The majority of students who take my Introduction to Creative Writing course are non-majors, which also often means that they’ve had little experience with “imaginative” writing (as opposed to “informative” writing). In this multi-genre workshop, students are exposed to three kinds of texts—fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry, in that order—complemented by course readings and workshops. One recently developed assignment is what I’ve been calling “fieldwork,” which asks students to perform a set of activities outside of the class in order for them to 1) become aware of the kinds of observation, listening, and research that all active writers do, and 2) mine their worlds for potential writing material.
I offer three options for each of the three genres, meant to allow room for student-directed interests. Each is tailored to emphasize the interdependence of the “creative” and the “critical,” and all options are intended to enliven their work and push students beyond their habits of writing. In what follows I break down the options for the fieldwork assignment in each genre.
- Fiction: Students can choose from “I Hear What You’re Saying, But” (recording and transcribing a conversation, which leads to discoveries regarding voice, tone, and dialogue); “You Are Here” (an activity which asks students to immerse themselves in a specific setting, developing mood and atmosphere through description), or “What’s in Your Wastebasket?” (in which students go through the garbage cans of three friends or family members, then devise a character sketch based on what they find).
- Creative nonfiction: Students can choose from the following: “Gonzo Journalism!” (in which they cover an event in the style of Hunter S. Thompson), “Photo/Graphic/Memory” (in which they compose a photo essay incorporating material from Susan Sontag’s essay “On Photography”), or “It Was the Best of/Worst of Times” (in which students research a decade and interview an individual who lived through it).
- Poetry: Students choose from the following: “Write What You Don’t Know” (outlined below), “Metrophobia?” (an assignment focusing on developing a speaker with a phobia), or “Poem as Musical Score,” a prompt created by Emilia Phillips in which students use the structure of a musical form (a waltz, a cadenza, etc.) to generate a poem. To give a better sense of the parameters of the assignment, the first of these is described in full below:
Write What You Don’t Know. Think of a field of study, lifestyle, hobby, or profession you know nothing about (the stranger, the better). Jot down a few; select one. Do some research about your selection and assemble a list of 10 words, details, or phrases distinctive to this particular field. Include at least 8 of these in a poem of at least 20 lines. Important: The poem should have nothing to do with the original topic you selected. Simply let the researched material inform, shape, or resonate with the rest of the material in the piece. NOTE: Not everything of interest can be found through the easy tools of Google and Wikipedia. For example, the ONU library has The Tibetan Book of the Dead, The Art of Bonsai Design, Camouflage and Mimicry, Weird Astronomy, and The Art of Stop-Motion Animation. Push yourself beyond the familiar. Mark Yakich writes, “To write what you know is fair advice. To write what you do not know but try to imagine may not be better advice, but it is more fun.”
I assess these activities by looking at the following: 1) the timeliness and thoroughness of the submission, 2) the development of responses to reflective questions, and 3) formatting and mechanics. Student reactions to fieldwork have been generally positive (though the requirement to reflect critically on both process and product takes a bit more prodding). The broader goal of these activities is, in part, to demystify the writing process and to emphasize that imaginative texts are essentially responses to the world around us. I have found that directed experimentation in the form of “fieldwork” can reveal significant potential in students, and that students, in turn, recognize this creative capacity in themselves and in each other.
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Jennifer Moore is the author of The Veronica Maneuver (The University of Akron Press) and What the Spigot Said (High5 Press). Her poems have appeared in DIAGRAM, American Letters & Commentary, Best New Poets, The Cincinnati Review, and elsewhere. She is an assistant professor of creative writing at Ohio Northern University and lives in Bowling Green, Ohio.