For this exercise, select one piece of advice from Lopate’s essay. You might decide to take a self-inventory, give your “I” something to do, or see yourself from the ceiling, for example.
Then write a paragraph in which you follow that advice, to make yourself a character in your own story. Think about the literacy narrative and respond to Lopate’s advice with the theme of writing in mind. For instance, maybe you want to take a self-inventory of yourself as a writer. If you want to write this from third-person perspective, that’s fine.
Then, in a second paragraph, discuss what piece of advice you followed, why you chose this piece of advice, and what your experience of making yourself into a character was like: did this exercise reveal anything to you?