Writing the Self: Creative Writing and the Search for Authenticity
Jane Spiro, UK
Jane Spiro is Reader in Education and TESOL at Oxford Brookes School of Education. She runs an MA for international teachers of English and has directed programmes in literature and language education, creative writing and academic literacies worldwide including Poland, Hungary, Mexico, Switzerland and India. Her publications include two books on creative writing pedagogy with Oxford University Press, Changing Methodologies (2013) Edinburgh University Press, and collections of stories for language learners with Cornelson, Thomas Nelson and ELI. E-mail: p0073416@brookes.ac.uk
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Introduction
Writers in search of a voice
Language learning and the notion of authentic texts
How do experienced story writers start stories?
An insider perspective on story writing and creative constraints
Learner writers in search of a voice
First language writing, second language writing
Bibliography
This paper explores how writers, both experienced and creative writer ‘beginners’, search to make connections between what they write, and who they are. How do both these kinds of writer struggle to find what it is they want to say, and the meaning and message that best expresses them? I answer this question as a writer both of language learner literature and as a teacher asking: can the insights from practising writers help me to empower students as they embark on the creative writing adventure for the first time? The materials drawn on as ‘data’ for the writing journey include semi-structured online interview, class writing activities, writing notebooks and personal writing manifestos gathered over a decade between 2003 and 2014, both my own, and that of other writers and learner writers.
Writers have made explicit to varying degrees the process by which a text becomes their own, or to use terminology often adopted by writers themselves, by which they ‘find a voice’ or make a text authentic. Some describe the moment at which a text becomes ‘real’ for them. Conrad for example describes the alchemic moment in his writing of The Secret Agent when he found the theme that gave him “depth enough there for any passion, variety enough there for any setting, darkness enough to bury five millions of life” (Conrad 1920: 6). These moments of insight or clarity, and the need to convey them in permanent form through words or images, seem to be “predicated on a simple proposition: this writer’s personal experiences are worth sharing with others.” (Denzin 1997: 225).
Although the issue is complex and mutable, and for each writer takes on different forms and shapes, for the purposes of this paper, I shall work with the notion of writer voice as the search for ownership of text, what Hunt and Sampson describe as “a deep connection (in her writing) between her inner life and the words she places on the page” (Hunt and Sampson 2000: 16). Virginia Woolf describes in her diary what this meant for her in practice:
The test of a (story) is if it makes a space in which, quite naturally, you can say what you want to say. --- This proves that the (story) is alive: because it has not crushed the thing I wanted to say, but allowed me to slip it in, without any compression or alteration.
(Woolf 1929: )
'Authenticity’ within language education discourse until the 1980s referred to ‘real world’ texts written without conscious adaptation to reader level: “in other words, materials which have not been designed especially for language learners and which therefore do not have contrived or simplified language.” (Hedge 2000: 67). There was a culture of respect for these ‘real-world’ texts, as essential ingredients of the communicative classroom; texts written precisely with language level in mind were viewed as giving learners inadequate exposure to the ‘language in use’ that they needed. Hedge (2000) goes on to say, “the argument is quite simply that if the goal of teaching is to equip students to deal ultimately with the authentic language of the real world, they should be given opportunities to cope with this in the classroom.” (ibid: 67). In its worst case, it meant that writing for learners involved “rejecting anything interesting in favour of anything dull on the assumption that learners of English come to reading as blank and unliterary and inhuman as computers. For example, she was coming to the evening of her life becomes she was very ill.” (Day and Bamford 1998: 75).
Notions of authenticity have moved forward significantly since then. It is now understood that all texts are honed and fine-tuned to communicate to an audience, so to shape a text for the language learner is no different to any other modification; nor need it involve ‘contrived’ language any more than any other context-sensitive writing. ‘Authenticity’ as a notion became more generous and inclusive: “An authentic text is one whose primary intent is to communicate meaning. The relevant consideration here is not for whom it is written but that there has been an authentic communicative objective in mind” (Day and Bamford 1998: 60). It is also now understood that language learners carry into second language reading all the skills and enthusiasms of first language reading. Reading schemes such as the Cambridge Readers Library do “not fall into the trap of treating the learner as a child and equating a low language level with a low intellectual level or limited experience of life”. (Prowse 2001: 1). This shift in understanding has been good for writers. It means that publishers now commission ‘authentic’ stories rather than “watered-down versions of the classics” (ibid: 1) and allow writers to make natural and intuitive adaptations to his/her audience.
