Teaching Writing

In the Collected Maxims of the German writer, W. G. Sebald (1944 –2001),  he is credited with offering this advice to writers: ‘Significant detail’ enlivens otherwise mundane situations. You need acute, merciless observation. Observation provides a foundation on which writers can build. It is, of course, not observation alone that makes Shakespeare or Dickens or Melville or Tolkien the great writers that they were, but keen observation underpins their work. Personally, I have spent a great deal of time with Dickens reading for fire references for a book I wrote on hearth cooking, The Magic of Fire (2002). Dickens is, in fact, one of the best sources of information on how people related to the fireplace and how they actually used it to cook. I took a train once through Scotland on a late summer evening. A volano-shaped mountain topped with orange stained clouds read Mount Doom of Tolkien’s Mordor. Moby Dick is an example of  a novel built on observation. One way it tells its story is through a series of discreet observations —  a meal of chowder in a busy inn, the nuances of the color white, the harvesting of ambergris — all tied together through the animating character of Ahab, a classic study in the obsessive self-destructive personality. With children whose literary foundation is heavily influenced by mass culture — Netflix videos — blockbuster movies — it is especially important to try to focus them on observation of the world of real people and real objects in order to provide them with a vocabulary that can animate their stories with a sense of real life. The art in literary writing is, in part, the art of finding the words to describe the physical world in a way that gives life and depth to the imaginary world of the story. As it is not easy to draw the room you are sitting in with a pencil, so it is also not easy to paint that room with words. I think the trick to succeeding with observation exercises  is simply to get your students started. Let the depth of their observations — or more accurately put — the depth of their literary descriptions of what they see grow slowly by accretion. Color will come with time and practice. Please feel free to share your experiences teaching observational writing. Examples from your students are welcome.

I recommend this blog post, What Kids Have Taught Me About Writing, by children’s book author Kathleen McCleary. Those of us who read a lot of writing by children produced in schools — and I certainly speak for the staff here at Stone Soup — get tired of reading writing by children that is so obviously constrained by creative writing formulas. “Stop!”  I sometimes want to shout, “can’t you ask children to write something that means something to them?” At Stone Soup we are very focused on personal experiences — writing from the heart.  Not being teachers ourselves I think we probably make the mistake of discounting the value of creative writing formulas. What Kathleen McCleary talks about in her blog post is the constructive use of writing games. She mentions the “ahah moment” creative writing game by way of one  example. As the “ahah moment” fits in with my own bias towards writing based on experience I actually find her description of a fill-in-the-blank project the most challenging to my own thinking. And, the most inspiring. On the face of it, what could be more dull? “Once upon a time _______. And every day ________ ……” but then, the example Kathllen offers is a story that does, indeed, take one’s breath away. A writing class taught by a novelist is probably not quite the same as one taught by you or me. It is impossible to know what inspiration Kathleen herself brings to her students in the way she framed the assignments. But what I take from her post is that if you can free up children’s creativity, if you can tap into their deep imaginative layers, then the game becomes a challenge, like the strict sonnet form in poetry. When one masters the formula (rather than be mastered by it)  brilliant literature is the outcome. What Kathleen McCleary sees as the wonder of it is what all of us who are closely involved with children’s creativity see, whether it is in the realm of writing or art or music, when the stars align for children they seem to effortlessly create material that most adults would have to struggle for. This, then, from Kathleen McCleary’s blog, Writer Unboxed. Simple can be powerful. One of the exercises I do with kids is 7-sentence story, in which I ask them to write a story by filling in these blanks: “Once upon a time____. And every day____. Until one day____. And because of that____. And because of that____. Until finally____. And ever since____.” Last summer, a quiet, 14-year-old boy wrote this story, in less than 10 minutes: “Once upon a time, the sun fell in love with the moon. And every day she chased him across the sky but he always slipped just out of sight and set as she rose. Until one day she caught up to him in what the humans called an ‘eclipse’ but she called a ‘miracle.’ And because of that, she discovered that she and the moon could not ever stay in the sky at the same time, except for eclipses. And because of that, every day she felt lonely and sad as the moon set and she rose. Until finally an eclipse came again and she and the moon met once more. And ever since she has been hoping and waiting for another so they may be together again.” It gives me goose bumps every time I read it. It makes me want to be a better writer. It makes me grateful I get to work with young people.