Creative Writng; Tuesday, Period Two [ 03/07 ].
There was nothing particularly special about Valentine's class when the students moseyed their way in. Just a classroom, and a young woman sitting on a desk up front with a friendly smile for each of them, and CREATIVE WRITING written in very big letters on a chalkboard behind her, along with a quote:
"I have been successful probably because I have always realized that I knew nothing about writing and have merely tried to tell an interesting story entertainingly." -Edgar Rice Burroughs
"Welcome to Creative Writing," Valentine said, with a quick glance at her roster to guess that everyone was here. "Behind me on the board are words from someone much wiser and more prolific than myself in writing, a quote that very much embodies my approach to creative writing. We can talk mixed metaphors and qualifiers and thesaurus abuse all day, but, at the bottom of everything, are you telling a good story? We'll leave the technical stuff to the grammarians and the cunning linguists. Over these next few weeks, we're just here to tell an interesting story entertainingly.
"As you know, the first week is full of introductions. We're only on Tuesday, so you're probably not utterly sick of the yet, but we're still going to do something a little different in this respect. There's a popular line of thought in the writing world, that there's a certain duality to the writer. As a writer, you have your everyday self, and then there is the writer self, and the writer self has the ability to go to places your everyday self would have never dreamed of. When there is a pen in your hand, you cease to be, say, Valentine Wiggin, and you become some other great and powerful creature, a world builder, a storyteller, a myth maker. Some authors even go so far as to use a pen name, a new alias to separate the writer world from the waking one.
"So that's what we'll do today. We're going to invent our writer self, and the moment you enter this classroom, you will leave the Daves, the Lokis, the Natalies at the door. You'll say sayonara to the Maebys and Peetas for at least an hour and invent yourself a writer persona. If you'd like, choose a new name for yourself, a pen name, and that's what you'll be once you're here. Now, if you really like your name, which is understandable, because it's your name, then keep it. But you're still going to tell us a story about your writer self.
"I'm not sure if any of you are familiar with the Two Truths and a Lie game, but the essential idea is that you tell everyone two truths about yourself and a lie, and the others generally try to guess which is the lie. We're using that principal to invent our writer selves today, only I want you to frame it as if it wasn't a mere list, but an antecdote about yourself, and I want you to use two lies and one truth. We won't play guessing games on what was the truth, but I certainly welcome everyone to speculate.
"Since it's only fair, I'll go first. I'll be going by the name V. A. Waters, a reflection of the fact that I come from a time where a woman didn't have much luck getting into the writing business unless she went traipsing about under a more masculine name. George Elliot, eat your heart out. I'm the middle child of two brothers, which left me eager to express myself creatively and stake a claim beyond my gender, and I absolutely abhor squirrels,"--with a little side-wink to whichever reporter was hanging out with them today--"which is why you will commonly see a theme of squirrels representing all that is evil in the world today."
And once "V. A. Waters" had finished, she gave a nod and a smile to her class and asked the penultimate question, "Okay, who's next?"
[[ please to be waiting for the OCD is ready for peer review! ]]
"I have been successful probably because I have always realized that I knew nothing about writing and have merely tried to tell an interesting story entertainingly." -Edgar Rice Burroughs
"Welcome to Creative Writing," Valentine said, with a quick glance at her roster to guess that everyone was here. "Behind me on the board are words from someone much wiser and more prolific than myself in writing, a quote that very much embodies my approach to creative writing. We can talk mixed metaphors and qualifiers and thesaurus abuse all day, but, at the bottom of everything, are you telling a good story? We'll leave the technical stuff to the grammarians and the cunning linguists. Over these next few weeks, we're just here to tell an interesting story entertainingly.
"As you know, the first week is full of introductions. We're only on Tuesday, so you're probably not utterly sick of the yet, but we're still going to do something a little different in this respect. There's a popular line of thought in the writing world, that there's a certain duality to the writer. As a writer, you have your everyday self, and then there is the writer self, and the writer self has the ability to go to places your everyday self would have never dreamed of. When there is a pen in your hand, you cease to be, say, Valentine Wiggin, and you become some other great and powerful creature, a world builder, a storyteller, a myth maker. Some authors even go so far as to use a pen name, a new alias to separate the writer world from the waking one.
"So that's what we'll do today. We're going to invent our writer self, and the moment you enter this classroom, you will leave the Daves, the Lokis, the Natalies at the door. You'll say sayonara to the Maebys and Peetas for at least an hour and invent yourself a writer persona. If you'd like, choose a new name for yourself, a pen name, and that's what you'll be once you're here. Now, if you really like your name, which is understandable, because it's your name, then keep it. But you're still going to tell us a story about your writer self.
"I'm not sure if any of you are familiar with the Two Truths and a Lie game, but the essential idea is that you tell everyone two truths about yourself and a lie, and the others generally try to guess which is the lie. We're using that principal to invent our writer selves today, only I want you to frame it as if it wasn't a mere list, but an antecdote about yourself, and I want you to use two lies and one truth. We won't play guessing games on what was the truth, but I certainly welcome everyone to speculate.
"Since it's only fair, I'll go first. I'll be going by the name V. A. Waters, a reflection of the fact that I come from a time where a woman didn't have much luck getting into the writing business unless she went traipsing about under a more masculine name. George Elliot, eat your heart out. I'm the middle child of two brothers, which left me eager to express myself creatively and stake a claim beyond my gender, and I absolutely abhor squirrels,"--with a little side-wink to whichever reporter was hanging out with them today--"which is why you will commonly see a theme of squirrels representing all that is evil in the world today."
And once "V. A. Waters" had finished, she gave a nod and a smile to her class and asked the penultimate question, "Okay, who's next?"
[[ please to be waiting for the OCD is ready for peer review! ]]