I would like to place my own account of finding a voice, side by side with six other ‘learner literature writers’ who shared the commission from a European publisher (ELI 2003) to generate ‘authentic’ stories intuitively graded for intermediate level students. Certain limited constraints were imposed regarding the level of complexity within the plot and the number of protagonists permitted. The section that follows explains this in more detail. The first set of stories were to be a response to the title London Tales, and the second a response to the title A Twist in the Tale. The language learner writers were ‘interviewed’ on paper and invited to explain the sources for inspiration and the ways they had responded to the constraints of the writer brief.
Sue Leather’s story is about an innocent man locked up for a crime he didn’t commit.
Once I happened to walk past Durham Jail and I had a physical reaction, almost as if I was going to be sick. So I guess it’s one of my greatest fears, to be locked up, not to be able to swim in the sea or take a walk on the beach. (Leather 2003: 44)
In addition to one of my greatest fears, Sue Leather adds as the source of the story:
I’m an avid newspaper reader and I’m addicted to crime stories, so I’m sure I read something in a newspaper which sparked it off. (Leather 2003: 45)
Stories that tap in to our greatest fears tend to leap out from the huge storybank that surrounds us and make themselves known. Individual cases may not be remembered, but the qualities that connect them are. For Leather, these formed the catalyst for a story.
Antoinette Moses describes how ideas for her story emerged from two newspaper articles:
One was about people selling drinks and cigarettes --------------. The other was about using ‘alpha pups’, children who are seen to be popular and fashionable, and giving them new computer games to play with in the playground so that other kids want the same games. I was quite disturbed by these stories----- then I started to think about how people are manipulated by advertising and the media. (Moses 2003: 6)
From this starting point, she generates a story of ‘the beautiful people’: “”Today if you’re beautiful, you’re a commodity, you’re somebody with something that everyone else wants. You’re for sale”. (Moses 2003: 14). In other words, the ‘spark’ for many writers can be something gradually arrived at, an idea or concern actually explored and discovered through the story medium.
Martyn Hobbs describes his storywriting approach in A Twist in the Tale
My stories tend to take shape through the accumulation of snatches of dialogue or pictures. With Minotaur, I had the opening situation in a bookshop; the idea of a maze, and an image of a tennis match or grass court during an English summer, played between a young man and woman. ---- then an idea for a plot began to form. (Hobbs 2004: 8).
So, the story spark can be small observations, single moments, daily routines, fleeting visual snapshots. From these fragments, Hobbs evolves a sinister story of a young man’s encounter in a Rome hotel, with a mysterious book collector who seems to know too much about his past.
Many writers keep journals and notebooks for recording these moments, and trawl them for creative ideas at a later stage. In Angwin 2005, writers explain the sources of their inspiration for poetry and stories.
To me, and I think to most serious creative writers, maintenance of a notebook is an essential discipline. Notebooks are a positive creative tool as well as a simple repository of notes and information. --- One enormous advantage of a notebook approach is the wealth of material you have permanently available to work on. ---- (Notebooks) should, as much as possible, be undirected, unplanned and unstructured (North 2005: 153)
So an element that can be added to the mixing bowl is the ‘unplanned’ element – the part that is not designed for the eye of the audience, where error, mixed codes and registers, linguistic snapshots are legitimate. Peter Redgrove called this ‘secret writing’: “when you simply put pen to paper and don’t stop until you have either covered the required amount of paper or completed a stated time” (Flint 2005: 322)
We have this sense of non-linear description, sometimes veering into the surreal, and not designed to be honed or shaped, from several artists’ journals. During a brief period when he felt unable to paint, Pablo Picasso resorted instead to linguistic ‘paintings’ in the form of poems and prose-poem daily records. He describes this journey into language as “using words like a palette of colours”. From the records of the day spring the tiny observation, or the small event which is the beginning of something. Here is Picasso, in his journal for Dec. 28th 1935:
astride this afternoon that’s running out trailing its guts and liver on the forget-me-not lake open at random supporting in my arms these two broken wings along the tambourine of screams I take a walk when suddenly the cigarette wraps like a madwoman around my finger and bites me till she draws blood (Picasso 2005: xxv Dec. 28th)
The artist’s eye helps us to see just how much can be contained in observation of the apparently trivial, the tiny, the everyday, the fleeting. The collage of impressions gathered in this way, is in itself a post-modern narrative.
