Skip to main content

Starting a MOOC

I recently began a MOOC through Wesleyan. It's part of my Champions of Wayne goal this semester. As director of academics, my boss and I are asking staff to set their own goals alongside their mentees. For me, it's to actually complete a MOOC. I tend to start them and never finish.

So this weekend, I began Creative Writing: The Craft of Plot. Watching the videos was the easy part; it's actually sitting down to write that's been difficult. I'm starting to realize what students go through when we don't give them time to brainstorm before asking them to write.

Brando Skyhorse, a novelist and the course's instructor, posed great questions about characters that I plan to use in my own creative writing course:

1. What do they want? What gets in their way from getting what they want? This is the rising action.
2. What are their weaknesses?
3. Where are they from (emotionally and geographically)?
4. Where are they going?
5. What can your characters do to surprise you?

I've started and stopped so many times this weekend as I've tried to craft a character. I've turned to apps to help with brainstorming (I had forgotten about Story Dice, an app I downloaded years ago and never really used). 

I'll post a character after I spend a little more time developing him. I'm even finding it difficult to not write about or craft characters that seem a little too like characters that were in novels that I've read recently. Time to go on a walk to clear my brain.




Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Handwritten Cue Cards in the 21st Century

I just stumbled upon this behind-the-scenes clip of Saturday Night Live's cue card process. This is intense writing. This is writing that is dependent upon trust and checks and balances. Over a short period of time, skits are written, drafted on cards, revised, and the cards revised over and over again. I also really love that SNL continues to use cue cards and not a teleprompter. Like Wally points out, technology can fail. Handwritten cue cards ensure the show goes on. Comedy is hard work. Writing is hard work. Changes are made up until the last minute to get things just right. This is a form of real-world writing.
1 comment
Read more

Six Things to Keep in Mind When Your Class is NaNo-ing

Students recently drafted their reflections about National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), so I wrote beside them about the lessons that I had learned. Here they are: Limit the other work you give . While you may feel the pressure to have copious assignments in your grade book (there tends to be a sort of teacher shaming if you don't have many assignments in, as if there is a magical number), you have to recognize what is valuable and what is not, especially during the 30-day writing frenzy that NaNoWriMo is. I tried to make every assignment relevant for the month and their novels. Students encountered "daily challenges" (these quickly turned into every-other-day challenges) that focused on many of the necessary elements to good novels: dialogue, story world development, character creation, subplots, etc. Everything was designed so that students could use their work in their novels, and it allowed me to have short glimpses of the types of things they were writing abo
1 comment
Read more

Past Secretaries of Education

After last night's hearing with nominee DeVos, I decided to research past education secretaries. Senator Alexander talked a lot about "precedent" when it came to procedures regarding the HELP Committee. Let us remember that the first education secretary was appointed in 1979. That's the same year that Congress created the department under Jimmy Carter. This is also the same department that Ronald Reagan promised to abolish. Even the first education secretary had experience in government. Shirley M. Hufstedler was both a federal and state appeals court judge. I'm going to say that because of that experience, she's probably familiar with law and how laws work. As we saw last night, when Betsy DeVos was redirected a question because her answer implied that states could choose to implement federal law or not, she might need a refresher. Then we had Terrel Bell, who was a high school teacher, bus driver, and served in the Marines. Again, a long list of public
2 comments
Read more