@SechinTower
In
a recent post, I made an argument for including creative writing
in school curricula. Here’s another advantage: everybody, regardless of their
profession, can benefit from thinking like a writer.
I’m not saying that all students should aim to become
novelists any more than a P.E. teacher would suggest that all the kids in her 5th
period class should set their sights NFL careers. Nor am I trying to argue that
it’s the only proper way to think: people should never stop experimenting and
weighing evidence like a scientist, or sequentially calculating results like a
mathematician, or seeking causes and connections like a historian.
Creative writing isn’t the only window through which one
should view the world, but it’s at least as valuable an approach as any other.
Everybody can benefit from practicing the habits of mind required to be a
writer.
For starters, writing demands knowledge. Anyone who’s ever
written a novel will testify that stories are ravenous beasties that will
gobble up everything you ever thought you knew and then come back for seconds.
For any given piece, a writer might need to delve into the history of the
French revolution, or current trends in emergency medicine, or Creole table
manners, or the predictions to be tested by the CERN particle accelerator. You
might even have to investigate all of the above—I’d love to read that book!
A writer must develop an insatiable curiosity about the little wonders all around us—the color of a
sidewalk after a rainstorm, the texture of a dandelion leaf, the crooked finger
on the bus driver’s right hand. Fully half of this knowledge will never be
useful, but one never knows which half. “Write what you know” is absolutely
true, and therefore you can never know enough. A writer must be a compulsive
collector of ideas and experiences, and that’s a good way to live.
It’s not enough to simply observe and know, because a writer
must weave all these things into something new. How does a treasure-hunting
crew in the Caribbean navigate international banking laws? If a vacationing
detective found his hotel room burglarized, whom would he call first? What
effect would an electromagnetic pulse have on a cell phone? Failing to answer
questions like that could result in phony characters and yawning gaps in the
plot.
On top of all that, the story must form a cohesive whole inside
a reader’s mind. This is one of the most challenging tasks in any profession,
and it cannot be accomplished through sentences fragments or text-message contractions
because the slightest bobble could break the reader out of the delicate cocoon
of willing disbelief. Creative writing is more than just making up stories,
it’s the science of how the human brain makes sense of the world and the art of
structuring words to expand that sense.
In my class, the idea that creative writing is really about refining
human experience and ideas usually doesn’t win over a lot of students right
away, but that’s okay because we have a whole semester for me to show what it mean. I start
by giving them free rein to pick their topics, and for many of them this is a
first. You didn’t like Holden’s view of the world in Catcher in the Rye? Okay, give me your view. Sick of writing essays about history? No problem, just
make up your own history. Or your own future. Within a few weeks, one by one,
they get sucked into their stories, and they start to find that they need to
search out more from the world around them than they had ever needed to in the
past.
It’s not as important to me that they become novelists as it
is that they learn to think like writers. At least, that’s my story, and I’m
sticking to it.
Be good, and dream crazy dreams,
Sechin Tower is a teacher, a table-top game designer, and the
author of
Mad Science Institute. You
can read more about him and his books on
SechinTower.com
and his games on
SiegeTowerGames.com
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