them to a cork board.  Simon is laying in bed, mulling over the obituaries he has clipped from the newspaper, when Monty walks in with his breakfast. Simon insists that Monty reads what he’s written so far.  The first draft of Simon’s obituary states when he was born (and to whom), when he was married, when his son was born, and that he left his wife and son to join the Merchant Marine when his son was not even a year old.  The obituary troubles Monty since his father walked out his mother.

Monty offers feedback by saying, “You should put things in your obituary that you’re proud of.”

“I thought it was supposed to be facts,” Simon responds.

At the end of the movie, once Simon dies, it is clear he took Monty’s advice.  He wrote about things that made him proud, while paying tribute to his “family,” the four college students who took him in during his final months of life.

This small exchange in the scene got me thinking about mentor texts and the way they’re used in the classroom.

In the movie, Simon knows that you can get better at writing by studying the writing of others.  What he doesn’t realize, which he realizes after Monty “confers” with him about his writing, is that sometimes you have to weave things from yourself into your writing.  You can’t just emulate what another writer wrote and hope it will work for you.  On the contrary, you have to take what you learned from studying other texts and make it your own.

In the final weeks of the school year, I encourage you to spend an extra minute or two when holding a mentor text conference.  Remind the child you’re sitting next to that we can learn from other writers and other people’s writing, but in the end, we have to make sure that what we write has our own voice and our own ideas so that it’s truly our own.