WHY TEACH CREATIVE WRITING?
A new audience
In the introduction to their book Creative Writing, authors Christine Frank and Mario Rinvolucri argue that in order to create a “writing climate” in the classroom teachers need to raise the students' awareness that their compositions will have a captive audience. In the exercise Frank and Rinvolucri describe, students are given the usual task of writing a 300-word essay, but with a twist: when writing, they need to incorporate three lies into their texts. After the teacher corrects the compositions, students are asked to read their stories to each other in groups of four, knowing that their classmates will be trying to spot the piece of false information. As a result, they are faced with a new challenge and tend to pay more attention to their compositions. "[T] he writer must always have a reader – and, moreover, a reader who is interested in content, not just form", the authors contend (8).
Our competition is trying to provide not only a platform for creative writing, but also a captive audience in the form of our judges and, of course, our online community. By entering the competition students accept that Libra Books might publish extracts from their stories on its website and its Facebook page in order to popularize creative writing and the possibilities it can have in teaching foreign languages. The competition serves a similar purpose to the exercise described above: it provides that creative, aspiring stories will be read and analysed on a different level than the one students are used to.
Is writing “wasting time”?
Lengthy writing exercises might raise the doubts of teachers, wondering whether they should spend as much time developing this skill as the task requires. Frank and Rinvolucri argue that writing has more advantages than we would think: writing a lengthy composition in class means that students are “fully occupied processing the target language” and, similar to free practice of grammar and vocabulary in speech, they can ask for feedback and help from the teacher when they need to. Also, writing can often serve as a “springboard skill”, having a beneficial effect on all three skills of reading, listening, and speaking (11).
Homework or class work?
The method you choose to tackle our monthly exercises will probably vary from class to class, even from student from student, but there is one thing we suggest you decide in advance: will you set the tasks as homework or class work? Of course, there are advantages and disadvantages to both approaches. Frank and Rinvolucri list them as follows:
Advantages of writing at home:
- freedom to decide when to start and finish working on a project
- calm surroundings are likely to induce a "reflective state of mind" (10)
Advantages of writing in class:
- the energy of the group stimulates the writing process
- the audience is at hand when one finishes writing
- the teacher can help with language issues
Ultimately, the authors of Creative Writing argue that writing in class might be more motivating for students because of the immediate presence of their audience. However, they also acknowledge that there might be significant differences between more introverted students, who would generally prefer writing at home, and "more sociable folk", enjoying writing rather as a group activity, done in class (10).
GUIDELINES FOR TEACHERS
The following section is dedicated to some ideas that might be useful when teaching creative writing to secondary school or college students. All of the listed points form part of Cherry Campbell’s book, Teaching Second-Language Writing: Interacting with Text, which is an excellent source to use when one endeavours to teach creative writing in class.
- Real life comes first
Encourage students to practice their writing skills by relying on their personal experiences in life! You can set the task of keeping a journal for a week or a month, you can ask students to recall an exceptionally happy/sad incident in their lives, or to retell the experience of a memorable journey or holiday. Remember: the more personal the topic, the easier it is for students to create!
- Reach Out to the Five Senses
Try to draw students’ attention to the five senses and the many ways they can describe what they feel and experience. Choose a passage that gives a powerful description of a place students might be familiar with or introduce games that focus intensively on hearing, smelling, etc. You can, for example, take students for a blind walk or use Rorschach-like inkblots to elicit figurative language. In every case, the point is to avoid using the same verbs and adjectives over and over again.
- Peer Review
Having an audience which is different from the one they usually face (their teacher) can be a surprisingly powerful form of motivation for students. Make it clear at the beginning of every writing task that in every case the first person to read the story is going to be a fellow student from class instead of the teacher. Students can tell if the composition is coherent, if they understand the plot, they can come up with suggestions for twists or further descriptions of character. Combine writing and proofreading on a student level and see what happens!
- Have a Purpose
Writing for an audience means that the writer has a purpose for writing (besides having to complete an assignment, of course). Correcting papers needs to include a discussion about the message the student wanted to convey and whether it forms part of the final compositions. Does the text have a beginning and an end? A conclusion? Or is it purposefully open-ended? Do not be afraid to ask these questions from your students and try to find out what the reason is for the way they write the story.
- Read and Write Hand in Hand
Although coursebooks always feature texts for reading, these are often adapted articles or informative texts based on surveys. It is very rare that a regular coursebook provides space for any kind of literature or sets a creative writing task for the students. Developing writing skills can be supported perfectly by reading – if you have the chance, set a graded reader for your class and discuss plot, characters and new vocabulary.
IDEAS FOR DEVELOPING CREATIVE WRITING
Finally, we collected a few ideas which can support a creative writing lesson or course. If you are interested in the detailed descriptions of these exercises or want to have access to more ideas, we recommend the Creative Writing resource book, written by Christine Frank and Mario Rinvolucri, which is the source of all the following tasks.
Habits I No Longer Have
Students are asked to write a list of habits they dropped over the years (e.g. cycling to school, going to the gym, smoking, going to bed at 10 p.m., etc.). Then they are asked to choose three of these things and write a short paragraph about each - why the habit was good/bad, why they stopped it, or how this affected their lives. When they are finished, students read out their paragraphs to each other in groups of three or four.
From Emotion to Situation
In this exercise students are asked to make a list of different emotions (fear, joy, anger, etc.) and then compare their lists with a partner. They can talk about emotions they have in common and discuss specific situations when they experienced these feelings. After the discussion, each student writes one page about one specific emotion and the occasion he/she experienced it. After the exercise, students read their stories again in mixed groups or pairs.
Reality Changed from Photos
For this lesson students need to bring a photo of one of their family members to class. Arrange the photos on a table and ask students to choose one they find interesting (it cannot be one they bought to class). Then, students are asked to imagine what the person's interests, hobbies, personality traits might be, and they write one paragraph about the person they imagined. They share their stories afterwards with the person who brought the photo to class.
The Whole Writes to the Parts
In this exercise, students work in threes. They all get different roles: Student A is the car, Student B is the steering wheel, and Student C is the brakes. Each student writes a half-page letter to the other two parts, and gets two letters addressed to him/her. Every student has to reply to the letters he/she gets and share the answers with the group.
Choose your Adjectives
Find a 7-9-sentence story appropriate for the level of your students - make sure the story has no adjectives, or if it does, delete them from the text. Tell students the rough outline of the plot without the details, and ask them to brainstorm as many adjectives as they can, which might fit the story. Then, students are handed the text itself and they try to incorporate as many of the adjectives into it as they can. In the end, stories can be read out in front of the whole class!
Works Cited
Campbell, Cherry. Teaching Second-Language Writing: Interacting with Text. Heinle & Heinle, 1998.
Frank, Christine, and Mario Rinvolucri. Creative Writing: Activities to Help Students Produce Meaningful Texts. Helbling Languages, 2010.