Pen to paper! Fingers to keyboard! Feet together! Sit up straight! You aren’t in Kansas anymore, you’re in the roughest toughest writing professor's class. Get your finger out of your nose and prepare to type out your deep-fried thoughts out of your potato brain.
That's good advice for any writer suffering from potato brain, but in this case it's directed toward a very specific audience. Since my Creative Nonfiction students are swamped by final projects, I asked them to put their list-making skills to work today and write helpful hints for future writing students.
Some of their tips could apply to a wide variety of activities: Just show up! Do the work! Stretch outside your comfort zone! Words to live by.
Other tips were more relevant to writing classes, revealing how much my students learned from their own struggles:
Know how long 400 words are. Objectively this shouldn’t come as a surprise but there will be writing exercises that you will do the night before class and you will stare at the little number at the bottom of the screen wondering how even after you’ve exhausted all your thoughts is it only 200 words long. My advice? Don’t look at that number--it’s a threat to your train of thought.
You should get some steam coming out of your ears while writing, and you should transfer your thoughts in a way that expresses you. Don’t just write what you think people want to hear. Give your words your voice.
Drafting doesn't have to be linear. Many of my drafts for large assignments in this class were pieced together like a puzzle. I wrote parts out of sequence and found ways to fit them together as I went along.
I want to cheer when I see these tips because they show that my students have developed valuable skills that will serve them well in other contexts. They're not just learning to produce better writing assignments; they're learning to be better writers.
One student warned that weak verbs come here to perish a swift and merciless death, which is true but makes me think that we need to pump some more drama into our destruction of weak verbs, maybe round 'em up and disembowel 'em all as we dance in glee to their sound of their shrieking. Because that's how I roll, unless you believe the student who called me a mythical creature:
She has stories about meeting many authors in elevators or at conventions. She lives out in the woods and knows the names of plants and flowers that you may stumble upon in national parks. You won’t be able to collect enough tidbits even if you take at least one class with her a semester. She will elude you.
I'm not sure how useful that last bit advice might be or how accurate since it suggests that I'm some sort of unicorn, but if it gives students a reason to get their fingers out of their noses and pull the deep-fried thoughts out of their potato brains, I'll be happy.
2 comments:
Oh that was lovely! Thank you for sharing.
And thanks for commenting!
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