In “Biography of a Dress,” Jamaica Kincaid takes a significant aesthetic risk by telling her story from a first-person point of view that seems both multiple (even as it is singular) and pretty unreliable.

In “Biography of a Dress,” Jamaica Kincaid takes a significant aesthetic risk by telling her story from a first-person point of view that seems both multiple (even as it is singular) and pretty unreliable. Such choices easily could have resulted in the story feeling both very general and very unmoored; instead it is brilliantly particular and grounded. One thing Kincaid does to focus her story and her characterization in this essay is to ground the piece in a single physical object that is associated with a very particular moment in her life.

  As Jamaica Kincaid does in “Biography of a Dress,” write short/flash story that develops a character by exploring the “life” of a material object that is important in some way to the character in question. Your work can be a coming of age story, as Kincaid’s is, or it can be another sort of story.  As always be as specific and concrete as possible.