The section above has explored the prompts and stimuli for creation
experienced by 6 practising writers. This section will offer my own account, as an insider responding to the constraints imposed by audience, editor and commission: the first in terms of plot line and the second in terms of linguistic parameters.
Finding the heart in themes: Travelling Light
The first project involved contribution to the collection of commissioned
‘authentic’ stories for language learners described above, with the overarching title
London Tales. As an author, I was required to modify my language intuitively for the
selected level. However, there were constraints on the story development. There
were to be no sub-plots, and at the earlier levels no more than three main characters.
The stories had to be set in the present day with a linear timescale; there were to be no
flashbacks or ‘flash-forwards’. Within these constraints I was permitted to write
freely and ‘naturally’, designing my stories for my specific audience.
Within this broad remit, I began to search for core characters and their situation. Moses (2003) in the section above describes the way she reached towards an issue that concerned her, and about which she was able to feel passion and anger. Leather (2003) describes her story as triggered by a moment of fear. In the same way, I found myself working within the remit of London Tales, to find something that mattered to me and about which I could say something new stemming from my own experience. Having been born, grown up, and gone to school and university in London, I had mixed feelings. It was a city that could become a whole world, and a city one needed to escape in case it should do so. It was a city that made one both insular and cosmopolitan, and one I needed to move away from physically as well as metaphysically in order to become a ‘citizen of the world’ and find my own place. Through this duality I arrived at the story of two main characters: George Trubshaw, who had always lived in the same suburb of London, married his first girlfriend, and ran a taxi business around the streets where he grew up; and his long-lost schoolfriend, Len Eccles, who had left school early and become a long-distance truck driver, travelling round the world, never settling in one place, but carrying his world in the back of his truck. They bump into one another unexpectedly, on one of Len’s deliveries in London. The two men, George and Len, are both aspects of myself. In developing the story, I found myself exploring this dilemma in myself: between the pleasure of having a home, and the urge to explore and be an adventurer. Whichever choice is made, choosing one and not the other is a sacrifice.
The story leads up to a final turning point in which both characters have become destabilised by the other, slightly envious of the ‘other’ they could have been. The long-distance traveller, Len Eccles, thinks about his schoolfriend who has spent his life in one place:
I’ve been all round the world, and what’s he done? Nothing! Just run cabs up and down the high street. I’ve loved a woman with black eyes from the Black Sea, and another from the Spanish Steps. But what about him? Just the first girl he saw!
And yet…
Meanwhile the schoolfriend, George Trubshaw, who has stayed happily in one place with friends and family, thinks about his adventurer friend:
The pyramids, the Blue Mosque, the Arizona Desert, the Black Sea, Table Mountain. The nearest George had ever come to these, was the window of the travel agency in Brent High Street.
But I’ve got Sal and the kids, all three of them beautiful, and my parents still strong and in good health. I’ve done very well for myself. My home is nice, my marriage is happy.
And yet …
(Spiro 2003: 108)
The constraint of two characters and a plot pared down to a single linear thread allowed for simplicity in shape. The two characters start as mirror opposites of one another, but move towards the recognition that we all indeed do contain opposites and a subliminal yearning for “the road not taken”.
Language constraint as rune
The second project involved an invitation to contribute to a graded series at one of five carefully staged language levels. The subject matter presented itself swiftly. For several years, I had been collecting examples of myths that answered questions about the world: How did light and day separate from night? Why are there so many languages in the world? The answers offered by different world cultures, their differences and similarities, became the theme for this second project and evolved into two collections of stories based on creation myths (Spiro 1990A and Spiro 1990B).
