Introduction to CREATIVE WRITING

Christine Frank, Mario Rinvolucri

( This text is currently under consideration for publication by Helbling Languages)

Menu

Where this book has no place
Creating a writing climate
Getting to know your students as writers
The nature of reader-focused writing
Writing in class or writing as homework?
A model worth proposing to learners of writing
What is in this book?
Using the Internet
Sharing the ideas in this book with teachers of Mother Tongue.

There are some situations in which the way you run a writing class is dictated by events beyond your classroom walls. In Northern Ireland, during the recent Protestant Catholic civil conflict, it was clear that children at primary school, writing in L1, needed to come to terms with the terrifying events happening in their neighbourhood streets. These events were what they vividly painted and wrote about powerfully and eloquently.
In 1992 I met a training college teacher of EFL writing from Palestine; he told me that his Monday morning class regularly started with the students writing diary entries about what the Israeli attack planes, bulldozers and patrols had "achieved" in their West Bank localities over the week-end. These young people had no lack of stuff to write about.

Zana, in Sarajevo, Bosnia-Hercogivina wrote this in 1992 She was 12 years old:

      When Daddy is fighting in the War
If only you knew how it feels
When your Daddy is fighting in the war
You run away from unhappiness, but unhappiness follows you
You hear no news of your father
And one day when everything is getting black
Daddy knocks on the door
Stays for five days
And then happiness goes away again
And my heart beats loudly like a little clock
And now I cannot write anymore because my daddy
Is not here, close beside me.

( P31, LETTERS FROM SARAJEVO, edited by Anna Cataldi Element Books, 1994 -English version of SARAJEVO-VOCI DA UN ASSEDIO, Baldini e Castoldi, 1993)

In situations of enemy occupation, war, natural disasters, famine, decimation by AIDS and other extreme but very common situations you have no need of a book like this or any other techniques book. What your students have lived and are experiencing will be the inevitable driver and urgent content of your writing classroom.

Christine and I have written this book from our mainly European experience and the activities have been used in Hannover, Canterbury, Ancona and Malaga rather than Belfast, Vukovar or the Basque Country. In other words these are exercises written by two people steeped in Western, metropolitan culture whose teaching experience is mainly with students from the rich countries of the world.

After this preamble, let us get down to more EFL technical things and let me introduce you to some of the beliefs that underlie this selection of writing activites:

We believe that , parallel to turning your classroom into a bizarre island in the school in which it is normal to speak and listen in English , it makes sense to also create a communicative, second language writing climate in your classroom. I write this with a background awareness that some teachers, who get their students talking to each other in class in English, content themselves with setting somewhat non-communicative writing exercises. Teachers, for example, will ask students to write a 300 word essay on a theme that they, the teaxchers,have chosen. The teacher will take these compositions in and diligently mark them, only to be dissatisfied that the students pay scant attention to her corrections.

If you want to create a writing climate in your class slightly modify the above activity using the following Andrew Wright technique. Tell each student to weave three lies or pieces of wrong information into their 300 words. If the writing is done as homework, in the following class give out their marked compositions to the students and put them in fours.
Student A reads out his text, incorporating your corrections. The task of B, C and D is to spot the mis-information. The other three also read their texts, submitting them to their classmates' lie detection.

The little twist of working three lies into their writing humanises this traditional writing exercise. The students write knowing that their classmates will read their content with the eyes of detectives. These writers now have an audience. (The teacher is not a real addressee as her role is to help them with formal things they have got wrong, not to react to the text as a reader of content.)
A firm principle of this book is that the writer must always have a reader and a reader interested in content, not just form. ( In the exercises we propose in Section 5 the adddressee is the writer herself some time later than the time of writing, not another person)
There is a lot that you, the teacher, can do to help create a climate of writing in your classroom and current youth culture makes this relatively easy. Ten years ago teenagers did not spend half their time tapping out text messages and once we get fully efficient voice recognition in, say ten years time, the window of writing being culturally fashionable will have passed. For the moment, installing a culture of written communication in a language classroom is in harmony with the times in the metropolitan world.

