The questioning student

Once in India I thought I would like to meet a major guru or teacher face to face. So I went to see a celebrated teacher named Sri Krishna Menon, and the first thing he said to me was, "Do you have a question?"
The teacher in this tradition always answers questions. He doesn't tell you anything you are not ready to hear.

That's Joseph Campbell talking, in an interview by Bill Moyers, from their book The Power of Myth, 1988, Doubleday, New York. Page 67.

It's a pretty good model, I think. But often it means that you are faced with that dreaded silence when you ask a classroom -- 'Any questions?' Guess I'm not a major guru or teacher of the Sri sort... too anxious to wait for long enough for questions to form, I move quickly along to the input I want to share. But... isn't their just being there a kind of question? If students sign up for a course with a given title, it means they want to know something about it, yes?

The question gambit can turn tables. This week a student asked in class, 'What is the point of this course? What will we get at the end of it?' 'Fraid I blanked slightly, so she want on, 'Will we write a short story, or what?'

She'd arrived a bit late to this first class, or perhaps wasn't listening, when I read out the 2-line course description honed by me and printed in the course outline. At that moment the course outline was not in front of me, so I asked 'Do you want to write a short story? If that's what you want to write, you will.'

Not good enough. She went on with a no-but query-demand. This course draws and is designed for people who may be thousands of words into a novel or memoir, and for people who have never taken a writing course before and have only the flicker of desire to write something, and all variations in between. On the hoof, I came up with 'It will help you create involving characters and a narrative with dramatic tension.'

So there's where a question from a student can be good for the teacher -- I'd never put it quite that way before. Maybe that guru was learning from his followers.

P.S. Despite her question, it was an answer she did not want to hear, because at the end of the class the student told me she wouldn't continue on the course...

The joy of being a student

Maybe you are working on a Master's degree in creative writing, or maybe you've recently been on an Arvon residential course... or are you, like me, taking a course not directly to do with creative writing? I've just begun my third evening course in psychoanalytic psychology (Freud, Jung, Klein) and my! how lovely it is to be well-taught.

Mickey Yudkin (female), to give credit where it is due, makes each person in the class feel welcome and known by her. Even on day one, she'd say, 'oh, yes, I recognise your name from the list.' And every time someone asks a question or comments she addresses this, and before she finishes she circles back to the person saying something like, 'so that's why it was a good point, Susan' or 'you were right to ask, David.' Very supportive and warming. Even her attention and alertness make me feel that I am being nurtured, that I am interesting, that I am valued, and that she is knowledgeable and passionate about the subject.

Do you ever feel you are running out of steam as a tutor? We creative teachers do pour our energy into our students... there's nothing like a dose of being student of a good teacher to get a top up.

Hero's Journey, the first steps

Yes, so the brinkmanship of adult education is in my favour this time, and on 5th November the course starts. This raises the issue of prepping, and prepping for a class one has taught quite a number of times -- how to keep fresh?

Fortunately I have a passion about creative writing and about archetypes and the Hero's Journey, so I love learning more on all these areas. I have just finished reading The Power of Myth, an interview series of Joseph Campbell (he of the Hero with a Thousand Faces) by Bill Moyers; publisher Doubleday, 1988 [eeek! well, it's new to me!] Super illustrations and marvellous meaning-and-myth talk. I will add it to my booklist handout for students

Am also reading Writing Fiction, Creative and Critical Approaches, by Amanda Boulter, Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. I bought it at the Winchester Writers' Conference in July. Some sound stuff on reading for writers -- and yahoo, she gets into myth and Campbell as well. She has exercises, too, but I haven't read that far yet.

Blogger is playing up right now, so keeping this short. I won't buckle down to looking at my class notes and handouts etc til next week, so the presentation adrenalin builds up to good strong energy for greeting the roomful of new faces.

Deeper into character, part 2

I am trying to get back to doing this blog on Tuesdays, as I did throughout last year, but our oven sort of blew up -- well, dramatically shorted -- this week; fair amount of upheaval, but now all is sorted.

Continuing with the question of building characters, how to deepen. And how deep need they be? I began noticing characterisation a lot in my reading over the last few years -- I suggest you do the same, and get students to do so too. This is why it is good for a creative writing class to all read a book in common each term.

I like to ring the changes among genres. I have encountered one or two snooty students who refused to read sci fi or chick lit (not that I chose only those). One can learn from all genres, even cereal box backs. In fact, maybe learn more easily, because one is more detached in reading out of one's fav genre.

