Teaching cadets creative writing on line.

Abstract

This article reviews a successful grant proposal to develop an on line creative writing workshop for NGCSU students in the Corps of Cadets, a workshop intending both to encourage and develop in the cadets self-expression and self-knowledge.

Introduction

Last spring, the Corps of Cadets students in my British Literature survey courses found themselves the silent centers of a controversial whirlwind. The controversy stemmed from class discussions on Rudyard Kipling's The Man Who Would Be King, a story based in modern day Afghanistan. From such simple questions as "does might make right?" my class went on to discuss such complex issues as the United State's apparent intention to make war with Iraq in order to keep peace.

During each of these discussions, the cadet members of the class maintained a tightlipped silence. When I pointedly asked if they were interested in contributing their views, they inevitably answered, "I can't." This inability to share their views in free intellectual discussion on military issues of interest to non-cadet members of the class led me to consider what opportunities for free self-expression our university offered in classes geared to cadets. The only clear possibility I discovered was the Leadership class within our Leadership Minor, a minor that has two tracks, one for military leadership; the other, for servant leadership. The leadership class stresses self-knowledge as well as communication skills, both of which qualities respond to the leadership mission at North Georgia College & State University, the Military College of Georgia. Both of these qualities also seem to me essential skills in creative writing; hence, I derived my interest in developing a creative writing workshop for cadets, using our university's on line technological capacity in Web CT course design.

On Line Workshop Proposal

As the leadership initiative here included grant opportunities for course development, I submitted a grant proposal for an On Line Creative Writing Workshop for the Corps of Cadets. I had always been interested in developing an on line creative writing workshop because the environment of a computer based course seemed to me to reflect both the needs and realities of creative writers. Creative writers, who "bare their souls" in written form, need a safe environment for such transparency of expression. E-mail discussions and peer reviews via the Web CT chat room function allow just such safety, an environment that gives readers as well as writers the freedom to focus not on the author but on the author's work. Also, creative writers rarely meet face to face with their editors, publishers, or even their readers. Rather, snail mail, e-mail, and telephone exchanges seem to be the common modes for submission and revision of one's creative work. Certainly these modes were the ones I used straight out of high school when I published two historical novels. I was based in Miami and never met my New York editor until after my second novel was published.

Richard Mariotti and Bruce Fife confirm this professional reality in their introductory guide How to Be a Literary Agent, "While there are advantages to working in cities with large publishing industries, it is not necessary. A literary agent can live and work anywhere in the country. All work can be conducted on the phone and through the mail. An agent in Texas can sell a manuscript from an author in Oregon to a publisher in New York almost as easily as if all three were located in the same city" (7). As agents tend to be the lynch pin for professional writers with successful careers, what is true for agents can be true for writers as well. With these ideas in mind, added to my interest in giving the cadets at our school a venue for self-expression, I proposed a Web CT Creative Writing Workshop for the Corps of Cadets, stressing in the grant proposal the following benefits:

   The workshop will foster self-awareness, self-expression, the means
   to convey one's ideas to a diverse audience, and ways to implement
   stories, metaphors, and pointed imagery to effect leadership
   communication. The workshop will offer these learning opportunities
   in a way compatible not only with the writing process, which benefits
   from revision and peer review, but also with the professional
   realities of writers, who rarely see either their editors or
   audience "in person" and yet who reach their mind and spirit through
   the written word. Workshop peer reviewers will serve as an immediate
   audience for posted work, an audience that will help participating
   writers learn how to evoke from readers the responses they (the
   writers) desire. Peer reviewers will thus, for themselves, hone the
   skills of collaborative leadership/collaborative communication
   (NGCSU Faculty and Staff Leadership Grant Proposal Fall 2003).

In developing this proposal, I elicited input from the Corps Commandant who approved such a safe writing environment for cadets, one that would, in effect, allow anonymity for the students at the same time that it allowed me as instructor the opportunity carefully to overview their work. The Commandant particularly requested I emphasize improving such writing skills as grammar and punctuation. Since I think that writing skills and clear expression go hand in hand, I readily incorporated these expectations into the workshop design.