An easy way of leading students into such a culture is to regularly write a Dear Everybody letter or email to your class. Your text may comment on problems in the class. It may express your feelings about the way things are going. You can use such a letter to recycle and revise vocabulary met in the previous units of the coursebook.
In Section 6 ---23 you will find the outline of letters that introduce new grammar points and get students practising them in writing. ( These letters we offer are merely models for you…..>You know your class, you know your relationship with the students and your letter to them will arise from this relationship.)

When I have a group of students to get through an exam and when 25% of their marks will come from demonstrating an ability to write English I want to get them used to communicating freely across the classroom in English and in writing. In Section 1 03, A Maelstrom of Letters, the students put their names on bits of paper and you give each person someone else's name. Each person writes a short letter about whatever they like to the person whose name they have drawn. They can write about whatever they want BUT it must be in English. They deliver their letters to the addressees. They then reply to the letter they have received. Once this preliminary exchange has been completed, they write to anybody they want in the room.
When you try this activity the first time you will be amazed at the inter-personal energy it releases: student autonomy seen in convincing action.

I wonder how you see yourself as a writer? How do you change as a writer as you go from mother tongue to the target language? That you are a writer is beyond doubt. You write or have written some of these
notes on the kitchen table
Thank you letters/emails
Academic reports
Compositions
Love poems
Cooking recipes
Stories
Letters you have never sent
Shopping lists
Letters to lawyers
Work emails etc……..

Since all of us EFL teachers teach writing and it worth becoming aware of how we see ourselves as practitioners. On a recent trip to Malaga, South Spain, I asked a group of Spanish teachers of English to write me short letters explaining how they felt about themselves as writers. I wonder if you will find yourself echoing any of their thoughts or whether your self-characterisation as a writer would be very, very different.

Antonio: I see myself as a hopeless writer. Even sending an email take me ages, and after sending it, I am never sure I've actually conveyed the message I meant to. Just writing this letter is already a challenging test. I think it must sound as if it were written to an agony aunt asking for help. Ps. I have the same problems writing in my own language.

Macarena: I'm quite glad you're asking us to write about ourselves, for this early in the morning this seems a much easier task to do. I've always loved writing, I've loved it since I was a child. And I'm not just talking about the typical diary. When I write I seem to be able to free a part of me that does not come out easily otherwise. Writing allows me to admit things that are difficult to express in spoken words. The thing is, it's me I always write to, nobody usually reads me and I don't think I would really like it if they did, either. In fact, the old habit of writing letters to friends is dying out and the quick email is taking over. So much for progress!

Marta: My writing skills in both Mother Tongue and English are satisfactory but not outstanding. I can just about manage. I have students who are excellent at writing compositions in English, and, not surprisingly, they are also very good writers in Spanish - they just have the gift. I belong to the group of people who can manage to produce a good piece of writing after working for hours and hours, checking and checking, changing words and expressions again and again. However, the result is - how could I put it into words? - rigid or controlled. I am not the sort of person who keeps a diary or writes stories. I write letters, reports, project outlines….that is pieces of writing where you end up using the same structures and vocabulary. Nothing creative, after all.
I don't want you to think that I am not interested in writing. I really envy those who have the gift and of course you can always learn!

For me, as a teacher of writing, information like the above is precious. I know who I am dealing with in this skill area and I know a bit about their emotional filters. This will, naturally, influence my choice of exercise. I guess Antonio, who says he dislikes writing, may well feel better in a dialogue writing exercise, where he is continually being stimulated by the other person. After reading texts like the above I know who needs careful encouragement and who will fly on their own with little help from me.

The above texts exemplify a fundamental exercise it is sensible to do with any group of students to whom you have to teach writing skills. It is vital for you, the teacher, to learn something about the students' self-image as writers in both Mother Tongue and the target language. To fail to do this is a bit like being an architect who does not much care whether she is laying a house's foundations on granite or sand. If you turn to Section 1 11 you will find our suggestions on how to get students writing to you about how they see themselves as writers.

Howard Gardner in his seminal book, FRAMES OF MIND, suggests that people have both an intra-personal and an inter-personal intelligence. As I write these lines which you are reading, I am alone in my study, I have not spoken aloud to anybody for the past half hour and I am working reflectively in an introspective way. I would not feel embarrassed if I were sitting here naked. I am drawing on what Gardner would call my intra-personal intelligence. And yet I am also aware of your presence, reading these lines. I vaguely wonder where you are and what the temperature is on the "today" when you read this. I wonder what age and level of student you teach and in which country. Without your presence in my mind I could not write this introduction.