I have just finished reading Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Now that's character depth. And illustrates the rule -- depth of character requires time with the character, ergo, different genres, different depths of character (a) possible and (b) expected by reader. ULoB has essentially 3 characters (plus the narrator, a strong 4th) and the whole book is about getting to know them; indeed as they plumb their own depths. A fascinating, curious book. For contrast, as mentioned last week, read Dan Brown's The DaVinci Code: tons of characters, lots of action and pace, no time to get to know characters. But it works, of course, in its way. So it all depends.

One of my fav eye-openers to bringing a character alive is a paragraph in Anna Karinina early on, where Tolstoy has Kitty looking in the mirror, just about to descend to the dance where she will see both Levin and Vronsky. I call it 'the hills and dales of thought'. It gives insight into her state(s) of mind, and we live through it with her.

Currently I'm reading Elizabeth George's For the Love of Elena, Inspector Lynley working on a crime. I think she has a good balance of character depth (Lynley, Havers) and intermediate depths and quickly sketched characters. All of them ring true. What do you think?

Good news, my November Hero's Journey course has sufficient numbers, so it will run, hurrah! I have found that re-doing some of its character exercises has let me surprise myself with things I didn't know about existing characters I am working with. Particularly the Mentor's Gift.

Deeper into character

First of all, thank you and hi! to Nellie59 who posted a little fan note on the Teacher as Host blog entry a couple of weeks back. It is just great to know that Creative Writing: the Matrix has been proving really useful to her in teaching creative writing... if anyone out there has found favourite exercises in the book, or devised variations they'd like to share please get in touch.

I am thinking that at some point I will do Creative Non-Fiction: the Matrix (or some such title), from the many exercises I amassed (is that how you spell it?) in years of teaching Journalism & Professional Writing. It would include feature writing, travel writing, life-writing and other miscellany [have to add blog writing!], including a bit on copy writing... all 'creative' but not the usual thing people get in creative writing classes... yet it is not essays, reports or academia, and people do need-want help in these areas. What do you think, as teacher-writers?

Communicating with a fellow writer Peter Ward; I have just reviewed his book -- Dragon Horse http://www.dragonhorse.co.uk on Amazon. We were talking about deepening character, how to.
The Matrix book has 4 exercises on character (p. 53 onward), but those are pretty basic essentials -- never hurts to go back to basics though! Then later there are 4 more called Deeper into Character (p.84); The Dream and The Scar could be particularly useful if you worry that your characters are too thin. However, some genres don't want deep-deep character (hello, Dan Brown). I think depth of character means dwelling for quite some time inside and with a character's head and heart (hello Marilynne Robinson's Gilead).

More to say on character, but that will have to be next week.

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.

Teacher as host

Back to school -- autumn still always feels like the real start of the year to me, so Happy New Year.

If you teach primary or secondary school you've been in place for a fortnight or more, if adult/community education a week, if university or continuing higher education you still have a week or more before you stand up in front of your students.

See previous blog entries tagged First Class, Start of Term, Stimulus for ideas on short, sparking exercises to get people writing -- this week I'm thinking more instead of YOU, the teacher.

Flying back from a holiday (Lake Como, since you ask) I browsed through British Airways' magazine aimed at business readers and happened on a feature useful to us tutors. I clipped and saved it -- but blast! it was here on my desk before the university son used my pc, and it's gone now (surely he can't have... nah, he's a chemist and a drummer). So I will dredge up the tips I recall -- for businessfolk, it was on on giving presentations. But the advice is excellent for teaching:

• think of yourself as the host of this group before you... what does a host do? welcomes people, helps them to feel relaxed and in friendly circumstances, makes clear he/she is glad to see them
• be clear -- in yourself and to your audience -- what you are here to do, to say, and why they are here
• prepare in advance, know what your main message is, keep focussed
• use notes or bullet points if you must, but don't read from a page; ideally your preparation and your passion for the subject provide natural liveliness and information
• speak clearly, project your voice, watch audience faces and body language to be sure they are receiving your communication
• smile! make eye contact
• move about; don't cling behind the table/desk/podium, step to the side, or even into the audience (ideally for creative writing tables are arranged in a U-shape, or boardroom style)
• be flexible, allow for interruptions, adjust pace and order if needed, bring things back to the main message of the session

So there you are, creatively writerly businessly presenting -- hosting your audience into their new or growing creative world. See also the blogs tagged planning or preparation.