Out of the chaos

One student frenetically wipes desk-tops with a paper towel while another wanders around asking about a lost dog and a third urgently tries to usher everyone out of the classroom. Why is this student sitting in the corner ignoring everyone? Why is that student miming the need to be fed? And why is the professor jumping in front of students and insisting on rescuing them?

Welcome to chaos. Want to make something of it?

My Creative Nonfiction students are working toward an essay composed in the form of a list or a collage of fragments. Lists and collages, I tell them, allow us to make some sense out of a confusing world, to imply connections where they may not be apparent and to impose some order on the chaos. But before we can practice doing that, we need some chaos. 

And so we made some: Students randomly drew slips of paper, each describing a specific role: You are a flight attendant trying to persuade passengers to sit down before the plane takes off. You are an old lady who can't find her way home. You are trying to get people to respond to a survey. You are a superhero, so fight some crime.

That last one was mine, by the way. If my students are willing to get up and simultaneously perform unfamiliar roles in the classroom, then I'd better join the chaos. 

I probably wouldn't do this exercise early in the semester, but by this time we're all pretty comfortable with each other--and besides, it's April. Everyone is so overwhelmed preparing projects and papers and end-of-semester events that they'll happily take the opportunity to step outside their own lives and have some fun.

We all acted out our roles in the classroom for about five minutes, and then I told them to sit down and quickly write everything they could remember, quickly scribbling the details before they fade from memory. After that we talked about structuring their observations and controlling tone and details to achieve a particular purpose--and wow, what a difference. One student wrote a children's nonsense story, while another used the same details to plunge us into a dark, brooding city of madness. We may all inhabit the same physical space, but our headspaces are in whole different galaxies.

Sometimes chaos is all we've got to work with, I tell my students, but that's not the time to put down the pencil. That's when we sharpen the lead and start writing.