Thread: essay help

I'm supposed to write a creative essay for my english class and I think I will write it in a diary form. We can pick any topic and I wanted to pick a famous person (singer, writer, or w.e.) with a psychological disorder. The only problem is, I can't think of a famous person with a disorder. Does anyone have any ideas? Thanks!

why would you pick a subject you don't even know exists?... to write about a living person,'s 'disorder' you'll have to be sure of your facts, or you may well be committing libel...

why not pick a topic you know more about?... research takes a lot of time, and if this is for school, you must be on a deadline... besides, why would someone write about a famous person's disorder in their diary?... makes no sense to me...

or, did you mean you would write the piece as if it were that person's diary?... if so, you could 'be' edgar allen poe, who certainly suffered from depression, along with drug and alcohol addiction... or poet sylvia plath, who was treated with electro-shock 'therapy' and underwent psychotherapy for much of her life... or virginia woolf, who suffered several mental breakdowns... both playwright tennessee williams and novelist ernest hemingway also suffered from serious depression...

and that's just a few from the literary world... head for hollywood, and you'll have so many to pick from, you'll never be able to make up your mind... a fun one would be to write a few pages of winona ryder's diary, detailing one of her kleptomania-fed 'shopping' sprees!

If you're looking for crazy famous people, I think the sea of options is endless. Here's what comes to my mind:

Kurt Cobain (think of the last journal entry on that one..)
Marilyn Monroe (she lived her life as an alter ego)
Tom Cruise (what goes on in that man's mind has got to be entertaining, I think there must be sharp contrasts between reality, and his perception of it)
Johnny Cash (he was very troubled for many years, and so creative)

That's all I can think of right now. If you pick dead people, they really can't argue with you.

Have you read Bridget Jones' Diary? That is a great example of telling a story in journal form. Even if the genre is not your favourite, it's probably worth taking a flip-through for research purposes. But if you do like the genre, than it's the best of the category.