Creative Writing Skills: 6 Lessons You Need To Teach Today
So, you’re going to teach Creative Writing. Congratulations! Now comes the hard part–what exactly does that mean? What should you be teaching? What skills should your students be learning? In this post, I’m going to share some essential Creative Writing skills you should be teaching in your high school Creative Writing class.
Creative Writing Skills #1: Show. Don’t Tell.
About half of my students come into Creative Writing with these big elaborate stories they want to tell. But when they actually get into writing, their stories feel more like a list of events that happened.
I’ve seen months of plot happen in just a paragraph of my students’ writing. Students need to learn to slow down and create an experience for their readers. It’s how a story unfolds, after all, that makes it worthwhile–not the events themselves.
Tips for Teaching “Show. Don’t Tell”
Like all creative writing skills, you’ll want to show your students some really good mentor texts first. Find some excerpts from books with really juicy descriptions. Share these with your students.
I do this by giving each student a “telling sentence” and asking them to turn it into a “showing” paragraph. A student might get a sentence that says something like, “Billy felt angry.” Then, they’ll have to write a whole paragraph that implies Billy is angry without actually saying it bluntly.
If you want to save yourself some time (and the mental anguish of brainstorming a bunch of bland sentences), you can get my “Show. Don’t Tell” Mini-Lesson right here. It includes a slideshow, student worksheets, and those telling sentences.
Intro
I run a Creative Writing Meetup for adults and teens in Montpellier every week where we start with a 5 to 20 minute exercise, followed by an hour and a half of silent writing, where we each work on our own project. Each of these exercises has been used with the group and works well. Where the exercises below specify a number of people, if you have a larger group, simply split everyone up into smaller groups as appropriate.
The solo exercises are ideal if you’re working by yourself to help stimulate your mind before working on a larger project or to overcome writer’s block, or can be used with a larger group, where you simply ask everyone to share what they’ve written in groups of 3 or 4 people afterwards. Looking for something quick to fire your imagination? Check out these creative writing prompts for adults.
A Letter From Your Character To You
If your goal is to write a complete work of fiction, whether it be a novel, a play or a movie script, you will one day need to write to an agent or publisher to ask them to publish your work.
In this exercise, we turn this around and ask you to instead spend 10 minutes writing a letter from a character in your novel to you, the author, explaining why you should write about them! This serves three purposes:
If you’re doing this exercise with a group of teens or adults, and some of the group haven’t already started working on their masterpiece, they can instead choose any fictional novel that they love and imagine that a character within it wrote to the author in the first place to ask them to write their story. What did that letter look like?
Example 5: Casual First Person Narration
First person narration can be very powerful when done right. Because you must embody the voice of the person narrating the story, you will often have to write in a more casual, informal voice.
“But then the Letter hits like a Star Trek grenade and detonates everything, past, present, future. Suddenly, her folks want to kill me. It don’t matter that I helped them with their taxes two years running or that I mow their lawn. Her father, who used to treat me like his hijo, call me an a**hole on the phone, sounds like he’s strangling himself with the chord. You no deserve I speak to you in Spanish, he says.”
This wouldn’t pass muster if you were writing about an 18th century aristocrat, but fits in perfectly with Junot Diaz’ protagonist – a rough Dominican immigrant. The occasional curse word is permitted as well since it only adds to the story.
Example 6: Historical Details in Fiction
Writing historical fiction requires a special skillset. Not only must you be fastidious with your research – factual lapses are rarely permitted – but you must also match your voice and tone with the historical setting.
Boatman. River. Saint. He’s been travelling since early morning and in the saddle for the best part of two weeks on the cardinal’s business, and has now come down by stages – and not easy stages – from Yorkshire. He’s been to his clerks at Gray’s Inn and borrowed a change of linen. He’s been east to the city, to hear what ships have come in and to check the whereabouts of an off-the-books consignment he is expecting. But he hasn’t eaten, and he hasn’t been home yet.
The cardinal rises. He opens a door, speaks to his hovering servants. ‘Cherries! What, no cherries? April you say? Only April? We shall have sore work to placate my guest, then’. He sighs. ‘Bright what you have. But it will never do, you know. Why am I so ill-served?’
Lesson: Writing historical details in fiction requires a thorough understanding of the time period, right from the kind of language used to the way social structures operated.
Resource:
https://itslitteaching.com/creative-writing-skills/
https://www.indigoextra.com/blog/creative-writing-exercises
https://blog.udemy.com/creative-writing-examples/