Diving Into Wrecks: Revision as Response in the Hypoxic Creative Writing Class

Dawn, Ryder, Me, Ching-In

Hello again...

I am yet again presenting at a conference this coming weekend - woo hoo! This time its the Creative Writing and Innovative Pedagogies Conference in Warrensburg, Missouri. I created a prezi to go along with it if you're interested (so much prettier than PowerPoint...).

Meanwhile, enjoy pics of me and my girlz at the Steel Pen Conference last weekend. We rocked that panel all right...

The Hypoxic Creative Writing Workshop

Diving Into Wrecks, or Response by Revision

“The traditional workshop regards the written work as one product always already complete and finished. The environment is hostile by definition, and the gag rule that seeks to defuse tension actually forces the writer to anticipate and confront all possible criticism before he or she even gets to the workshop. Ironically, workshop, though the term connotes working on a work in progress, actually produces for its consideration a finished product.”

“A workshop should be a generative space not a curatorial one. Other classes can teach how a story works via means of models. An hypoxic workshop teaches by doing. It is about process not product. Just saying. You don’t have to order textbooks for this kind of workshop. You are not “norming” your students. Their work is the textbook.”

…Michael Martone on the Hypoxic Workshop

The principles expressed here reflect my own teaching philosophy on the importance of revision, of seeing a written work as always in process, always alive and fluid, not done. Thanksgiving turkeys are done. Stories never are.

But part of that philosophy also involves a relationship with the reader, for whom writing exists. Especially in a world where students are given feedback in the form of grades every semester, and where they expect that grade to be a reflection of their performance. Students may not enjoy giving feedback, or critiquing…on which the traditional workshop is based. But they get more satisfaction in writing if they know there will be some response by a reader. One of my mentors told me that feedback was important, to let those with talent set themselves apart from others. I don’t know about that…but I do think that a piece of writing really exists somewhere between the writer and the reader.

The issue with the traditional creative writing workshop is that in the typical undergraduate classroom, it means that students spend the overwhelming majority of their time during the semester critiquing or reviewing creative work instead of actually writing. The hypoxic workshop seeks to increase the amount of writing practice, and reduce the time devoted to critique to only minutes per class. I’ve reimagined some writing exercises with that spirit in mind, while preserving the element of feedback and reader response we’ve traditionally defined as critique. In these exercises, the writing is the feedback. Students read each other’s work and respond by rewriting it. The emphasis is not so much on “constructive criticism,” but on what kind of vision and inspiration a readers draws from the work.

Exercises for Collaborative Revision: Response by Revision

1)      Choose your own adventure…(fiction)

Reader chooses an alternate ending, or alternate beginning if preferred, for the story, removing the writer’s original idea and changing the outcome.

2)      Fan fiction…(fiction)

The reader writes a scenes that exists offstage, or is not featured in the writer’s story, and includes the characters designed by the writer. This can be just a random exploration of the characters, and the scene need not necessarily push the narrative forward.

3)      Rearranging…(poetry)

The reader will rearrange the structure of the writer’s poem or poems. Students can take out all the line breaks, transforming the poem into a prose form. They can also cut and paste the lines into different order, insert spacing or line breaks where none exist, or reform stanzas.

4)      Mad libbing the poem…(poetry)

The reader replaces all nouns in the poem that are not sensory images (can’t be heard, seen, smelled, tasted, touched) with blanks. The same can be done with overfamiliar images, cliché’s and word packages, or with non-energetic verbs and “thought verbs.” Fill in the blanks with nouns that represent concrete images, or active, energetic verbs. These can be chosen at random, resulting in something silly or bizarre, OR the reader can select words and phrases that they genuinely feel would work for the poet’s purpose.

5)      Borrowing the recipe…(poetry or fiction)

The writer shares the “recipe” (see below) that was used for the story/poem in addition to the work itself. The response then is to use the same recipe to write something else.

In the hypoxic class, students will write a poem and a fictional scene twice a week. This would be processed as a document posted as a journal in a digital format, such as through Blackboard or other electronic location. As Martone envisions, students learn to write by writing. However, since it is indisputable that better writing comes from reading and lots of it, I would also argue for the preservation of the assigned reading in the creative writing class. This tends to be an epic failure in the traditional format as well, since students either don’t read it, or vehemently resist commenting on it in discussion. In the hypoxic workshop centered on revision, students will write in response to published writers, not by critiquing or analyzing their work, but by revising it. For an early unit in which reading assignments are incorporated, students would continue to journal using published poems and stories as scaffolding for their own writing.

