Notes
from Victoria:
Suggestion: Draw a clear distinction between imagination and skill.
Compare skill in writing to sports or to painting or to playing a musical instrument -- students already accept the idea that if you want to get better at playing a sport you have to practice and no matter how much you love a game if you don’t practice it you’re not going to improve. Same with art and music—it’s already accepted that technique is helpful to know and accessible to learn.
Convey to students that imagination comes from the individual voice being expressed and knowledge is the study of how to express. By drawing that distinction we make writing more palatable, more exciting, more enticing. An important piece of this is guaranteeing that the individual voice--the imagination that is coming direct from the inside of a person--will not be criticized. The technique may be, and at some point needs to be criticized, (critiqued) but the voice will not be. Thus you help forge positive associations with the act of writing. (I’ve never met a teenager who didn’t want to find a way to express him/herself. )
Fiction writing is made up of so many elements: voice, style, dialog, character-building, POV, conflict, scene-setting. . . One of the ways I teach scene setting is by asking students what sort of mood they want to create in their fiction. So much of working with teens is about setting the right mood.
To encourage teens in creative writing –open mic night for poetry, having a forum for publication of anonymous submissions for shy teens, writing contests, school paper, writing copy for school events, etc. In all of those venues, teachers and media specialists are called upon to create a specialized atmosphere, a setting that has respect built into it for each voice that is raised. In the creative writing groups I’ve visited I’ve been really impressed by how much respect students are able to give to each other, and how much they flower in those situations.
If I had to pick one element of writing to focus on for that essential 20% for teens, I’d pick voice. Teens want to express themselves. Once they understand that writing is a way to do that, they’re motivated to learn technique.
What IS voice? Voice is saying what you want to say—the way you want to say it. Once teens feel the joy of truly expressing
themselves and finding an audience for that expression, they want more.
Voice is really the
element that makes all the others come alive.
Prose can be grammatically perfect and also be completely lifeless. I’m not advocating just ignoring punctuation
and mechanics. But if you frame the
mechanics under the heading of technique, and emphasize that it needs to be
learned as a support for expression, kids are more likely to want to practice
technique. If you can engage your
students in the area of emotion and interest, you won’t be able to hold them
back!
Learning to appreciate
a wide variety of voices goes hand in hand with reading. A strong selection of books with a wide
variety of voices and styles creates an atmosphere that supports expression.