CREATIVE WRITING

Teacher Larry Johannessen writes, “It took quite a bit of discussion to convince [some] teachers that a good writing curriculum should provide students with a wide variety of writing experiences and that narrative and descriptive writing would help students learn important thinking and writing strategies. Writing about personal experiences is an opportunity for students to think about their own lives,” (Kahn et. al 56). More often than not, creative writing is trumped by more conventional forms of writing in the standard secondary English classroom. However, as Johannessen suggests, the overshadowed form of writing offers students many benefits. Creative and descriptive writing is a wonderful way for students to understand their lives and the world around them. It also gives students the opportunity to exercise their creativity and let content flow without worrying too much about adhering to constrictive academic form.

Although creative writing definitely deserves a place in the classroom, students often panic when handed this type of assignment. Students are so used to writing conventional, scripted assignments, they worry that they’ll either complete a creative writing assignment poorly or “wrong.” I saw this mentally when I told my seventh grade students they would be writing a short play script about their lives. Students immediately froze up, and suddenly a dozen hands shot in the air with the same concern: “I don’t know what to write about.”

            Here I gave the students a lot of freedom, and I saw that they craved more structure. As a compromise between the two, I offered the students several models. We had just read the play “Sure Thing” as a class before the students were given the assignment. I asked them to write their scripts mimicking the style of “Sure Thing.” To ensure that students felt comfortable with the assignment and knew what to do, I also wrote a model of the assignment using examples from my own life.

In his book Image Grammar, Harry Noden says, “Imitating structure—whether it’s the structure of sentences, the structure of paragraphs, or even the structure of entire works—is a technique teachers have used successfully for decades” (Noden 78). Students really benefitted from this technique. Before they were given a model to imitate, students were confused and high anxious about what was expected of them. However, once they saw several examples and discovered how to make their stories fit within that general mold, students let their creativity shine. They wrote wonderful scripts that told their very important life stories. This experience serves as a great example of balanced freedom and structure. Students were given the opportunity to write creatively about their lives, but they needed a structured frame to do so comfortably.