Yoga on the page: Teaching creative writing
review by Helen Gildfind

This book is a compilation of writing exercises from creative writing teachers all over the world, and is aimed at ‘enabling’ other teachers to ‘review, borrow and adapt ideas’ for their own practice. This text is logically and accessibly organised with each contributor introducing and detailing their exercise over a few pages, with a clear explanation of the exercise’s structure and objective.

Each passage is contextualised by its author’s completion of the first exercise in the book, namely Elaine Walker’s ‘ice-breaker’ exercise; this she uses as a ‘getting to know you’ activity for new classes. Though this is not quite a ‘how to write’ book, and not quite a ‘how to teach writing’ book, it indirectly offers useful insights into both of these practices whilst primarily acting as a ‘go to’ book for new and experienced teachers who need original ideas on how to create and structure writing exercises in imaginative and purposeful ways.

This is not the kind of book you read cover to cover, and one of its most useful aspects is its ‘Thematic Index’ which allows readers to identify exercises that cater for a particular need (‘Confidence Building and Ice Breakers’, ‘Developing Writing Practice’), a particular genre (‘Flash Fiction’, ‘Food Writing’, ‘Song Writing’), a particular skill (‘Editing and Redrafting’, ‘Creating Structure in Short Stories’), or a particular student level (‘New Students’, ‘All Stages’, ‘Confident Writers’). This index also allows readers to quickly identify exercises of a particular time-duration, with activities ranging from less than an hour to several weeks.

As I used this index to locate exercises that I might find useful in my own classes – especially those classes that did not work out as well as I’d hoped – what struck me most was just how much we ask of our students. It is so easy to come up with an activity for someone else to do, but – by positioning teachers on the receiving-end of teaching – this text reminds us just how intense, confronting and difficult writing classes can be for students. It is a definite strength of this book that it emphasises the care and clarity needed for good teaching, with its detailed contributions acting as model lesson-plans. Without stating it, this text reminds teachers to keep out of the classroom until they know what they are doing and, most importantly, why they are doing it.

The exercises in this book vary widely, and most could be easily adapted to suit a range of student needs and backgrounds. Martyn Bedford’s exercise ‘Travel writing – from classroom to Khartoum’ illustrates how ostensibly simple activities such as basic note-taking, memory exercises, discussion, and the strategic use of secondary sources, can help students move in two hours from questioning the value of their own experiences to establishing the foundations of a substantial piece of writing.

Diana Chin-a-Fat helps students ‘get into character’ by asking them to imagine past the public personas of celebrities in order to delve imaginatively into the deeper darker secrets that might lurk in their minds. By producing monologues and sharing them, her students learn about perceptions, assumptions, public personas and the credibility of voice.

Allene Nichols combats student shyness and perfectionism by getting them to ‘write a bad poem’. In the process she teaches them to embrace – as all writers must – writing ‘badly’, whilst also teaching them the ‘vocabulary’ of poetry that will enable them to both write and critique poetry in the future.

Ian Williams focuses on the long-term skills his students will need by helping them to establish a ‘daily writing habit’. He gets his ‘young warriors’ to post a new poem on an interactive online forum everyday for 30 days. Steve May also uses technology to re-envision traditional workshopping methods in the belief that paper print-outs give students a false sense of completion with their work. He finds collaborative editing onscreen assists students to shed preciousness and recognise writing as an ongoing process. He notes how onscreen work can allow classes to write collaboratively or even edit the published works of famous writers.

Other contributors use yoga and meditation to ease students into writing tasks, or conjure ‘creative mayhem’ by getting students to collaborate in the writing of manifestos, or guide students in their struggle to create credible narrative voices for children.

As all these examples suggest, the exercises in this text are applicable for student writers at any level of experience and across a range of genres. Nearly all of the activities have been structured with an acute awareness that student writers need a relaxed and trusting classroom atmosphere in order to gain skill and confidence with their work, and most contributors seem equally aware that the best way to get students writing is to focus them on ‘process’ rather than ‘product’.

Teaching Creative Writing is obviously well suited to teachers of poetry, fiction, non-fiction, and plays. It offers a practical resource for teachers who are just starting out and lack the confidence or ideas required to create truly engaging classes. This book might even be useful for experienced teachers who suspect that their own methods have become repetitive and uninspiring, or who sense complacency creeping in to their classrooms through the stultifying effects of their own habits.