One of the great psychological advantages of addressee focused writing is that it draws on both the intra-personal intelligence of the student and her inter-personal intelligence.
Most oral work in the target language forces the students into the inter-personal area, whether they like this or not. The fifth language skill, talking to yourself, draws very largely on the intra-personal intelligence.
Writing, however, allows you to think and be both intra-personally and inter-personally. It therefore draws on both the introspective and the socially oriented intelligences, as well as , of course, on the linguistic intelligence.

As you flip through the book you will notice that we suggest doing many of these writing activities in class. In our attempt to humanise the writing part of the curriculum we feel that, especially for younger people, there should be as short a gap as possible between the act of writing and the act of being read. When you set writing as homework, there can be a two or three day gap between the writing and the reading….which in many cases does not work. When you bake a souffle people need to eat it straight out of the oven.

We feel it sensible to do some writing as homework and some in class time. The advantages of students working at home are that they choose the moment when they start, they finish when they decide to, they are more likely to be in a reflective state of mind ( at least, in middle class homes). The advantages of writing in class are that students are carried by the group energy, they are in the presence of their readers, and they can get all the language help they need from the teacher.

People with a strong intra-personal intelligence, the more introspective types, generally prefer home writing, while people with a strong inter-personal intelligence, the more sociable folk, find writing in class more motivating.
We have met colleagues who feel uneasy about "wasting good teaching time" by having the students write in class. They feel they are somehow selling the students short.
Surely good teaching is taking place when students are fully occupied processing the target language and calling on the teacher when they need her. An energised writing activity done in class with the teacher in facilitator role has to be a lot more learning-effective than many teacher dominated phases of a lesson.

We however recognise that if you only see your class for 90 minutes a week, as is the case in many Northern European adult classes, you will not want to do much writing in class and will use the activities in this book for homework.
If you are an Escuela Oficial de Idiomas teacher who see your group for 16 hours a week, we would suggest that you could afford to do two or three hours writing in class-time.
In the case of some students writing can be a "springboard" skill which helps them to improve the other four: listening, speaking, talking to self and reading. This tends to be the case with people who need more thinking time than is allowed by aural/oral interaction .

In thinking about our own writing we have found the Walt Disney model, taken from NLP, to be extremely useful. The great cartoonist was identified by his collaborators as alternating between these states of mind:
the dreamer
the realist
the critic

If you apply this model to yourself as a writer, how well does it work? Let me lead you into this thinking with a few questions:

How do you feel as you prepare to write something?
Do you tend to create pictures in your mind prior to writing
Is dreaming a part of your writing process that you are strongly aware of

How do you draw up you writing plan?
How do you take the continual decisions that are part of producing text?
Do you like the act of getting something down, making your statements?
What sort of feelings do you have as the text in front of you grows?

When does the critical voice in your mind chip in?
How useful is this evaluative side of your thinking?
How would your writing be without the critic's contribution?

This book is partly organised along the Disney model lines:

Section 1 .Getting Going corresponds to the dreamer stage of the students' process and offers you many techniques for warming people up into their dreamer phase.
Sections 2-6 are about actually producing the text.
Section 7 Editing is about the students learning to stand away from their text and get a balanced critical perspective on it.

The Disney model is particularly useful for exam writing, as each student needs to decide how long to give the dreaming, how long the realist text production will be, and how much time needs to be left to the critic.
A poor dreaming phase will mean thin content, a bad realist stage will mean chaotic writing and no time left for the critic will mean handing in a text littered with language goofs.

Section 1 Getting going
Here you will find activities that help you start creating a writing climate in your class as well as lead-ins to necessary exam skills like composition writing. A typical example of such an exercise is Section1….13 Speed Writing. You give the class a typical exam composition topic and ask them to write flat out for 90 seconds on the topic. They must write in sentences and without lifting their pens from the paper or resting their fingers while keyboarding. You group them in fours to read out what they have written. In the examination hall some candidates find that speed writing is just what they need to stop them gnawing their biros and to get themselves productively dreaming.

