The Creative Writer's Notebook

I want to put the journal, as a writer's tool, at the center of my creative writing instruction this semester. I want to emphasize expression, experience, and process rather than model texts and genre-based rules.

Here are the premises I'm setting forth for myself as I embark on this new journey:

• Don't check their notebooks. It's a private space for them to be creative. You can't expect someone to take risks (and all creativity is a risk) if they have someone looking over their shoulder the whole time.
• Don't grade their notebook. Find something else to grade. Find something else to hold them accountable for. This isn't it.
• Two things go in their journals: raw writing (call it freewriting, automatic writing, stream-of-consciousness, or my personal favorite: zero-drafts) and raw observations (personal experiences of the world around them).
• Create opportunities that invite them to share and a culture that doesn't judge them.

So far, it's the tension between the first and last bullet points that challenge my lesson designs. How do you create a culture of sharing without violating the personal privacy that is the journal? I know there are lots of ways, but when it comes to designing lessons, I found myself noticing that lots of my activities are one or the other: solitary invitations to write or prompted collaborations.

Two weeks into the experiment, I have done the following:

• Discussed freewriting in a lesson I titled "Like No One is Watching" - this was just an adaptation of various freewriting introductions that I have done over the course of my career, but I was sure to make a new powerpoint and add some new quotes from authors as well as a passage from Virgina Woolf, just to set that tone for myself that this is new. I'M DOING SOMETHING NEW, he screams at himself
• The second lesson pivoted to setting up their writer's notebook. We talked about different ways that authors use their notebooks to record observations and take note that they will use in their writing. The second-half of their journal became devoted to this space.
• Lesson three "The Writing Habit" returned to both of these functions. We practiced more freewriting (I introduced the surrealist method for "automatic writing") and showed them how my observation journal is set up. In a first middle-finger to the GPA-industrial complex, I gave them a homework assignment to add things to their observation journal and promised not to check or grade it.
• HOWEVER, the next day I showed them how to turn their observations into writing prompts, how the back half of the journal enters, informs, and inspires the front half.
• My fifth lesson was called "Creating a Writing Environment" and in the first get-to-know-you BS that moved them into groups of similar students and they created a visual of their ideal writing environment.
• Lesson six was a cool idea that needs some work. I put four posters around the room with titles like "Seen Around School" and "Never Thought I Would Write Down" and "Not the first time I've noticed" and they added post-it notes of things from their observation section of their journal that fit those categories. It definitely succeeded at getting students to share in a low-stakes way and we had lots of fun reading what they're observing.

• Day seven called back to lesson five. I showed them my writing desk (as well as peer's for contrast) and talked about how I was inspired by Stephen King's On Writing. I gave them another homework assignment: to find the place where they are comfortable writing and taking a selfie writing there and then to go somewhere they would not normally write and write there (again, selfie as proof). Then, because it was a nice day and this was really just wrapping up what we did the other day with the Creating a Writing Environment, I took them to the courtyard where they took notes on their environment using the five senses and from then wrapped class up by having them making similes out of those observations. Back in the classroom, students shared their similes aloud and it felt like an introduction to poetry.
• And on the 8th day, I showed a movie. Okay, sort of, but also not. I am a teacher who almost never shows videos of any kind. But to prove the point about how writer's use observations, I had to show them about 15 minutes from the first act of my favorite Christmas movie and THE BEST Hollywood representation of how a writer's process actually works, The Man Who Invented Christmas. In this film, we see Dickens writing A Christmas Carol and we see how he draws on personal observations to synthesize the story. We had a discussion on his process and then used that to launch into a writing where they drew their own observations out of the back half of their journal and moved them to the front. I prompted them to draw the most random, unrelated ones they could, and then freewrite in an attempt to synthesize those details together.
• For days 9 and 10, I introduced them to NPR's "This I Believe" and the idea of drawing on personal experience to write a statement of belief. The assignment was in the form of a quote, one that I've used many times to begin a writing class: "All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence you know." ~Ernest Hemingway.