The writing intensive class is heating up! We have a new teacher for Level II, Joe, and he is full of energy and his energy psyches all of us into a creative state of being. He asks for more writing in less time, but since the class environment is safe and I am free to learn as I work, I dig in and try to think of “situations” to expand into sketches. We are asked to write down twenty situations/plotlines in fifteen minutes. Joe states emphatically, “Quantity over quality!” The hard thing about this request is that there is no room for self-criticism, something that comes naturally to many of us. However, when you are trying to beat the clock, you have to free your mind of any negativity and push forward or you will never meet the objective. Once we hit the number twenty or fifteen minutes, whichever comes first, we choose five of the twenty that we like the most, read them to the class and the class decides which plotline each of us will develop into a sketch to be read in class tomorrow. Majority rule!
This process will be a fabulous pre-writing exercise for my 2e students, who tend to be overly critical of their writing skills and many times freeze over their laptops, hypnotized by the cursor and unable to get one word from their brain into their word document. I will need to cut the number of ideas down from twenty to ten, or surely there will be several spontaneous combustions to deal with in the classroom. But this exercise in pushing through the fear and critical voices will become a fixture in our writing curriculum. If I can get them to accept less than perfect ideas as a beginning, instead of an end, my students will be closer to the flexibility and cognitive shift necessary in producing written expression.
Now I must flex my own cognitive muscle and write!
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