Wednesday, September 01, 2010

Here’s the deal: I’m teaching a university-level creative writing class this semester and one of the assignment’s I’ve given my students is to write a weekly blog post. They can write on the assigned readings or the writing process or both, but it’s got to be every week. The point is to write as much as possible as often as possible because if there is one rule of writing that I have found to be true it is the more you write, the closer you get to discovering what you have to say.

I’m taking my own advice and reviving this dead blog to write about teaching the reading and writing of fiction (and later in the semester poetry). For my part, I hope to discover what insight teaching can bring to my own writing process. The workshop process has been vital in allowing me to gain perspective on my own writing and I believe that teaching can do the same. Objectivity is much easier to achieve when we are observing the work of others, like wondering why the parents of the obnoxiously loud kid at a restaurant don’t take him outside when your own child is under the table rolling around in bits of fallen food.

The first few weeks of class we will be discussing various short stories, trying to pin down what Peter Elbow calls the “center of gravity” for each and identifying the techniques each writer uses to communicate that center to the reader. They have a short short story due this Friday (300-600 words) and I want them to revisit their first drafts before handing them in, see if they can figure out the main point of their lovely prose—if they can’t find it, what chance has the reader got?

I’m looking forward to reading what they come up with.

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