However, unlike the writing described above, the language constraints were strictly delineated. Metaphors and similes were not ‘allowed’. The vocabulary list permitted, for example: superordinates (eg. trees, flowers), but not hyponyms (eg. oak, ash and elm, rose, violet and bougainvillea); primary colours such as red and black, but not intermediary colours such as pink or grey. At the first stages, there were to be no subordinate clauses, and only simple tenses – present and past, but no future forms. There were to be no passive forms or reported speech, and only a limited set of synonyms for he/she said. For example, asked is allowed, but not replied, told, retorted, explained, remarked. Explicit cohesion was required between sentences so there was minimal substitution of nouns for pronouns, or ‘empty’ subjects such as ‘There was’ ‘It’s a nice day’. No abstract nouns were allowed, and figurative language was to be used sparingly and carefully, particularly at the lower levels (Arnold Graded Readers 1990). Thus these sentences were feasible:
I saw the black tree. It spread its leaves.
but not this:
It’s a willow I see, reflected in the water, grey-black and velvety like a bat’s wing spreading over the lake.
On reviewing my choices, I came to see that the ‘limited’ language had another beauty: it read like a translation from a mystic proto-language, with an almost runic simplicity, like a Norse saga or a set of hieroglyphs carved on rock. In this realisation came the ‘alchemic moment’, in which I understood that my new ‘learner’ stories were to be these myths, retold as if translated from their ancient sources.
In this runic world, there is no sub-divided notion of the past. For example, these are disallowed:
The man with the black eyes used to smoke tobacco every day.
The man with the black eyes was smoking tobacco.
The man with the black eyes had smoked tobacco every day for a century.
Instead, my first story, In the Beginning there was Water: a myth of the Joshua people (Level 4) starts with:
The man with the black eyes smoked tobacco.
Everything that happens to ‘the man’ is pure past tense; what happened a moment ago is as equally ‘past’ as the beginning of the universe, grammatically and perhaps philosophically too.
The man with the black eyes smoked tobacco.
The house sat on the water like a bird. And all around there was cloud. The man with the black eyes smoked. He smoked, and sat, and worked.
The Giver moved to the door. He blew rings of smoke across the land.
(Spiro 1990a: 12 – 14)
The undivided past
The story is deliberately punctuated with the refrain: The man with the black eyes smoked tobacco. From a language learning point of view, there is opportunity to internalize the rhythm and structure of the phrase: the man with ------. From the ‘mythical’ point of view, it underlines the importance of both ‘the man’ and the act of smoking. In fact, he is the Giver and Maker himself, Xowalaci (who is eventually named); and in the act of blowing rings of tobacco, mystic weed of the Joshua people, he creates the world.
Yet the story is not so simple. Its final stages are explored through a pared-down dialogue, a sequence of ‘said’s and simple sentences, between the Giver/Maker and the First Man, his companion in the hut on the water. As the land lifts out of the water for the first time in creation, something unexpected is found there:
The two of them stood by the door of the hut. They looked silently.
“Wait, there is something here I don’t like,” said the Giver.
There was a line in the sand: a deep line burned from north to south of the endless beach. They looked, silently. The clouds moved across the sand. Then the Giver said, sick at heart,
“They are footprints.”
“That’s not possible” said First Man.
“It is not possible. But that is what they are.” ------------------------
“Someone else is here,” said the First Man.
“Someone walked on the bed of the sea, before I gave the sea a bed,” said the First Giver. -----------------
“There is something about this I don’t like,” said Xowalaci, the Giver.
And the waves washed over the land.
(Spiro 1990a: 17- 18)
In this ‘runic’ language, the dialogue must truly ‘go somewhere’ in terms of plot movement. The words between the two first creatures on earth need to be without clutter, unambiguous and without nuance. There is also a sense of a new ‘rule’: to say something once is serious: to say something twice is very serious. The two ‘first creatures’ are ‘inventing’ language through these first pared down linguistic steps.
