By midterms, my students could use “yearning” in a sentence. They said, “show don’t tell,” called dialogue “rich.” I am born to teach, I thought. I must be brilliant. Until I read their daily journals. Had I accidentally taught Creative-Writing-from-a-Can?
Every journal had similar broken-hearted narrators, confusing titles, robotic dialogue, roommate dramas, rage-letters to divorced dads, exes, or politicians. And worse: any of the former from the perspective of a dead pet. Sure, the writing techniques we discussed were there, but not at all harmonious. Perhaps I’d thrown too many concepts at them in too short a time. To test this theory, we revisited a single concept and stretched it across a week of classes.
Tell It Slant author Brenda Miller has students “deliberately ‘ruin’ [a piece of writing],” and her class builds a list of best practices from the activity. I decided to try something similar and asked students to ruin a tension-packed scene by decreasing tension. In order to ruin it, students had to locate techniques that create tension and reflect on how those are working:
Step 1: Ruin
Objective: Identifying how the writer increases tension.
How: In groups of 3-4, students work together to ruin the scene by decreasing tension.
Discuss: What techniques were used to create tension? What specific lines did you remove? Come together to discuss. Create a master list of tension-building techniques as a class.
Model Text: Micro Memoir by Ira Sukrungruang “Invisible Partners,” published in Brevity Magazine, September 15th, 2017
It almost worked. The students showed an understanding of how to create tension in writing but hadn’t applied the tools to writing. In the next meeting, I’d hand out a passage similar to their notebook entries—scenes lacking tension, detail, place, time—and ask students to repair.
Step 2: Repair
Objective: Repair a piece of writing to manipulate tension.
How: In groups of 3-4 students, repair a tensionless scene. Work together to increase tension using techniques from our master list.
Discuss: What did you change to increase tension? Each group shares their new scene, explaining their choices.
Applying techniques from the master list to increase tension really inspired conversations around craft. I couldn’t wait to have them practice tension-building independently. Using our master list and understanding how those tools combine to create tension, students revisited earlier writings and chose one worthy of reconstruction:
Step 3: Rewrite
Objective: Create a scene that uses storytelling techniques to control tension.
How: Using the class master list of tension-building techniques, increase tension in a passage from your notebook.
My students worked on this third step of rewriting independently for a week. To say that every draft was free of tropes would be a lie. There were broken-hearts, spiritual experience narratives, several wrote in the epistolary style. Even so, the stories were more expressive. No letters to politicians or from dead pets.
We repeated the Ruin/Repair/Rewrite sequence to explore other concepts like shape, form, scene/summary, and approaches to revision. Narrowing the focus to one concept gave the students’ narratives an opportunity to breathe, to simplify. And the characters-from-a-can? They all found a deeper complexity.
Works Cited
Miller, Brenda, and Suzanne Paola. “Sample Syllabi/Classroom Ideas, TIS Classroom Activities: Inverse Learning.” Tell It Slant. Third Edition. wp.wwu.edu/tellitslant/instructors-manual. Accessed 10 Dec 2021.
Sukrungruang, Ira. “Invisible Partners.” Brevity, 15 September 2017, brevitymag.com/invisible-partners. Accessed 10 Dec 2021.
–
Rebecca Arrowsmith is an M.F.A. student and creative writing instructor at the University of South Florida.