Writing Exercises

I've been really busy this summer, and I haven't written much here. But, I've been wanting to talk about some of the classes I'm teaching, and the exercises I've been using to get these "kids" to write. Some of them are far from kids, but you know: it's hard not to think of even the seventy-year-old woman who's trying to learn how to write as one of my "kids".

I've been teaching two classes: a Regents Preparatory Course, and a Fiction Workshop. In Georgia, college students--if they want to graduate--must pass two Board of Regent's Exams in reading and writing. I taught the writing course. Students who take this class are almost always of two types: they're either students who took too many credits without taking the exam (the cut-off is 40 credits in) or they're students who took, but failed, the exam. Either way, generally, they're all students who have some serious difficulty with writing. I've come to see that all of my students--no matter the class--can't write.

So I've been trying to teach them. Here are some of the exercises I use with each class (pretty much any writing class):

Five Senses:

I explain the five senses, which doesn't take much explaining, as you can imagine. Any reasonably intelligent person observes the world through their senses of sight, touch, smell, taste, and hearing. I get the kids used to thinking not about--for example--simply a car driving by, but the whoosh as it rushes past, the whiff of its exhaust, the blur of color and shine of the chrome and windshield, and, if you're close enough, the breeze it stirs up that blows about you--especially on a sultry Georgia day. So, they get that, right? I send them out of the classroom with a pad of paper and a pen to simply observe and record as much as they can with their five senses for twenty minutes. They can record the info however they want. Some write actual sentences, most simply write a list of observations. It doesn't matter. What's important is that they simply pay attention to the world.

That leads into the old cliche, Show and Don't Tell:

I know some writers don't necessarily agree with this dictum, but most of my students, and I'm guessing that most people who don't write on a regular basis, don't know the difference between showing and telling in the first place, so it's a worthwhile exercise if only so they understand. My students by now have already done their five senses exercise, so they're into looking at the world in this way. So I tell them I want them to show me how a particular character feels. I tell them to imagine a barn. Any barn, whatever barn comes into their minds. I tell them that I want them to show me the barn using their senses: what should I see, smell, hear, feel, taste, all that. But--of course--there's a twist. The character who's reporting this information to me is a woman whose husband has just died. The students' job is to show me how this woman sees this barn without saying anything about her husband or his death. Explaining this to the students takes a minute, because they don't usually get the concept at first. So I have to explain that how we're feeling at any moment usually "colors" how we experience the world. So, if I'm driving home during sunset--and it's a fucking beautiful sunset--but I just got fired that day, how'm I gonna describe that sky? By now they're kind of getting it. Usually, I still have a student or 15 who cannot help but mention the husband or the fact that he's just kicked the bucket, but mostly, they understand this little exercise about character, point of view, and showing as opposed to telling.

Both these exercises seem to work well (they're not mine, originally, by the way, but I cannot remember what writing professor or book originally imparted them to me) whether my students are supposed to be writing fiction or essays. Even my Regents students. The Regents students had no clue how to be specific about anything. This exercise at least gets them started on specificity. And, it's obviously worthwhile exercise for beginning fiction writers.