Exercises for outcomes: fooling around with tenses

I was blogging recently about my course subtitled Narrative Devices (10 March 2011) and think it could be useful to go on. One Learning Outcome is Define verb tenses and their effect on narrative. Sounds so basic, yet I really only arrived at it because I was forced to break down creative writing into specific craft skills; turns out to make for some good exercises.

I invented two Criteria for Assessment.
1) Recognise present, past and past-perfect verb usage in published or own writing.
2) Evaluate strengths and weaknesses of different verb tenses in narrative effect.

Sneakiest way to get into this is to set an exercise, probably starting with a stimulus of listing or even a given list of words to choose from, where you ask students to write a paragraph or two about something (place, object, pet, person, event...). Or it could just start with 'I remember...' and go on.

Why is this sneaky? Because you want them naturally and unselfconciously to write in past tense. This is your (their) raw material. And now you talk a bit about present tense, maybe read out an example, and ask the students to transmute (or maybe we should say timeshift) their own piece into present tense.

They set to it... and then they start to say it is hard to do! Urge them to soldier on. Also some 'ask permission' to leave things out or change things because it won't work otherwise. Aha! Now they are seeing the craft differences in the two modes. Of course it's okay.

Then read out and share and comment and discuss. Good to prepare a handout of excerpts from published works in both past and present tenses to read out to further support the discussion. There's no right answer, it's just... how does it feel? what does it convey? is this the effect you want? have you considered the effect?

A variant or addition is to have students transcribe (transmute? timeshift?) the published excerpts into the other mode; again -- to sense the effect on the reader. Effect on the writer might be considered too -- some people love to write in present tense, some hate it, some can only flow in classic past-tense storytelling, some feel paralyzed by it.

Hmm, all this and I didn't even get to past-perfect, otherwise known as the had-hads.

Mixing newbies & returner writing students - part 2

Continuing the theme of mixed levels of students (how're you doing, Helen?), last week I expanded about gentling in the new-to-creative writing students and asking tolerance from the old hands for hearing some of your same jokes and tricks. This week, a bit more attention to the loyal returners. Or: your fan club.


Even without newbies, a classful of students coming back... and back... and back can be a challenge. Details now on the solution mentioned last week. Here's the bad news -- well, not so bad, as we are creative teachers, and passionate, too -- you do have to come up with some new material. However, it's not too painful when you simply think of it as fine-tuning and variably focussing what you are already doing. It all began with the title... and arose in part for administrative reasons.

Let's say the course was originally called Creative Writing. The new tweak was subtitling. I devised two further course names to make a 3-year cycle, so after the first (unsubtitled) came Creative Writing: Narrative Devices. Then Creative Writing: Structure, Pace & Voice. Three years is a good long time to have held (taught? entertained?) a student; if he/she comes back a fourth year when you repeat the cycle, it will have been so long ago -- and they will have grown so much -- that it will feel new again.

The secret is that of course you are teaching narrative devices, structure, pace and voice all the time... but now you and your students are shining a spotlight on them, focussing. And this is what provides the new angle for your returners. Dialogue, character development, setting etc still are present too, and all of this is fine for the newbies, so long as you start off with gentle, fun, freeing exercises (see last week's blog).

Here are the Learning Outcomes I devised for the Narrative Devices subtitle:

1. Identify a variety of narrative methods
2. Recognise person point-of-view
3. Describe the uses of various person points-of-view
4. Recognise storytelling angle point-of-view
5. Define verb tenses and their effect on narrative
6. Generate, submit and engage in writing with awareness of narrative devices

If anyone out there wants my breakdown of these into Criteria for Assessment, please ask and I will put them in future blogs.

Two big supports for these new angles -- add the reading of a book or selected contemporary short stories to the class. I did one novel per term but it was a pretty advanced class. Maybe one or several short stories is better for starters. We are NOT doing lit-crit here, but READING AS WRITERS, to notice and discuss and then try out the points above.

Other one: make it a regular workshopping class, with readers scheduled ahead, committed to reading out. Make this a 20 or 30 min slot per person -- 10-15 mins to read (about 2,000 words), the rest for feedback (developing constructive critical abilities in all). [more on this in The Matrix book]

Oh, yeah, you still have to go to a book of exercises like mine or your big shelf of 'how to write' books and find exercises you can turn into class exercises... but with the above elements, at least not soooo much of this.

Sense and surreality - plotting exercise

An interesting little item in 23/09/09 Telegraph reminded me of an exercise that explores plotting and point of view which I did not include in Creative Writing: the Matrix. The news item says psychologists have 'found that bizarre juxtapositions of facts and time frames force people to engage their brain.'*

Researchers at the University of California and the University of British Columbia gave a study group a chopped up, nonsensical version of a Franz Kafka story, while a second group read a sensibly edited version. The first group remembered more and better. Conclusion by psychologists: they did better because they were motivated to find structure.

Their research seems mainly to be about learning (though it also mentions film director David Lynch's work), but I'm interest in that last phrase I bolded. I was trying to get my class to explore plot AND point of view (angle)... the various ways of telling a story, and how the ways then affect the story. It took a fair bit of preparation, worth it for the resulting lively group-work session.

• Prep: I took a published short story and analysed, or deconstructed, it into key actions in the narrative. I typed out these key events (synopsis-style, not the actual text); nine in total. Each was only 1-3 lines long.
• Prep, cont'd: I printed out 4 copies of this list. I numbered the first event on the first copy #1, as it occurred in the telling of the story. I studied the events and on the other three sheets chose different starting points. (I got quite deeply and creatively involved in this editing task and could see how all versions might conceivably work.) Then I cut up each sheet into strips of the 9 identical events.
• In class, I gave each of four groups (2-6 people in each) one set of the story events. But each group had a different #1 starting event. The task was then to put the other events into an order that made sense -- possibly eliminating one if it just would not fit. This took a good noisy 20 minutes.
• Then a speaker for each group told its story to the class. The discussion was fascinating as the variations provided different tones to the basic story, differing sympathies, motives and even personalities for the characters, and differing themes. Two groups did not manage to complete the task, but that mattered less than the working at it and all contributed to discussion.
• Point of the exercise: to realise how flexible plotting can be, to be creatively free in storytelling, to experience how the sequence of telling a story affects readers' interests and empathies.
• P.S. I revealed the order of the original published story (and its author) at the end; some students preferred their own versions!

Point of learning for the tutor: it was a bit confusing and chaotic (surreal!) but very stimulating and open-ended... showing, not telling, students the potentialities of plot and point of view and their effects. It is not necessary to agree, there is no one right way.

*The study is published in Psychological Science.