Allegra Pescatore, aka Allegra Fisher, was a MCWC 2006 High School Scholar. For her senior project at the Mendocino Community High School she taught a Creative Writing class. Allegra will attend Hampshire College in the fall.
Creative Writing 101
By Allegra Pescatore
Part One
A normal day in my Creative Writing class starts in the empty Lit/Comp classroom with me, myself and I staring at the clock and tapping my foot in annoyance. The stage is therefore set for the students to arrive, as always, late from their break (some of them are usually on time, but it adds dramatic flare to exaggerate any story just a bit, so if you are in my class and are on time, forgive me for taking some literary license)....After a brief introductory rant, I begin by giving them a writing prompt. Some days it will be a word (try Dendrochronology, which, on a side note, means the art of tree ring dating, which I’ve always been curious about it, I mean, is it tree dating or tree dating? Another favorite is Floccinaucinihilipilification: to establish or state that something has no value), and other times a more traditional prompt (write from the point of view of a clean sock mistakenly placed in the laundry basket). I try to keep these prompts light and easy, since they’re just a warm-up. Five minutes of fast and furious, uninterrupted writing later, I tell them to put down their pens and, unless someone wants to read a particularly good or funny response to my day’s prompt, we move on to the subject of the day.
For the sake of this example of a normal day in class, I will say that today’s theme is character realism. I explain quickly that it doesn’t matter how great one’s characters are, how moral/immoral, sane/twisted and otherwise enthralling and mysterious, if they don’t feel real, then the audience won’t love/hate them. Now I give them their assignment for the day. We gather paper, clipboards and pencils (I suggest dark glasses and trench-coats, but none are available) and set out for town. As we walk I explain. Discreetly, I ask them to observe people going about their day-to-day activities. They are to jot down quirks, habits, ticks and any interesting conversation they overhear. I ask them to please not get caught stalking....The next day, I ask them and the others to share their findings. We discuss how to create realistically flawed and quirky characters, and then I ask them to write a 1000 word piece centered on making the main character and villain as real as possible. Now they can use what they learned to begin to develop the cast from their November Novels.
National Novel Writing Month is a worldwide event. Thousands participate, taking on the challenge of writing a 50,000-word novel in 30 days. Of course requiring new writers to write that much would be tantamount to suicide (I could see them stalking towards me with bloodshot eyes and gleaming knives, chanting “blood. Blood. Blood,”) so I let each of them pledge a certain number of words with a class minimum of 30k. I extended my offer to all writers in the community and by Halloween, I had over thirty people pledged to sit their behinds down every day of November and fulfill their word-count.
On the 31st of October, ten minutes to midnight, a large group of writers were sprawled out...waiting for the countdown to begin and November to start with a frenzy of words...“Ten. Nine. Eight. Seven.” Everyone was holding their breath, I could see their fingers twitching, their first sentences already coalescing before their eyes. “Three. Two. One.” From then on no one said a word....It’s a magical sensation to write like that, without restraint, without having to worry if the words you’re typing are good. It’s an excellent moment for the inner editor inside us all to go on a quick vacation to Fiji and let us have some peace. While it’s dancing naked on the beach and cracking open coconuts with a rock, we, the writers, are letting all pretenses go and letting what we really want to say flow out of us. As a writer I admire greatly said: “Horrible first drafts make good second drafts and fantastic third drafts.” To that, I would add: “But if you have no first draft to begin with, it’s all rather pointless.”
As my own word count started piling up, I began to see the transformation in my students. At the beginning of the month, they had been people who wrote, but now they started being writers. They would come to class with stories, things like: “Yesterday my hero decided to follow some pixies into the forest. He ended up having to be saved by the mysterious figure who I still don’t really know much about. I can’t wait to see what happens next!” I can’t wait to see what happens next. That is the sign that the story has come to life, is in fact, crawling out of the evolutionary gravy and shedding its gills for fully functioning lungs. Soon, it will start talking for itself, and eventually it might reproduce into a sequel. The writer is no longer in control, we’re just hanging on for the ride and getting carpel tunnel syndrome while doing it. The writer is nothing more than the vessel, the tool the characters use to bring themselves to life. We writers are Pinocchio’s fairy’s wand. It’s a humbling place to be in, your ego pushed aside to let a dream come through....Not everyone completed their novels that month, many fulfilled their word goal but found that their stories were just beginning, while others found a perfect end thousands of words short of the mark. Finishing however, was not as important as having begun. To Be Continued
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