As the date for my writing class nears, I continue to work on what I’m going to teach. I’m also creating a number of handouts for the class. Today my goal was to create a piece of bad writing so students would have something to critique without fear. The writing is meant to be bad and I want them to have at it without worrying about anyone’s feelings.
It’s easy to critique writing when you don’t have to do it to a writer’s face and much more difficult to be honest when a writer is looking hopefully at you. This reticence toward disappointing a writer makes a lot of us become Milquetoast about what we might see wrong about a piece. This doesn’t do any service to the writer. (That doesn’t mean every critique is valid. A writer gets to sort that out after considering several critiques. It also doesn’t give the critic license to be mean. We’re shooting for productive critiques that don’t attack the writer.)
Anyway, I’ve written this intentionally bad piece of writing, which was a more challenging exercise than I thought it would be. When you’re used to writing a narrative and hooking things up in a logical fashion and spelling properly, breaking those rules is tortuous. The mind keeps screaming, “NOOOOO! Stop it!”
It’s not something I want to do a lot of, but I think the piece is successful. I had Eldest Son review it and he said it was painful to read. My pain will now be the pain of my students. Hopefully they’ll laugh at the dreadfulness and be open to telling me what is wrong with it.
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My class is called Working Out the Wonk: Tools for Improving Your Writing. It’s being offered by the Great River Arts Association in Little Falls, MN. For information on cost and how to sign up, visit this link.
I learned a bit from my creative writing class, but I was also left hanging with a lot of unanswered questions, the main one being, What constitutes a piece that is officially ready to be published? Why is a short story that is published, published? What truly distinguishes one from the other?
I also learned a bit about some things like vocabulary selection and readerly flow, amongst others like cliché and of course, everyone’s favorite massive gripe, sentence length (It is clear no one reads Herman Melville in this age).
Taking your class would be interesting for me if it were possible, so I could see if ideas of literary processing are different by local culture.
Hope it goes well as I’m sure it will…I’ve read your book!
Good question about what makes a piece ready to be published, LK. What do you think makes a piece ready? I have this sneaking suspicion that it’s a case of knowing it when you see it, which seems like a cop out, but if it were easy to boil good writing down to a recognizable formula, writing would stop being interesting. (That sentence is full of cliches. Ack!)
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