The simple present and the universal present
While the past simple tense has a specificity about it: he smoked tobacco on the day the world was created – the simple present is the form that describes all time, and events which are universally true: the sun also rises. So, for the telling of stories about the creation, the simple present proved a perfect vehicle. Through the present simple, I am permitted to introduce figurative language, restricted to concrete nouns which supply me with all the images I need.
The moon is like a mirror of life on earth. People see themselves in the moon. They see a human face. They see a person who changes like they do.
(Spiro 1990b: 6 – 7)
Through the present simple, it is also possible to suggest the currency of ideas for the reader. Grammatically, the form suggests both all time, and current time. To carry that through philosophically, it is a vehicle for the universality of questioning, searching for answers and responding to mystery. Whilst all cultures do this, and continue to do so, their answers are remarkable both for the shared themes, and for the specificity of the differences; for example, the Greek moon goddess Diana is chaste and a huntress, other moon goddesses are loving wives, or fickle wives, or lovelorn wives: yet interestingly, most are female.
Here, as with the first example of plot constraint, linguistic constraint became a vehicle for shaping story. In this case the constraint led to the construction of an alternative language that perfectly fitted the mythical content. Thus my own search for authorial voice involved transforming the constraint into opportunity, providing the optimal way of conveying the story’s meaning and message. Writing under strict commission emerged, unexpectedly, as research into self, into language, and into the writing process; it became a process of professionalisation.
The sections above describe processes by which I and other writers evolved themes, messages and meanings that ‘mattered’ to them both within and beyond
the constraints of publishers’ guidelines and editorial intervention. Their triggers and incentives included exploring their “greatest fears” (Leather 2003); allowing for the subliminal, free and unconscious (North 2005, Flint 2005); stimuli such as notebooks (North 2005, Picasso 1935), pictures (Hobbs 2003), newspapers (Moses 2003). In my own examples, triggers included the recognition of duality and paradox in the London/Len and George story; and identifying the rhetoric and language of myth. The struggle to match form and message lies behind all the writers’ statements of intent.
How do learner writers experience the imaginative leap from required to authentic writing? The section that follows will explore learner voices in two different settings: undergraduate students engaged in exploring their authorial voice as part of a creative writing programme; language learners writing poetry and story as part of their English language learning.
Learner writer manifestos: Why do I write? How do I write?
18 students engaged in an undergraduate programme in Creative Writing at a UK ‘new’ University, were asked to explore their own motives and incentives for writing. Through a series of awareness-raising explorations, they were encouraged to explore the same questions that are implicit, and sometimes explicit, in the professional writer’s search for voice: What is important to me in the writing process? How do I position myself as a writer? These questions formed stepping stones for an ‘assessed’ piece of creative writing in which they were asked to make explicit how their ‘manifesto’ expressed itself in their actual writing. The writing itself could take any form or shape, either as poetry, story, prose poem, play or sketch, with an upward word count of 6,000 and a minimum count of 40 lines of poetry. The students were thus invited to map the same journey from commission to output outlined by writers in the sections above, exploring what they considered central to their own writing voice and how they had honed this for their audience. In reporting their words, names have been fictionalised, but give an indication of whether the author is male or female, and where their views are reflected more than once.
A number of contrasting positions emerged from their manifestos in response to the questions: Why do I write? What do I want to write? The first polarity that emerged revolved in various ways around the question: should I write about the ordinary or the extraordinary? Several in the group felt that their purpose in writing was to “turn the humdrum into pleasure” (Sandra), or to work with the experience of the everyday and ordinary. Exploring what they would need to do to transform the everyday into material that held a reader, they identified “pace, pile of images, repetition, passion” (Katy). Several felt the ambiguity of this position, in that they saw the writing task as making the ordinary extraordinary. “Does it leave you wanting to know more?” (Natalie).
