creative writing

My teaching class has been helpful in a few ways that are immediately useful:
1) have an objective in mind for every lesson that you plan
2) don't assume prior knowledge, instead use assessment to determine where students are at
By the way, the answer to the latter point is always, "less than you think."

I can't tell you how many times I've been standing in front of my class giving instruction on an activity only to realize I've taken way too much for granted, Whoa. Halt. Backup. What exactly do you mean by tone? (When we discussed tone in Poe's The Raven). How were we supposed to know that a frat meant Oliver needed to feel like he fit in when we don't even know what a frat is? (They didn't know what a frat is.)

I had to take a step back when I was doing a unit on flash fiction. I had introduced it with two examples and a list of necessary components (start in the middle of the action, bury the preamble in the beginning, use a twist, use allusive references, etc). Then I said, okay now you write one. And they did. Several times they wrote short pieces. But they weren't working. At least not as pieces of flash fiction.

So I bought a good book of flash fiction, Flash Fiction Forward. I picked out a very simply structured story. It was about a first date with a Neanderthal woman. So I had them use it as a model text. First we analyzed it a bit - we discovered that we learn a little bit about the narrator and the Neanderthal in each paragraph, and the way we learn it is through an action on one or the other's part. The students could choose whomever they wanted to for a first date - most chose Barbie. Then all they had to do was replace the details with their character. They still had to be on a first date, they still had to go to a restaurant, there had to be a small misunderstanding (conflict) and a meeting of the minds (resolution), in the end, they had to mull over why they liked their date and decide they'd like a second date one day. In the end, they needed to have the same number of paragraphs as the original story, and roughly the same number of words.

The stories were all quite good - everyone had fun writing them. They read them to the class, too, an unusual bonus.

For the next lesson we used Oliver's Evolution by John Updike. Each student played psychiatrist, analylzing his actions, they had to offer an analysis of his personality and the effect his childhood had on him. Before they read the story they were asked to write a short (one to two pages) rough draft chronicling a character's life from birth to their coming of age. After they've analyzed the story (to death, they might add), the job is to revise their initial drafts and follow the pacing of Oliver's Evolution (again, there should be roughly the same number of paragraphs and each paragraph should correspond roughly to Oliver's stage of life). They will also create actions for their character that reveal something about the type of person that s/he is.

Everyone is eager to edit their NaNoWriMo novels, but I haven't known where to start. This unit of flash fiction, though justifiably helpful to our novel editing (I'm sure I can justify it somehow), has been in part to delay a unit on editing a novel while I figure out how to approach it. Thanks to John and Oliver, I now how we're going to do it. The one thing I've been sure I don't want to do is to go through our novels and simply change grammar, word choice, and spelling. But how can they approach editing a 10,000 plus word story (up to 50,000 words in the case of some students) without understanding character development and story structure? Without knowing it, the work we've been doing is precisely right. Students will bring in the first chapter or two of their novels, they'll work with a buddy to find ways through actions (showing not telling, right?) of developing characters that a reader cares about.