Panic!

I am supposed to be creating a piece of personal writing for the SSWP. It should have been ready to share today and it won't be ready to share tomorrow, so it looks like Friday is the ultimate deadline. I am having a great deal of trouble getting started. I can't select a topic, I haven't determined a useful purpose, I don't know the audience and I haven't even begun to think about format. I am not sure that I have ever written just for the sake of writing so without these advance organizers I am really struggling. Robert, our facilitator in the project, gave me a number of good suggestions to get started and Sandra, our instructor, gave me Nancie Atwell's Lessons That Change Writers. Between those two sources I should be able to get started on something that is acceptable to me and marginally interesting to my classmates. Wish me luck!