In contrast, but in equal numbers, another group of learner writers believed that what they wished to write were the moments that were raw, extreme and dramatic in their lives. Yet they were also wary that this might entail too much exposure, and that some degree of distance was needed to turn personal drama into public text. “Is the memory too raw, or not raw enough?” (Lily) “If I adopt a dramatic tone, is that too dramatic?” (Helena). In the search for writing the extraordinary, they also grappled with the strategies they might need: “I will be extraordinarily visual” (Hazel).
A second contrast emerged between those students who felt writing should be, or inevitably is, about the self: and those who felt it should be about the other. “All creativity is an extension of the self” (Saskia) one learner states, and her position is supported by several others: “I am a selfish writer who writes for their own gratification” (sic) (Anna). Importantly, for many students who took this position, like North (2005) they saw their own everyday lives as a rich creative resource: “use everything that happens to you as a writing opportunity” (Saskia); “I will remember to be inspired by the moment” (Adele). Positioning the authorial voice was, however, seen as problematic if the writing came from personal experience. Several grappled with the problems of claiming or fictionalising the story or characters: “do I use the ‘I’ if I am writing about my own family?” (Adele).
Others, however, took quite the opposite view: “I hate writing about myself” (Dirk). This group of learners felt writing should be about entering the shoes of others, following a theme or idea, or masking your own story through the words of others. “I am a collection of creative experiments that manifests themselves through ideas’ (Jake). For this group, writing about themselves was limiting in terms of content and restrictive in terms of authorial possibilities. “I do not agree when people say write what you know – it’s just not the end of the story” (Hannah) : “it’s often easier to cohere your thoughts by writing indirectly” (Hannah).
A third contrast emerged between those learner writers who were much concerned that their message was clear and understood, compared to those who felt that the writing had taken on a life of its own and audience were free to interpret for themselves. “Is it clear what it is about?” (Reya) asks one student who developed her key idea through metaphor. “But I didn’t want to just say it straight, I wanted to use the metaphor of the fish being dead” (Reya).
A further issue that emerged amongst 10 out of 18 manifestos, was the search for an appropriate form within which to write. Several grappled with questions such as: should I write a snapshot or a complete story? Should I write a single piece or a series of connected pieces? Do my ideas cohere into one or fragment into several? Should I write within one genre, such as long poem, poetry sequence, short story, or should I mix and subvert the genres? In working towards her decision one learner writer said, “It’s so much easier to lose an idea than it is to create one” (Saskia). Several grappled with the issue of how explicit they should make the stimuli which had triggered their writing: a set of photographs in one case – “are the photos necessary? Should I include them with the story?” (Lily); a newspaper article in another case – “is it clear what this is about if I don’t include the newspaper article?” (Netta).
Language learner writers: negotiating a second language identity
While the previous section explored learner writers’ sense of identity as writers, this section will look at the responses of second language writers to four classroom activities modelled on the processes of writers as described earlier. The students in these examples derive from two different settings: English language learners in General English classes from pre-intermediate to proficiency level in the language centre of a UK higher education college; and international teachers of English engaged in international summer workshops both in their home country (France) and in the UK.
The sections above describe processes by which I and other writers evolved themes, messages and meanings that ‘mattered’ to them both within and beyond
the constraints of publishers’ guidelines and editorial intervention. Their triggers and incentives included exploring their “greatest fears” (Leather 2003); allowing for the subliminal, free and unconscious (North 2005, Flint 2005); stimuli such as notebooks (North 2005, Picasso 1935), pictures (Hobbs 2003), newspapers (Moses 2003). In my own examples, triggers included the recognition of duality and paradox in the London/Len and George story; and identifying the rhetoric and language of myth. The struggle to match form and message lies behind all the writers’ statements of intent.
How do learner writers experience the imaginative leap from required to authentic writing? The section that follows will explore learner voices in two different settings: undergraduate students engaged in exploring their authorial voice as part of a creative writing programme; language learners writing poetry and story as part of their English language learning.
Learner writer manifestos: Why do I write? How do I write?
