Glitch

Sorry, my pc has completely died, and access to my blog dashboard is via the husband's mac, unfamiliar to me. So watch this space next week: I'll be back.

Meanwhile, you will find a complete exercise and a tutor tip on my website. They are extracts from The Matrix book, and I change these termly. Link to Paxton Publishing to the right.

'Champagne Method' of writing

I'm hooked on reading the lives and letters of artists and writers, finding inspiration and comfort in their struggles and strategies. Also, sometimes, quotes and exercise ideas for my students.

Letters of Ted Hughes, selected and edited by Christopher Reid (Faber and Faber, 2007), is a fascinating read and includes some useful support for aspiring writers. See the book for yourself; by way of review, and to tempt you, here's a bit of his 'Champagne Method' (pp 314-5).

It seems that back in 1971 he and a friend devised for mutual friend Irish poet Richard Murphy a list of exercises as a stimulus to his writing. Penalties and rewards were to be paid in champagne. Murphy recounts this in his memoir, The Kick (Granta, 1993). There are 15 items on the list; here are 5, and the instructions from Hughes:

All considered only as starting points--Also, each exercise to cover 3 pages in order to make a habit of flow & release. Also, under Beethoven's dictum to pupils: "Never mind the wrong notes--go through to the end." Very good dictum as dicta go.

• A congregation of gulls, storm petrels, seals -- the text, the service
• The voice in the well
• The Saint's curse on desecrators
• Fifty metaphors of High Island [choose some other place you & your students all know]
• High Island considered as a woman

So give it a go! Up to you to devise the rewards and penalties -- and to lay in the champagne (or maybe cava, these days).

Techno ups & professional bodies

The good news: I updated the Paxton website, providing, as I have promised, a new exercise and a new tutor tip for this term. Have a peek, they're on the 'Sample Inside' page. Well, my version of sample inside. http://www.paxtonpublishing.co.uk

Professional bodies --

If you teach in LSC-funded further and community education remember that you should (have to?) become a member of the Institute for Learning (IfL). This is all about government initiative to improve standards of teaching in the long overlooked FE sector. See my January blogs about it (though membership deadlines have changed since then), and go to http://www.ifl.ac.uk There's a nifty quarterly magazine that comes with membership.

And you must see/join NAWE (National Association of Writers in Education) http://nawe.co.uk It is directly up our street: writing and teaching writing. As usual, lots for schools primary and secondary. For HE too, somewhat. And there is attention to community and adult teaching of creative writing too. There's a big Resources Database listing, and well set-out announcements of events, such as the recent day of seminars for teachers wanting creative writing input, with Fay Weldon as keynote speaker. It was at Brunel University, organised by Celia Brayfield.

In mid-November NAWE's conference in Manchester offers fascinating multiple choices of seminars, among them The Pulling Power of Poetry, Guerilla Writing in Academia, Teaching Storytelling in Uganda's Refugee Camps, Teaching the Short Story...

Techno ups continued: On the Paxton site I changed the final page to be clearer about how to buy the book, now that it is selling via the website. I am even getting orders from bookshops; they have to order through Nielsen. But it means the customer has to pay £14 instead of the direct-from-author £10.
Tehno downs: just plugged in a new monitor and am going cross-eyed -- how do I get the resolution right!!!!?

Present tense

Is v Was... fascinating session with my advanced class on using present tense in fiction. I began with brief readings out from a selection of books written in present tense that I'd recently read, with discussion of various points along the way:

• Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow (Peter Hoeg)
• The Resurrectionist (James Bradley)
• When I Lived in Modern Times (Linda Grant)
• The Sportswriter (Richard Ford)
• And one in traditional past tense, Burning Bright (Tracy Chevalier)

It quickly became apparent that the challenge is how to get the past of the story told while being in the present on-going story. Gap-on-the-page or new chapter and shift into past tense are trad methods. Interwoven past and present is masterful and technically tricky, and effective.

I chose two small 'shift' sections from The Sportswriter and we modelled these, sticking to the sentence structures and tenses, but swapping in our own invented characters, actions, places, feelings. We surprised ourselves with the power of our little pieces -- nothing like walking in the shoes of a master, thank you Richard Ford.