Exercises Inspired by Assigned Readings: Permission to Plagiarize

Poetry:

1)      Replace all the images that appear in an assigned poem, and replace them with your own. For inspiration, you may go to Pinterest and use images that come up on the feed at random.

2)      “Scaffold” a poem (thanks to Heather Sellers). Copy and paste a poem, replace the language with its generic category (place, person, animal, vegetable, mineral, etc…). Then replace those parts with an image, word or phrase that fits the category.

3)      Write a poem that repeats your favorite 3-5 lines or phrases from the reading at least 3-5 times.

4)      Turn a poem into a fictional scene.

Fiction:

1)      Put yourself in one of the stories as a character and write your scene.

2)      Turn a story into a fraudulent artifact: a letter, diary entries, or crime notes.

3)      Turn a story into a poem by cutting everything out but a list of images.

4)      Write what you think is the “recipe” for one of the assigned stories. Use that recipe to write your own story.

Addendum: Assigning Creative Assignments with “Recipes” 101

Another roadblock to success in the hypoxic creative writing class might be inspiration. Students who fall behind the frenetic pace may do so for lack of ideas. But using the principle of revising as response, which involves repurposing existing writing into something new, exercises can incorporate constraints that supply students with direction. These constraints might require students to seek language from other locations to supply. This might involve asking students to follow what Heather Sellers would call a “recipe.” My version of the recipe has the advantage of allowing students the opportunity to come up with their own ideas, while at the same time giving them a scaffold to work with, and getting them used to the idea of borrowing language and structure from other people’s work.

A “recipe” for poetry would include not only line, syllable, and language constraints set by forms like sonnet and sestina, but also would ask students to seek outside help and inspiration, as from other texts, for their work. Fiction exercises would encourage a version of completeness by limited the narrative to a scene or scenes that cover the space of one hour. Beyond that, students may come up with their own recipes that fill in the following blanks: a) idea/intention, b) borrowed material/inspiration, c) constraints/limits, and d) research done. 

For instance:

A poetry recipe:

a)      Extended metaphor for a social climber

b)      A recipe for kudzu jelly

c)      Sonnet form

d)     Wikipedia on kudzu, kudzu news articles, kudzu recipes

A fiction recipe:

a)      Snake Pit: my high school reunion

b)      Class reunion games found online: esp. “match the artist and song title”

c)      Five paragraphs: each headed by a song…action must take no longer than the song is and must relate to memories of the song

d)     Song lengths, song lyrics, clothing styles and films from my high school years

You can give the students parts of the recipe and let them fill in the rest at first until they are comfortable with building their own. Some students may complain about the limits this places on their creative expression. They may come in with a pre-conceived story about vampires they just have to write. But in the end, they may find these limitations and the freedom to borrow language and content helps them realize their story.

A vampire fiction recipe:

a)      Death Scene: becoming a vampire

b)      The Lost Boys dir. Joel Schumacher (bridge scene)

c)      Story begins with jumping off a bridge or building, ends when you would have hit the ground when you were mortal. In the same moment, you become a vampire.

d)     Physics of falling velocity, sky diving videos and descriptions

Students tend to have more issues coming up with the right language than with the original inspiration for writing. They struggle with what words to use, and therefore fall back on cliché and abstractions. In the spirit of repurposing the texts of others, you can make part of a recipe include language from the assigned readings, or from other locations, as in the following recipes.

1)      Make a list of the food you ate this week, and the Google each one, and make a poem using the language that comes up about that food.

2)      Find an advice document online, copy it and paste it into your doc. Take a word that keeps repeating and replace it with a word of your own.

3)      Write an ode to a celebrity made up of language from the comments that appear in blogs about them.

4)      Choose three frames in your favorite comic/graphic novel, and write a fictional scene of what’s happening.

5)      Write a scene from the bible in a modern setting.

6)      Write a fictional scene retelling a scene from your favorite film.