18 students engaged in an undergraduate programme in Creative Writing at a UK ‘new’ University, were asked to explore their own motives and incentives for writing. Through a series of awareness-raising explorations, they were encouraged to explore the same questions that are implicit, and sometimes explicit, in the professional writer’s search for voice: What is important to me in the writing process? How do I position myself as a writer? These questions formed stepping stones for an ‘assessed’ piece of creative writing in which they were asked to make explicit how their ‘manifesto’ expressed itself in their actual writing. The writing itself could take any form or shape, either as poetry, story, prose poem, play or sketch, with an upward word count of 6,000 and a minimum count of 40 lines of poetry. The students were thus invited to map the same journey from commission to output outlined by writers in the sections above, exploring what they considered central to their own writing voice and how they had honed this for their audience. In reporting their words, names have been fictionalised, but give an indication of whether the author is male or female, and where their views are reflected more than once.
A number of contrasting positions emerged from their manifestos in response to the questions: Why do I write? What do I want to write? The first polarity that emerged revolved in various ways around the question: should I write about the ordinary or the extraordinary? Several in the group felt that their purpose in writing was to “turn the humdrum into pleasure” (Sandra), or to work with the experience of the everyday and ordinary. Exploring what they would need to do to transform the everyday into material that held a reader, they identified “pace, pile of images, repetition, passion” (Katy). Several felt the ambiguity of this position, in that they saw the writing task as making the ordinary extraordinary. “Does it leave you wanting to know more?” (Natalie).
In contrast, but in equal numbers, another group of learner writers believed that what they wished to write were the moments that were raw, extreme and dramatic in their lives. Yet they were also wary that this might entail too much exposure, and that some degree of distance was needed to turn personal drama into public text. “Is the memory too raw, or not raw enough?” (Lily) “If I adopt a dramatic tone, is that too dramatic?” (Helena). In the search for writing the extraordinary, they also grappled with the strategies they might need: “I will be extraordinarily visual” (Hazel).
A second contrast emerged between those students who felt writing should be, or inevitably is, about the self: and those who felt it should be about the other. “All creativity is an extension of the self” (Saskia) one learner states, and her position is supported by several others: “I am a selfish writer who writes for their own gratification” (sic) (Anna). Importantly, for many students who took this position, like North (2005) they saw their own everyday lives as a rich creative resource: “use everything that happens to you as a writing opportunity” (Saskia); “I will remember to be inspired by the moment” (Adele). Positioning the authorial voice was, however, seen as problematic if the writing came from personal experience. Several grappled with the problems of claiming or fictionalising the story or characters: “do I use the ‘I’ if I am writing about my own family?” (Adele).
Others, however, took quite the opposite view: “I hate writing about myself” (Dirk). This group of learners felt writing should be about entering the shoes of others, following a theme or idea, or masking your own story through the words of others. “I am a collection of creative experiments that manifests themselves through ideas’ (Jake). For this group, writing about themselves was limiting in terms of content and restrictive in terms of authorial possibilities. “I do not agree when people say write what you know – it’s just not the end of the story” (Hannah) : “it’s often easier to cohere your thoughts by writing indirectly” (Hannah).
A third contrast emerged between those learner writers who were much concerned that their message was clear and understood, compared to those who felt that the writing had taken on a life of its own and audience were free to interpret for themselves. “Is it clear what it is about?” (Reya) asks one student who developed her key idea through metaphor. “But I didn’t want to just say it straight, I wanted to use the metaphor of the fish being dead” (Reya).
A further issue that emerged amongst 10 out of 18 manifestos, was the search for an appropriate form within which to write. Several grappled with questions such as: should I write a snapshot or a complete story? Should I write a single piece or a series of connected pieces? Do my ideas cohere into one or fragment into several? Should I write within one genre, such as long poem, poetry sequence, short story, or should I mix and subvert the genres? In working towards her decision one learner writer said, “It’s so much easier to lose an idea than it is to create one” (Saskia). Several grappled with the issue of how explicit they should make the stimuli which had triggered their writing: a set of photographs in one case – “are the photos necessary? Should I include them with the story?” (Lily); a newspaper article in another case – “is it clear what this is about if I don’t include the newspaper article?” (Netta).