Constitutive Elements of Creative Writing Approach

This successful grant proposal comprised the theoretical basis for the on line creative writing workshop I developed, insofar as teaching cadets went. Insofar as teaching creative writing went, I intended to use the constitutive elements format of my regular Creative Writing course. This format focuses on such constitutive elements as character, setting, and conflict in order to consider the effects of generic pressures on the configuration of place, action, and person. Janet Burroway, in her Imaginative Writing: The Elements of Craft, organizes her contents along the same lines, focusing on image, voice, character, setting and story as distinctive elements then illustrating how they appear in short story, poetic, dramatic, and creative non-fiction form. As she writes in her Preface to the Instructor:

   Imaginative Writing is organized on the principle that students ...
   can benefit from playing with various writing techniques before they
   settle into a particular form. Much if not most of the advice given
   to students is relevant to any sort of writing and to most of the
   genres: the need for significant detail, for example, applies
   equally to narrative scene, poetic line, and theatrical dialogue;
   voice is a concept that applies to a character, a narrator, a
   memoir, or a lyric personae, and so forth. My expectation is
   that by discussing techniques and offering exercises that allow
   students to experiment with them before they lock themselves into a
   formal project, such instruction will prove less threatening and
   encourage a sense of adventure (xv).

In addition, this constitutive element approach drives the successful Elements of Fiction Writing series of guides published by Writers Digest, a series comprising such texts as William Noble's Conflict, Action and Suspense, Orson Scott Card's Characters and Viewpoint and Jack M. Bickham's Setting.

My first regular creative writing assignment, then, asks students to write a description of a character by having him or her do or say something or by having others talk to him or her. Subsequent assignments draw upon such character sketches by asking the student to translate them into a different form of writing: essay, poem, fiction, drama, etc. In this on line workshop, I intended to stress also the process of writing, just as I do in my regular creative writing--and, indeed, my freshman composition--course(s); both writing courses have sessions on pre-writing, drafting, and revising. Most texts on creative writing similarly stress process. Stephen Wilbers's Keys to Great Writing, for example, has several chapters devoted to process, as does also the Gotham Writers' Workshop's Writing Fiction: The Practical Guide from New York's Acclaimed Creative Writing School.

For creative writing, the pre-writing stage most usefully combines discipline and spontaneity through writing prompts and journaling. Consequently, my regular creative writing course requires students to keep in their portfolio pieces that respond to writing prompts that I give them as well as self-assessment reviews and critiquing reviews. The syllabus contains the following expectation:

   Your portfolio should contain your graded work as well as journal
   entries based on your responses to the workshop during which the
   entire class discusses your work, at least two journal entries based
   on your responses to class discussion of prompt pieces, and at least
   two self-critiques of work inspired by the prompts below (ENGL 3180
   Syllabus).

The prompts I refer to above draw upon such varied sources as the Writers Digest Home web page, Naomi Epel's The Writer's Observation Deck, Monica Wood's Pocket Muse: Ideas and Inspirations for Writing, and Judy Reeves's A Writer's Book of Days: A Spirited Companion and Lively Muse for the Writing Life. As Reeves explains in her Introduction:

   I ... know that given a topic to write on, a notebook to write in,
   and time devoted to doing the work, anyone can be a writer who
   writes ... By integrating regular writing practice sessions into
   your life, notebooks will get filled, stories will be written, or
   poems or whatever surprising forms your writing takes. Your writing
   will improve and so will the quality of your life ... I ... found
   that it's easier to begin the writing when a prompt is
   supplied--like someone providing the music when you want to
   dance. So this book contains a writing-practice for every day of the
   year plus a few extras (xx-xxi).

The On Line Creative Writing Workshop's syllabus I designed, then, included workshop assignments on drafting and revising, on developing significant details, on obtaining character credibility, and on shaping conflict. I also included a page of writing prompts and a chat room function to allow for peer review and peer critiquing. Student participation was voluntary, drawn from an e-mail call for participants, as well as flyer and poster information I submitted to the Military Department through the Commandant's Office. Six cadets responded: a nice number of participants, I thought, for such a tutorial type of course, one for which I received no salary compensation and for which the students received no formal academic credit.

Goal Based Creative Writing Approach

Immediately, the course content changed in response to students' expressed needs. It added to the constitutive element approach of voice and setting shaped into story or poem a more goal based writing activity. For example, each student requested via email pre-writing assignments in the form of writing prompts directed individually to him or her. The prompts I accordingly offered reflected what I knew to be the realities of not only their lives as military students but also the lives of most students on a university campus. For example, I asked them to write on "the end of the day" or on "opening a drawer."