Less obviously, this text has value for teachers because it emphasises and models the care required to structure classes in an engaging and purposeful manner. The book may even benefit creative writers themselves, for its huge bank of activities offer a means for writers to recover from writer’s block, by providing defamiliarising writing tasks.

Helen Gildfind lives in Melbourne and has had reviews, essays, short stories and poetry published in Australia and overseas. She is currently completing a collection of short stories with the aid of an Australia Council Arts Grant.

The first praised the opening chapters to the hilt and said this book was shaping up to be my best yet.
The second cited the (very fundamental) things the reader didn’t like about it and suggested I ought to give up on the idea and write something else instead.

I could spend several hundred words describing my response to their responses, but “flummoxed” sums it up pretty well. Not least because, in the past, both readers have not only proven to be insightful and valued critics of my work-in-progress and both have invariably been in tune with it. By that I mean that they’ve always liked the aspects I felt good about and raised concerns about the aspects I myself was unsure about. Unaware of each other’s feedback, they’ve almost always been singing from the same hymn-sheet.

Which has left me in a dilemma. Any writing student will know the problem: how to square the circle of two diametrically opposing critiques? And any writer (any writer of a certain disposition, that is) will also appreciate that, faced with good news and bad news, it’s the bad news that wins out. In an overwhelmingly positive review which contains one quibbling or critical sentence, it’s that one sentence which nags away at you, puts you in a grump, wakes you up in the middle of the night.
Which dents your confidence.

Right now, with only 24 hours to digest yesterday’s messages, my confidence – in this novel, in myself as a writer – is around my ankles and heading floorwards. This time yesterday I was feeling upbeat about The Fourth Wish, I had a metaphorical spring in my step. After spending most of last year grinding through rewrites of Never Ending, I was writing with an enjoyment, a freedom – and, yes, a confidence – I hadn’t experienced since first draft of Flip. I loved this book. I loved writing it.

Now, I glance at the typescript in its folder as if it was a plague-riddled rat squatting on my desk.

My gut instinct tells me I should keep the faith with this novel. My self-doubt tells me it’s a pile of shite. Of course, I’ve been here, or somewhere similar, before. But despite having written seven previous novels and encountered crises of confidence of all shapes and sizes, each new crisis reduces me to the status of a novice fumbling blindly for a way out of it.

from The Book of Ruminations, by Qi Tinh (AD 151 – 203)
Qi Tinh has just one thing to say about the relationship between confidence and creativity. It comes in an epigraph, right at the beginning of the book. Here it is: “The artist who has no confidence in himself should stop here, at the threshold of this book. It has nothing to offer him. The artist who is replete with confidence should keep him company.”

To link to the full list of revenge-themed works of fiction on the BookRiot blog, click here.

Time, then, for some market research. In the two years since Flip was published, I’ve visited schools all over the country to give talks and readings and to run creative writing workshops – including three very enjoyable visits to Scissett Middle School, near Huddersfield, West Yorkshire. The students who have attended my sessions at Scissett have been bright and engaged, a pleasure to meet and work with, and the librarians and teaching staff have always made me very welcome.

Me, at Scissett Middle School

I was both immensely grateful and, frankly, staggered that 81 students from Years 7 and 8 filled in their responses – making 243 wishes in all. Having sifted through them, I will be using two of these wishes for my central character, Gloria, and several of the others as wishes which she considers but eventually rejects. I won’t reveal which wishes I’m using because I don’t want to give away the plot (and the plot might change, in any case, as the novel progresses . . . my plots usually do).

But I thought it would be interesting to share some of the responses, to give a glimpse of what a cross-section of today’s youngsters would wish for. I’ve divided them by gender, to highlight the similarities and differences between what the boys and the girls wished for.

Most common boys’ wishes
1. travel back in time
2. infinite wishes
3. super powers
4. live forever
5. rule the world
6. be invisible
7. ability to fly
8. know (or choose) the time and place of my death
9. inifinte wealth
10. travel into space

Most common girls’ wishes
1. travel back in time/travel into the future
2. know what are other people are thinking
3. put right the wrongs I’ve done
4. eternal happiness
5. become famous/be a famous singer
6. live forever
7. infinite wealth
8. ability to fly
9. perfect face/body
10. ability to talk to animals

Among the wishes unique to individual students, as opposed to those which cropped up several times, my favourites inlcuded:

- for book characters to be real so I could be friends with Katniss Everdeen
- A TV remote that pauses real people you don’t like
- no more school, ever
- to know if there’s a Heaven and a God

and best, if most disturbing, of all:
- to be a vampire, to know what it’s like to suck the life out of someone you care about.