Language learner writers: negotiating a second language identity
While the previous section explored learner writers’ sense of identity as writers, this section will look at the responses of second language writers to four classroom activities modelled on the processes of writers as described earlier. The students in these examples derive from two different settings: English language learners in General English classes from pre-intermediate to proficiency level in the language centre of a UK higher education college; and international teachers of English engaged in international summer workshops both in their home country (France) and in the UK.
Activity 1: Establish a unique reason for writing
We saw in all the writer testimonies above, that the search for voice entailed the pursuit of something that ‘mattered’ to the writer, whether this derive from ideas, concerns about the external world, or personal and inner life. Acknowledging the importance of this, the first example activity started with unsaid pressing messages.
Stimulus: Is there something which you have wanted to say, but never been able to: either to a member of your family, a friend, a teacher, or anyone else?
Students shared the following examples of unsaid and unfinished conversations:
-a boy I played with every summer when we were little: one year I noticed he had begun to grow a beard- in fact he was growing up. I couldn’t play with him, I was so upset – and I never saw him again. I’d like to explain and say sorry. (a French-speaking English language teacher at a training workshop in France)a Japanese student in a Creative English class)
-after the evacuation was over, I was so excited to meet my real mother again, that I just ran to her and never said goodbye to the family that had looked after me for ten months. I sometimes think about that, and wish I could say goodbye now, but we lost touch. (English teacher at a training workshop in London)
Activity 2: Establish a creative distance from the subject matter
The learner writers articulated more clearly than the experienced writers, the challenge of separating self from text, and establishing an appropriate distance between the two. It could be that the experienced writers had already identified for themselves the extent to which personal and public interwove, and had established the threshold of acceptability between the two. As with Leather’s account of her fears of imprisonment, or my own experiences of London, each of these had been translated into the stories of fictional characters. The activity below encourages the learners also to make this imaginative leap.
Stimulus: Give the characters in your conversation fictional names. (Voice One and Voice Two). Choose one of your voices,(the one that wishes to speak the most urgently) and let him/her speak uninterrupted for 10 or more lines.
Amongst responses to this task, students wrote monologues from the voices of: a fish thrown back into the river after being caught; a character in a black and white photograph found in an antique shop; a journalist reporting the disappearance of a family during the Iraqi occupation of Kuwait; a job applicant with dyslexia. These written pieces were perceived by the students as fragments of story, complete poem or prose poem, or extracts from a play they wished to develop later. Below is an example of one of these, written by Annelise, a French-speaking student.
No
I have my pride
I will not make the first move
Definitely not
I will not apologise
At my age? To say sorry?
No
I have my pride
I can see him waiting for it though
I can see him triumphant and victorious
No
I have my pride
And I will not lower myself. (Annelise)
Activity 3: Explore duality and paradox
We also saw amongst both groups of writers, an awareness of paradox and conflict: the desire to write about self but to establish authorial distance; to be ordinary but extraordinary; to be unstructured within structure or the reverse. Several of the pieces written by the experienced writers were accounts of conflict and duality, such as my own story of the friend who travels and the one who stays at home, or Moses’ story of the beautiful people who have everything and nothing in that they are regarded as for sale.
Stimulus: Look at the voice you have written. Now imagine its opposite. The opposite could the good or bad part of a person; the secret and the public part of a person; the best and the worst part of a person; the past and the present part of a person. Write the ‘other half’.
The example below is a poem from Jade, a pre-intermediate Japanese student, describing a person and his mirror.
Today I met a friend.
I was so glad I was not alone.
I waved and he waved back
I hugged him but he couldn’t
I kissed him but his lips felt cold
I touched him but he felt smooth
I said hello but he didn’t reply.
Today I met a friend
I was so sad I felt I was alone
I felt sad he looked sad
I got angry he got angry
I shouted he shouted
I cried he cried
I hit him he was broken
(Jade: Japanese language student)
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Please check the How the Motivate your Students course at Pilgrims website.
Please check the Creative Methodology for the Classroom course at Pilgrims website.
Please check the Methodology & Language for Secondary Teachers course at Pilgrims website.
Please check the Teaching Advanced Students course at Pilgrims website.
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