Creative Writing Or Creative Restrictions?
I sat down to write yesterday. Ideas whirling around in my head, culminating from a peaceful and relaxing two weeks in the Costa Del Sol – I was finally ready to put pen to paper (or should I say fingertips to keyboard). I can’t say I knew exactly what I was going to write, but I had a character, a setting and determination.
That was until my teacher brain kicked in.
I was getting so focused on varying my sentence starters: god forbid I started a sentence with ‘the’ or ‘I’. Similes, metaphors and the unscrupulous need in my mind to extend them created a thick fog in my brain. I sighed and leaned back on my white faux leather office chair. Disheartened, unmotivated, and melancholy at my need to ‘fit’ with the AQA mark scheme. The funny thing is, I am no longer a student, haven’t been for the last 11 years, but as a teacher my mind appears to be hard wired to ticking boxes and jumping through irrational hoops which, on reflection, only halted my creative writing process.
How can we expect our pupils to write a ‘story’ in 45 minutes? Especially one filled to the brim with imaginative descriptions, ambitious vocabulary and oodles of literary techniques. And let’s face it, their work ends up saturated with the things: there are cliched similes jumping off the page screaming “save me, save me!” by the time they’re done with the piece. Not to mention the fact that those 45 minutes are part of a 1h 45min exam in which they also need to include planning and editing time. In reality, this is just NOT how writers write. The burning question has sprung to my mind, and has plagued my thoughts all night – are we helping or hindering our kids with these never ending ruled and structures to follow? And how exactly is this going to help inspire them to want to write after school?
For me, the reason I decided to become an English teacher was all down to books. I love reading, reading ABOUT reading and reading a plethora of different genres. I even love the smell of books: old ones that have been gathering dust in a library for over a hundred years, to brand new ones, freshly delivered to my door in less than 24 hours via amazon prime. As you can probably tell, when it comes to books, I ain’t fussy. Getting lost in their pages for hours on end, diving into worlds I have never experienced before, learning about characters from other cultures - that it was literature is all about: the art of telling stories.
The point of me wittering on about this is that I believe that we are failing the art of English within schools. The subject is currently falling flat; the love of literature and language and the pure joy reading can bring is lost. It’s not something that you can necessarily ‘teach’, it needs to be experienced. Reading aloud to the kids, just for the hell of it. Not tests on the novel, no in-depth analysis merely listening to the story, engaging with the story and more importantly ENJOYING the story. Writers are story tellers – simple.
I am saying this as a teacher, and a writer. If I’m struggling to sit down and write creatively with all of these restrictions floating around in my head, then how can we expect teenagers too thrive in this environment, constricted, suffocated by so many ‘rules’?
I don’t have the answer, not really. But what I do know is that something needs to change. During my PGCE year, I had a placement at an exam factory. (Sorry a hmm… high school…) They ‘taught’ pupils from year 7 up how to answer the exam questions. Yup, you read that right. No love of literature, no time to just read and enjoy a piece of text. Each piece was pulled apart, and if you read a text and didn’t know ‘how far you agreed’ with some made up statement, by a fictional pupil then had you really read it at all?
Now let’s talk about comprehension. Yes, it is of the upmost importance for us, as teachers and a society, to expand our children’s vocabulary. Words bring a certain power to those who possess them. But by over explaining each and every single word that one pupil or another doesn’t fully understand, we lose the story in its entirety. We lose the one thing it is actually supposed to be.
I picked up The Sun Also Rises this morning. A new day, a new book, and one of my favourite authors – Ernest Hemingway. He is simple. Straight to the point, almost blunt in his writing style. Obviously, he is an icon, and one of the greatest writers of his time yet his work isn’t saturated with an overuse of ambitious vocabulary or onomatopoeia and an avalanche of similes just for good luck. He chooses his words carefully, and it appears that a lot of the time, the fewer syllables the better. For me, he says so little, but every sentence is ambiguous and allows the reader to pour their own emotions into the novel, rather than having Hemingway’s opinion on the matter forced down their throats. And that is what writing should do. Allow the reader to inhabit the character they are reading about, to become them. To explore their world, be it entirely fantastical or somewhere true to life.
I’m not saying we should teach our pupils to write like Hemingway: I’m the first person to hate a copycat. But maybe, just maybe if we could give them a little more freedom then we would be pleasantly surprised by the results…
Creativity only falters under restrictions. We’ve all heard the saying: ‘a reader lives a thousand lives’, so why are we not embedding this into our children? Making this part of our pedagogy? I am a high school English teacher, so by the time the boys get to me, it’s normally too late. Good job I’m a lover of lost causes – If you find the right book, anyone of any age can fall in love with literature again.
Written by Heather Ferguson
Heather studied English Literature with Creative Writing at Lancaster University before going on to study her PGCE in Secondary English. She currently teaches at an all boys school. She loves writing poetry and rambling on about, well, anything really!