I have three guiding rules when it comes to teaching undergraduate fiction. First, most exercises should be 300 words or fewer. Second, imposed obstructions and restrictions are absolutely necessary in helping young writers discover what’s going on in their own work. And third, digital culture is not something to be leveraged. It is the world young writers inhabit as well as the market they have already entered. So it must also be intrinsic to their class experience.
The following, then, is an example of what that looks like in my class. I call this exercise “I feel like I’ve heard this somewhere.”
Assignment: Create a dialogue between two clearly differentiated characters complete with minimal scene and attribution. The first character is restricted to speaking only lines from memes found online. The second character is restricted to speaking only lines from the lyrics of one songwriter. All songs quoted and memes employed must be included in a separate file. The entire exercise must be completed in 300 words or fewer and the topic of the dialogue is completely up to the author.
Accommodations: To avoid shoehorning a digital assignment into a textual space, this assignment must be constructed and submitted digitally. Also, it is critical to remind students that the dialogue can be conceived of in a digital medium or a face-to-face encounter. These two allowances maximize compositional options and also open useful questions about the different challenges and opportunities imposed by different forms and media.
Goal: In simple terms, I want to help students stretch the notion of dialogue via digital means and digital culture. So often, courses based on legacy pedagogy eschew these compositional opportunities, opting instead to focus only on imaginative exercises tied to the printed text. And this is an unnecessary limitation.
Why Do It This Way?: Beyond a concentration on dialogue as a device (something I underscore with a complementary 100-word exercise), this exercise allows for other discussion while originating in the familiarity of digital culture. I find students grow more active in terms of cultural examination and how they can bring a variety of dialogues into their work. Similarly, this work highlights the adaptability of language as they “make” new meaning of existing phrasings through selection and order. Less directly, students often see more clearly the conventions they are most comfortable with as they discuss what they felt they were “missing” as they worked with their found texts.
Outcomes: I love the variety of approaches students take, ranging from “disembodied” constructions that strip text from songs and memes and reposition it in a traditional dialogic to versions that reproduce the memes verbatim (with image) and the lyrics in poetic notation. This also helps young writers “see” their work by defamiliarizing it, giving them insight into conventions they have internalized as how one is supposed to write and the options that exist beyond those limits.
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Michael Dean Clark is co-editor of Creative Writing in the Digital Age and an author of fiction and nonfiction. His work has appeared most recently in Pleiades, Paper Tape, and Relief. He is an associate professor of writing at Azusa Pacific University.