The general conclusion was that past tense is best for good old storytelling, and present tense is edgey, tricky and sometimes downright annoying to read. Now on tense-alert, I've had two quotes along these lines sent by students:

• Philip Pullman: 'the common mistake of thinking that using a present-tense narration conveys immediacy. It doesn't; it converys arty self-consciousness. It is a clanking, thumping, steaming cliche. There is far too much of it about...' (source unknown)
• Philip Hensher: 'the odd and general belief that writing in the present, rather than the past, tense is somehow more vivid... Writing as vivid and localized as Motion's doesn't require this journalistic twist.' (Telegraph 20/09/08)

Don't want you to get tense about it, but what do you think?

Name games

[I'm back now from a week's travel in the splendid peaks and dales of England; returned to plunge into bowels of my computer due to connectivity problems. Apologies for delay, and thanks for the book orders.]


Of course you started your course by getting people to get to know each other, simply by pairing, or pairing with a mini-interview task or a discussion focus.

Here's another idea, not in the Matrix book: name mesostics. That's right, not acrostics (every first letter), but a puzzle poem made from words that pattern the name letters randomly. Like:

seriouS
fUn
proceSs
creAtive
writiNg

I learned about this word form via Alex Finlay on a visit to the Baltic art centre in Gateshead. It's not as easy as it looks!

For beginners, a straighforward acrostic, possibly only giving descriptions of themselves (even silly ones) would be the way to go. Getting to my mesostic took a bit of a think, a rough go, a break for a broody stage of dissatisfaction leading to an eventual mild eureka moment (eg class coffee break), and then revision. Caution your students who might lose confidence if it doesn't come perfect all at once -- it's an experience in the creative writing process.

Here in blogland, the arrangement is wobbly; in reality the letters of the name or key word line up in one vertical column. See http://www.alecfinlay.com/ for more on what the master is up to with the mesostic form.

Second session & still warming

[Preamble: Met some lovely teachers of creative writing at a Brunel conference Saturday; apologies to all trying to purchase the Matrix book this week -- I'm away in Peak District & York, will answer queries on my return 15 Sept -- Susan. Meanwhile, on with tutor tips blog...]

One week later, and the class still won't have fully gelled -- especially because, in adult education, newcomers continue to join in week 2 or even week 3. Unsettling to you and the class, but hey, that's adult ed for you.

So you did a questionnaire to keep 'em busy and suss 'em out last week. Here's a summary of one of my classes, which I incorporated into the content of the second session. Students themselves like to know about the group and it helps in the bonding process. Out of a class of about 12 (remembering that they could give 3 choices each, see last week's blog), the kinds of writing they wanted to work on were

• Novels - 7
• Short stories - 6
• Memoir - 5
• Feature articles - 3
• Poetry - 2 (and those were as 2nd & 3rd choices)

So guess what's not going to feature very much in this course. There was also some demand for info on synopsis and letter-to-agent. You can tell that this is a pretty grown-up group. For beginners I'd take a sampling, but also set an agenda to guide them through a range of disciplines.

More on how I shaped the course to these needs as I go along. As for which exercises for these first few classes -- aha. See my book the Matrix? Or... one exercise per term for free on the http://www.paxtonpublishing.co.uk

Start of term

Welcome to Creative Writing class! Tutor _________ (your name).

It's always good to settle the first-day nerviness of your students by letting them know they are in the right classroom for the right class. Settles your nerves, too!

Besides writing a welcome note on the board I provide some busywork to fill up that awkward silence as you wait... and wait... for the stragglers to arrive. Soon you'll all know each other well, but meanwhile, I give out index cards to collect my own set of name-address-email and, much more interesting, a questionnaire.

More than mere busywork, a questionnaire starts the writers thinking about their individual pathways AND gives me information on how to tailor the course to this particular batch of writers. Bonus: I feed a summary back to the students (next class) so they know who they are, too. So here are some of the questions I put on an A4 handout questionnaire:

1. In order of priority, list the kinds of writing you prefer to do and would like to work on this year (for example: short story, novel, poetry, drama, memoire, feature articles etc). If you have equal priorities, adjust the list!

2. How long have you been writing, and how do you feel about your progress? Or, if you are brand new to creative writing, what prompts you to join the class?

3. Describe some of your writing needs and goals. How can this course help you?

4. Do you want to submit work for publication? Do you know where to submit?

5. List 2-3 favourite books or films you like.

Answers next week.
P.S. There still will be late-late arrivals to make the first session a bit bumpy.