Each prompt I offered drew from the cadet participants complete sketches or vignettes, with clear points of view, concrete setting, and dimensional characterization. For example, to "the end of the day" prompt, one student wrote the following:

   At the end of the day, my scratchy, wool olive drab blankets wait
   for me. I crawl into them, tired, exhausted from trying to keep my
   eyes open during class. I am interested in the classes, but the
   strings of morning "pt" pull my eyes slowly shut. I climb up the
   bars to the top bunk. My toes curl silently around the metal as I am
   lifted up to slumber. I crawl under the sleeping bag and lift my
   eyes to the white ceiling. On the hall the Commander of Quarters
   screams for silence, and many doors slam. It is 2345; I have fifteen
   minutes until I can sleep. Slumber will come easy to me tonight; I
   have had a long night of yelling and boredom. It will soon be over.
   The smell of wet starch and dirty boots waft up to my nose; it will
   be my last smell before I drift off to sleep. I will try to keep my
   eyes opened because I know that the sooner they shut, the sooner I
   will have to open them, tomorrow at 0520. I lose the fight though,
   and as the eerie notes of taps blast into the silent sky, I forget
   the troubles of the day and enter the secret realm of dreams (2
   February 2004). (1)

I need to explain some of this piece's terms. The military students here sleep not under their sheets but in a sleeping bag in order to keep their beds made perfectly at all times, in case of surprise inspections. Also, "pt" describes their physical training which includes track, sit-ups, and push-ups. And Quarters describes the time when all cadets must be in their rooms for lights out. These details comprise dorm life with a difference, I think, and are expressed effectively by this student.

In both my experience and training, I have found that most ineffective writing stems from the writer's imperfect sense of audience, so goal based writing, to be effective, must consider audience. Indeed, such general writing concerns as clarity, coherence, logic, and concrete particularity in writing respond to audience needs. As Lester Faigley and Jack Seizer write in their useful composition course text, Good Reasons: Designing and Writing Effective Arguments:

   Reading is often represented as if people were machines that decode
   characters on the page. But people don't function like machines when
   they read. They are more like artists who turn a sketch into a
   painting. They transform a plan into a particular form by filling in
   gaps and imagining a background. They are not passive receivers.
   They infer motives, make judgments, debate points, and sometimes
   write responses (60).

Creative writers especially need to be aware of active readers since such writers literally create the imaginary universes they want their readers to inhabit. To help the participating cadets consider audience, then, I asked them to revise their already strong prompt pieces with an eye to publication in local journals calling for short fictive and non-fictive pieces called fillers. Cadets read pieces published in these journals in order to familiarize themselves with the journals' audience expectations. Then they shaped their pieces into fillers.

In setting up these exercises, I drew as much upon writing theory as I did upon marketing realities, realities that would be apparent to general readers of such publishing guides as The Writers Market and of the Classifieds in publishing magazines like Writers Digest and Poets and Writers. I readily incorporated into the course such marketing concerns because of my own publishing experience that I described above, experience that led me to use the course's on line format in the first place. One student thus developed his goal-based "the end of the day" prompt into a narrative that I here excerpt:

   It was 10:35 pm, or 2235 as the Army would say, when the soldier
   slipped his key into the deadbolt on the front door. He opened the
   door carefully so as not to disturb his wife, sleeping as it turned
   out on the couch not 25 feet from the door. Quickly he crossed the
   threshold, divesting his dusty uniform blouse and boots and
   carefully arranging them in the front hall. Quietly he slipped into
   the small master bath, not having made a sound louder than a
   whisper. A shower can be nothing short of a religious experience to
   a soldier sometimes. Layers of dirt and grime, worked deep into his
   pores and skin, worked themselves out with the help of a hot jet of
   water that seemed to penetrate to the soldier's very soul. Father
   Callahan would not like his idea that a shower could feel like
   absolution for sin, but the priest had never spent three solid
   weeks with no more bathing than what a wet wipe could provide.
   Definitely he had not lain for three days in a muddy ditch simply
   for the purpose of removing some of God's most sacred creations
   from the earth either, of that the soldier was very sure
   (25 January 2004).

Each of my revision requests drew from the participating cadets just such finished pieces, works that often exceeded filler length requirements in the suggested journals' guidelines. Consequently, I suggested that the cadets revise their pieces further, this time with an eye to genre, that is, the short story or essay genres to which journals allocate greater word length.

Via e-mail, cadets asked me to be specific in suggesting how they could develop such genre work, so I was, focusing mainly on character development tied to conflict, since conflict is the driving force and center of any short story. For example, I suggested to the writer of the excerpt above that he consider developing the wife's character into one who felt her husband's duties conflict with his duties as a solder.

