In my Creative Nonfiction Class, my professor decided that we needed help writing stories that had fully-realized endings and themes.
So he gave us a packet of deconstructed essays that had been submitted earlier in the semester. Each page of the packet included the first few sentences of a narrative essay, with just enough information to place the reader in time and space, but not to provide any more context.
Then, he gave us a page with those chosen essays in chart form.
I've recreated the page here, using quotes from books that are popular in middle and high schools.
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| The Quentin Tarantino ending was actually a thing on the original activity. |
Each column included a key element of the original essay, with everything but the opening passage very vague and paraphrased.
He split the class up into groups of 4-5 and had each group roll a dice four times. (There were six options on his list.) One group could get the numbers 2, 4, 3, 1, for example; this meant that they had to choose the second option from the first column, the fourth option from the second column, and so on. So, a group with those numbers would have to construct a (fictionalized) story starting with the opening sentence of
1984, using the mood from
To Kill a Mockingbird, following the theme from
The Great Gatsby, and concluding with a similar ending to
The Hunger Games. Get it?
Then he had each group split up to do the shared-timed-writing exercise.
You know, that one where you write for ten minutes and then pass the story on to the next person so see where they take it.
He instructed us to make sure we read the entire story before beginning to add on to the end.
He made sure that every person wrote the ending to the story they had started. That was the point of the whole thing: we had to bring our stories to a close.
What really struck me about this exercise was that he had accommodated a common and often bizarre writing activity into something that would help the class. Normally, I don't like this strategy. Too often, it's just a test of students' on-the-spot creativity, and it results in some crazy and not-very-good stories.
But the quality of the stories didn't matter for this adjustment, because we were focusing on pulling all of these conflicting requirements together into a fully-realized story. Unwittingly, we were learning how to take things like character, setting, mood, and theme, and bringing them together into an effective conclusion.
So the activity was both fun
and helpful.
So, based on this...
What are some activities that you have participated in or can think of that take a well-worn strategy and flip it on its head?
Think about a literary strategy we have discussed in class. In what ways can you adjust it to fit a class's needs? Say your class needs to focus on a particular element of grammar, or thesis statements, or concluding paragraphs. How can you tailor a literacy strategy to those needs?