(The Fourth Wish is not a vampire novel, by the way.)

from The Book of Ruminations, by Qi Tinh (151 – 203 AD)

Who’s the daddy?

He makes this clear in the coda to The Book of Ruminations, with perhaps the best-known and most widely quoted of his epigrams:
“I wish that I might travel back in time to meet my adolescent self and show him the true path. But why should that youth heed the counsel of an old man who has taken so many wrong turns?”

Then I received an email from a reader which took issue with a particular aspect of my novel, Flip, and did so with such articulacy, intelligence and critical insight that I feel it’s time to restore the balance a little. So, here’s her message in full:

Dear Martyn Bedford,

I am far too old to be reading Young Adult books, but I quite enjoyed your book Flip because it was very well-written … except that as I reached the last page I realized we were never going to meet Flip.

This gave the whole book a very strange, out-of-balance feel. We spent most of the book having a detailed view of his family, home, girlfriends, friends etc. but only through the eyes of Alex, who despised them, trashed the various areas of Flip’s life and then found his way home. Because it was well-written, it was easy to identify with Alex’s problems finding himself in someone else’s life, but somewhere in the background was the guy we never met, having a real horror trip, Invasion of the Bodysnatchers style, and we never find out what happens to him after he comes back, to find that his parents don’t like him anymore, his girlfriend is gone, his dog has died &c.

Perhaps it didn’t fit into the structure of the book, but would it be possible to write a stand-alone short story from Flip’s point of view and put it on your website? I don’t think I’m the only person who wonders what happened.

The other reason I thought the book might have this strange ‘missing’ feel, was maybe because, although the other characters all seem more or less solid and real, possibly Flip was never a complete character to you, more a collection of characteristics that Alex didn’t like. That would be very odd to have a character whose name was the book’s title but nevertheless did not really exist even for the author. I suppose it would also make writing a small follow-up story out of the question.

Anyway, I will look out for your next book, and look up some of your adult books.

With best wishes,
Eugenie

(Before you ask, I won’t be calculating this figure as a percentage of the world’s Chinese-speaking population.)

“How?!” I hear no-one cry.

Simple. I always wake up around 7.00 or 7.30am and my wife and daughters rarely surface from their beds before 10.00am. So, each morning, I’d sneak down the creaky stairs of our rented cottage on the island of Bryher (pop. 86) and – barring any skull-related mishaps with a low beam – I’d settle myself at the breakfast table with coffee, notepad and pen and the background cries of gulls and oystercatchers.

A lot of words can emerge in two or three hours, especially when you’re conscious of the fact that it will be the only writing time you’ll get all day. On one or two mornings last week, I filled more pages than I’d have done at home, with the whole day in which to work.

Just as importantly, for me, is the need for continuity. I like to write something every day, if I can, when I’m working on a first draft. Even if it’s only a couple of hundred words.

The risk, otherwise, is a loss of momentum, and a host of other losses (register, tone, focus, concentration etc.) I don’t tend to lose the thread of the storyline, because I have that pretty well sketched out at the planning stage – at least in outline – but I can lose my immersion in the central character(s) and his/her/their perspective(s), especially if I have to break off from writing for more than a day or two.

With The Fourth Wish, I’d made a good start ahead of the holiday, in terms of striking a voice for Gloria’s (my heroine’s) 1st-person narrative, and was beginning to get into role – to “inhabit” her, as I think of it. I was afraid of jeopardising that, and possibly denting my confidence in the novel at a crucial early stage, if I went away for ten days and wrote nothing.

So, each morning, I spent a couple of hours alone with Gloria at the breakfast table. Then, hearing sounds of movement upstairs, I’d file her away and spend the rest of the day with my wife and the girls. I feel I know her a lot better than I did before the holiday. Gloria, that is. She doesn’t use up all the hot water in the shower, either.

from The Book of Ruminations, by Qi Tinh (151 – 203 AD)
Each Spring, when the snows melted and the mountain paths became passable, the Great Sage would set off from the Chinese monastery,

Qi Tinh in holiday mood

where he spent the Winter, and journey on foot through the sunlit lowlands for several months.
“Do the travels not distract you from your ruminations?” a disciple once asked.
“It is true that distraction can be found in the soles of the feet,” the Great Sage replied, “but it is also true that distraction dwells as readily in the buttocks’ cheeks.”

