Diving Into Wrecks:Response By Revision in the Hypoxic Creat
Diving Into Wrecks:Response By Revision in the Hypoxic Creative Writing Class
Permission to Plagiarize: Working with Assigned Reading
The Hypoxic Workshop
“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.”
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.
Collaborative Revision: Response
In Poetry
The Recipe: Algorithms for Writing
In Fiction
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.
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.
My philosophy on creative writing 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.
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.
Poetry
Fiction Exercises
Rearranging
Mad-Libbing
Borrowing the Recipe
Fan Fiction
Choose Your Own Adventure
Borrowing the Recipe
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
Inspiration by Repurposing
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.