Practical Effects (and Assessment)

This emphasis on character development tied to conflict helped students consider motives and needs, personal desires and what blocks them, often using themselves as test cases for analysis. For example, in developing the "open a drawer" prompt, a student wrote a piece about a son opening his late father's locked drawer, discovering there war medals that his father had never shared with his family. In the first version of the piece, the father physically abused his son. As he revised the piece, developing the father into not an abusive but a depressed character, the participating cadet offered the following self-critique:

   I threw out the original ending because it involved the father
   turning out to be some sort of unrepentant war criminal, someone
   who was pure evil. I could possibly have shaped it to look like
   the narrator's perception of the evidence he saw, based on his
   experiences. But I threw it out. There were several good reasons I
   had to ditch it and moreover didn't bother to save it. The first
   reason is that the mother said, "He used to be a good man." I
   suppose that she could just be a very bad judge of character, but I
   wanted that statement to be more cogent. The second reason is that
   I wanted the father to be more of a tragic figure, that the reader
   could identify as a human being rather than evil incarnate. And
   the third reason is that I don't like stories that have negative
   endings. I wanted this one to end sort of on the upbeat side. The
   moral is that everybody loses in war. I worry that many of the
   cadets here who are pursuing commissions do not understand that
   yet and that the lesson may bear a much greater price for them in
   the future (19 February 2004).

This self-critique seems to me characteristic of these participating cadets' tendency to express a strong sense of responsibility, both to themselves and their fellow cadets. The writing tasks and opportunities this workshop gave, as well as the mode of communication it offered, helped these cadets express and realize what they already knew, that is, their need for maturity, self-knowledge, and flexibility.

To participating cadets, their writing for this workshop seemed to them as much an aspect of their overall military training as did any other more conventional military duty or expectation, such as, for instance, doing "pt." By providing them with a practical, as well as theory based, means to develop this training in creative expression, this course seems, therefore, to have given them a much needed medium for self-expression within their already established academic and military program.

In effect, by offering cadets a creative writing course that met NGCSU's military leadership track's requirements, this on line course taught cadets what creative writing courses generally teach, that is, how to move from idea to expression. But it did so, I think, in a way that particularly enhanced their academic, military, and personal development.

For me, such success proved gratifying in itself, as was also the opportunity to work with such dedicated and caring students. In addition, the experience suggested to me ways to improve any future creative writing course I might teach by including from the start such practical publishing concerns as audience expectations, presentation, and market needs.

Notes

(1.) This and subsequent student pieces are quoted with the students' permission and, at the students' request, are kept anonymous.

References

Bickham, Jack. Setting (Elements of Fiction Writing). New York: Writers Digest Books, 1999.

Burroway, Janet. Imaginative Writing: The Elements of Craft. New York: Longman, 2003.

Card, Orson Scott. Characters and Viewpoint (Elements of Fiction Writing). New York: Writers Digest Books, 1999.

Epel, Naomi. The Observation Deck: A Tool Kit for Writers. New York: Chronicle Books, 1998.

Faigley, Lester and Jack Seizer. Good Reasons Designing and Writing Effective Arguments second edition. New York: Longman, 2003.

Gotham Writers' Workshop. Writing Fiction: The Practical Guide from New York's Acclaimed Creative Writing School. New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2003.

Mariotti, Richard and Brace Fife. How to Be a Literary Agent: An Introductory Guide to Literary Representation. Colorado Springs, CO: Piccadilly Books, 1995.

Noble, William. Conflict, Action and Suspense (Elements of Fiction Writing). New York: Writers Digest Books, 1999.

Poets and Writers, Poets and Writers, Inc.

Reeves, Judy. A Writer's Book of Days: A Spirited Companion & Lively Muse for the Writing Life. Novato, California: New World Library, 1999.

Robinson, Bonnie. Engl 3180 Creative Writing Syllabus. North Georgia College & State University, Dahlonega, GA. Spring 2004.

Wilbers, Stephen. Keys to Great Writing. New York: Writers Digest Books, 2000.

Wood, Monica. Pocket Muse: Ideas and Inspirations for Writing. New York: Writers Digest Books, 2002.

Writers Digest Home. http://www.writersdigest.com.

2004 Writers Market. New York: Writers Digest Books, 2004.

Bonnie J. Robinson, North Georgia College & State University

Bonnie Robinson, Ph.D. is associate professor of English.