Section 2 Writing from your partner's content
The activities in this section are strongly inter-personal. The student writes from ideas and information proposed by their partner and they know that their partner will be the main reader of the text.
In Section 2 8 I take your day on the teacher pairs the students and both write 5-6 sentences about what happened to them the day before .
They swap papers and Student A turns B's sentences into half a page of continuous writing filling out and adding more detail. A writes in the first person, as though he/she were B.
B does the same with A's sentences.
They then read each other's texts and comment. .
Student A really wants to know how Student B has modified his original sentences just as a politician is eager to know how an interviewing journalist has understood and misunderstood his words. In this activity the original writer reads the new text with real ego involvement.

Section 3 Group writing
There are students who feel the isolation of the writing task is daunting. To warm such students into feeling good about writing the activities in this section are ideal. Let me give you an example:
1. Seat the students in fives, and ask each person to write a one page story of.something that happened to them.
2. Each student passes their story to the person on their right. They read the story and write 15 questions about the text, questions of any sort.
3. The students pass their paper to the right. They read the story and questions and give each question a short answer ( 1 to 3 words)
4. Again the papers pass to the right. Each person reads the story, questions and answers and then responds by drawing a picture.
5. The paper goes to the right and now the original writer has he story back.

This is exercise is a variation on Section 3 2 Everybody makes a contribution.

Section 4 Writing in role
The same students who enjoy the masks they wear in oral role-play will find writing in role an escape from self, a kind of freeing.

In Section 4 7 The Whole writes to the part, you pair the students and ask one partner to be a leaf and the other to be the tree. The pairs then move to different parts of the classroom and write each other a short letter in role, respectively as leaf ( or needle or frond) and tree.
The trees exchange letters with their leaves and then answer the letters they have received.
If you do this exercise in autumn in a temperate place, the texts tend to be sad, while the reverse is true in spring.

Section 5 intra-personal writing
Students who have written diaries in their mother tongue will find these activities easy to get into. This section caters to the student for whom the happiest writing is intra-personal, the sort of writer who does not need an audience beyond themselves at a later date. This type of writing closely corresponds to interior monologue and dialogue.
I personally ( Mario) think this kind of writing is extremely important in second language study as you change you relationship to English when you communicate with yourself in it. You are accepting the foreign tongue into the inner recesses of yourself, you are accepting it as a strand of your identity.

Section 6 General writing.
In this section you will find writing practise techniques that take you from drawing up lists of things you really like to exploring areas of your past by bring in to mind all the falling you have done. The common factor of all these exercises is that the students are exploring personal experience and reacting to stimuli they may not have experienced previously. A good L2 exercise is one in which the students come on some slightly new area of their own experience and are led to think new thoughts.

Let me illustrate the list-making activity mentioned above: here are some things I really like:
Soaking in a hot bath
Cooking supper after a day keyboarding
Walking West and seeing the trees and buildings lit by the rising sun
Opening a novel and being in a new world after just two pages
Finding myself in quick harmony with a friend
Observing rhetorical excellence in a seasoned politician
Scratching my feet when they feel dry and itchy etc…..

Section 7 Editing
This final section is about coming out of the ego-involved stage of writing, of achieving distance from your text. It is about going from the realist state of mind into critic mode.
Let me share a marvellous editing exercise that you will not find in the body of the Section. This exercise is called lipogram and you are required to re-write what you have written omitting a given letter. Let me try omitting the letter A from the previous paragraph, paraphrasing to try and keep the same tone and meaning. Here goes:

This seventh section concerns itself with coming out of the ego-involved business of writing, of getting remove from your text. It works on going from the executive mood into the critic mode.
In doing a lipogram I am forced to pay critical attention to what I have written and wonder about its accuracy and elegance.

An excellent way of using the techniques in this book is to link up with a class the other side of the globe and get the pair work exercises done with Student A from your class and Student B from the other class. Such work has huge advantages:
a) your students are using English realistically
b) your students escape the tedium of their eternal classmates
c) your students are forced out of the cosy cultural assumptions of living in one community, in one corner of one country.

As you look through the acknowledgements below many of the activities in the book you will find that we have learnt much and borrowed much from English Mother Tongue creative writing thinking. Please share ideas from this book with the colleagues who teach mother tongue.
If they too start doing "mad" things in their lessons, you will no longer be seen as the only looneys in your staffroom! There is strength in numbers!

Enjoy your students enjoying the choreography of the exercises we have presented to you.

Please check the The Creative Writing course at Pilgrims website.