I like to have a title in place as early as possible in the planning stage of a novel, and certainly before starting a first draft. Even with a clear idea or premise, a sense of the characters, a rough plot outline and a notebook crammed with jottings, I don’t feel right about a new book until I’ve named it. Sometimes, of course, the title of the published novel isn’t the one it started out with. That’s happened in three of my seven books, with each change made at the insistence of my publishers.

The Houdini Girl was called The Zigzag Girl until, just a few months before publication, two other books appeared with “zigzag” in the title and Penguin asked me to come up with something else. And quickly.

Swinging the Bob

My second novel for teenagers, Never Ending - scheduled for publication in January 2014 – started life as The Fallen One but I had to ditch that because it was too similar to The Fallen series of fantasy novels, the first of which was The Fallen : 1. I came up with six alternative titles, each of which was knocked back by either my American or UK editor, or both. Never Ending was their suggestion and I was happy to go with it because: (a) I genuinely liked it, and (b) I’d lost the will to live.

Where was I? Yes, The Fourth Wish.

Having a title in place three months before I’d be ready to start writing the novel wasn’t without its problems. I had no characters, no plot – just the premise of a teenager being granted three wishes. There was no fourth wish. I didn’t even know what any of the three wishes would be at that stage – or why there might be a fourth. But I like taking something familiar and giving it a tweak. Jasper Fforde’s The Fourth Bear was in my mind. We know Goldilocks encountered three bears but mention a fourth in the title and who wouldn’t read the book to find out its identity? Similarly, we know clocks can strike 12 but Orwell hooks us in the first sentence of 1984 when a clock strikes 13.

So, The Fourth Wish it was. And is. Unless my publishers eventually tell me otherwise. At least I know what the three wishes are now. And the fourth. I’ll say a bit more about that in my next blog.

from The Book of Ruminations, by Qi Tinh (151 – 203 AD)

Qi Tinh, ruminant

The first thing to say about Day 1 is that Day 1 isn’t Day 1.

By the time I typed the first sentence of the first draft of The Fourth Wish the idea for the novel had been in my head for several months and forming scribbles in a (new, shiny) notebook for several weeks. The notebook has a picture of an old-fashioned racing car on the cover. I can think of no sport I like less than motor racing.
I mention this for no reason.

This story, like all my other novels, began with a “what if?”
In this case:
1. What if a teenager was granted three wishes?

The notion of three wishes is obviously rooted deeper than that – in my childhood, probably, with Christmas trips to the panto – but I’m not about to start digging there for the true Day 1.

Anyway, the first question gave rise to others:
2. How, or by whom, are the three wishes granted?
3. What does the teenager wish for?
4. And why?
5. What happens then?
. . . and most importantly of all:
6. Who is the teenager?

Because, until I know him or her (her, it turns out) how can I answer questions 3 and 4 – or hope to write the novel at all, for that matter?

Me, having ideas.

The second thing to say about Day 1 is that, truly speaking, this is Day 1 of my blog-of-the-novel. Day 1 of the novel was last Monday, March 25th.

So, in fact, this is Day 7.

Don’t ask how many words I’ve produced so far. I don’t believe in keeping a *word count while I’m writing a first draft. It can be distracting, demoralising.
Or falsely encouraging.

Here is a sneak preview of the opening lines of The Fourth Wish:

You won’t believe a word of this.
I don’t blame you. I wouldn’t believe it either, if it hadn’t happened to me.

The first thing to say about the opening lines of a first draft is that they may not end up being the opening lines of the finished novel.

My main concern at this stage, though, is that I will spend too much time writing the blog-of-the-novel and not enough time writing the novel. If that happens, you’ll be the first to know.

from The Book of Ruminations, by Qi Tinh (151 – 203 AD)
Finally, for now, I’d like to share some ancient words of wisdom from a curious, dog-eared tome I discovered in the Spirituality section of the

Qi Tinh, ruminating

Traveller: Where does my journey begin, oh Great Sage?
Great Sage: It begins with you.
Traveller: Where, then, does my journey end?
Great Sage: It ends where it began.

*2945