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Posted to ACW-L, WCenter, NCTE-Talk,
and TEACH on 1/22/99.
During the Fall, a couple teachers asked
me to tackle a list of creative writing assignments. It's taken me a
while, but here they are.
While they are all phrased for creative writing
assignments here, many of them could be revised to work for other
kinds of essays. The Show & Tell assignment and the Scavenger
Hunt assignment, for example, could easily become descriptive essays.
The Childhood Place short story could be revised to be a personal
narrative.
- [Show & Tell] Children
in elementary school look forward to show & tell days eagerly.
After all, it's the day that they can openly bring their special
treasures to school and share them with everyone. But the point
isn't just to bring the objects to school, but to tell others
about them, to share details that help others understand why an
ordinary teddy bear or a banged up toy dump truck is something
special. For your writing assignment, choose something for show
& tell, but rather than bringing your object to class, your
job is to write a short story or poem that shows us the object and
tells us why it's important to you. You'll need to use lots of
details to demonstrate the significance of the object -- use your
words to create images that *show* readers the object and why it
is important to you.
- [Jumble Story] Preparation:
Have students choose three numbers (from 1 to 10). Each number
corresponds to an item on the list below. The first number is the
character their stories are to focus on, the second number is the
setting for their stories, and so forth.
Assignment: Write a story with the character, setting, time
period, and situation that you've chosen. The character that
you've chosen should be the main character in the story, but isn't
necessarily the ONLY character in the story. Likewise, most of the
story will take place in the setting that you've chosen, but you
can include other settings or elaborate on the setting that you
have chosen (breaking it into several smaller settings, for
example). The situation or challenge that you've chosen may
involve the main character or your main character may observe
someone else who must deal with the situation or challenge. In
other words, you can combine these elements anyway that you
desire, so long as all four are included in your story.
Character
- a new mother
- a photographer
- a recent high school
graduate
- a restaurant owner or
manager
- an alien from outer
space
- a homeless child
- a 93-year-old woman
- an environmentalist
- a college student
- a jazz musician
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Setting
- near a National
Forest
- a wedding reception
- a celebration party
- an expensive
restaurant
- a shopping mall
- a city park
- the porch of an old
farmhouse
- a polluted stream
- a college library
- a concert hall
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Time
- during a forest
fire
- after a fight
- the night of high school
graduation
- after a big meal
- sometime in
December
- late at night
- after a big thunderstorm has
passed
- in early spring
- first week of the school
year
- during a concert
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Situation/Challenge
- an important decision needs to
be made
- a secret needs to be confessed
to someone else
- someone's pride has been
injured
- a death has
occurred
- someone has found or lost
something
- someone has accused someone
else of doing something wrong
- reminiscing on how things have
changed
- someone feels like giving
up
- something embarrassing has just
happened
- someone has just reached an
important goal
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- [Scavenger Hunt] This
assignment has two parts. Part One: For the next week, you're on a
scavenger hunt. Usually, when you have a scavenger hunt, you
physically gather objects on a list. Instead of gathering the
objects on your list, write complete descriptions of the items as
you find them. You'll use these descriptions in an assignment next
week.
an angry exchange
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something unpleasant
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an out-of-place object
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something fresh, new, or
unused
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a well-loved object
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a lost or forgotten
object
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something well-used
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a home-made or hand-made
object
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Part Two: Write a short story incorporating at least half of the
descriptions that you found in your scavenger hunt. Weave in
details, words, and phrases from your descriptions, but be
discriminating -- use the details, words, and phrases that fit
well and help your story. Rewrite and revise the original
description as necessary. Feel free to break them up, rearrange
them, or add more information.
- [Embellish An Ad - Inspired by an
assignment described in the movie Mr. Blandings Builds His
Dream House.] Choose an advertisement from the
Classifieds section of a recent newspaper. Use the advertisement
as the starting point for a short story that explores the people
and situations behind the ad. Who wrote the ad? What was the
writer's motivation (beyond buying or selling an item)? What kind
of life does the writer have? What is the social setting behind
the ad? What kind of family or community is involved? Using the
advertisement as your starting point, create the story behind the
ad that you've chosen. Here are a couple of example ads in case
you have trouble finding one on your own:
For Sale
CLOTHING, UT apparel. Worn only a few times by former UT
athlete.
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Wanted To Buy
BICYCLE, free. Working poor. I'm married with 2 small
children. Need bike and helmet to work nights. I use
Capital Metro for day job-school.
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[NOTE: You could create a similar assignment where students
take the facts in a newspaper story and write a fictionalized
account of the people and situations referred to in the
story.]
- [Historical Fiction] Choose
a historical figure whom you know something about. Choose one of
the following sentence beginnings below, and complete the sentence
for your figure. Compose a short story in first-person, speaking
as the historical figure where you explain the figure's wish,
dream, or fear.
The thing that I regret
most about my life is _____________________.
If I could accomplish one more
thing, I would ___________________.
The accomplishment that I am
proudest of is ___________________.
If I could live anywhere in the
world, I would choose ______________.
The saddest moment in life was
when ________________________.
My favorite childhood memory is
_____________________________.
The thing that scares me the
most is _________________________.
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- [Confess a Secret] Create a
character who has a secret to confess, but who is afraid to
confess it. Write the diary or journal entries that your character
would write as she or he considers the secret, explores why it
needs to be confessed, thinks about who will be affected if the
secret is known, and considers why she or he is afraid. Write a
series of diary or journal entries, as if they were written over a
period of several days or a week. In the entries, you can
incorporate the main character's interactions with others and
explore the ways that the day-to-day events that the character
experiences influence the way that she or he thinks about the
secret and confession. Your character's decision to tell (or not)
should be revealed in the final diary or journal entry. All the
entries need to work together as a whole -- they should sound like
the writings of a single person, and should show consistency from
one entry to the next (for example, if the person writes in the
diary that she is afraid of water in one journal entry, it would
be inconsistent to have her mention that she had been water skiing
in the entry written two days later).
- [Random Words Epigraph] Step
One: Randomly choose 15 entries from your dictionary. Just flip
through the pages, close your eyes, and put your finger down on
the page. Copy down the word that is closest to your finger. If
your finger lands on a word that you don't know, you can choose
the word just above or just below it. For the purposes of this
assignment, count paired words as a single entry (for instance,
"melting pot" is listed as a single entry).
Step Two: Shape your list of dictionary entries into a poem, using
at least ten of the entries (you can, of course, use them all if
you want). You can add articles, helping and to be verbs,
coordinating conjunctions, and prepositions.
Step Three: Use your poem as an epigraph for a short story.
Compose a story that incorporates the themes and images that are
included in your poem. The relationship between the poem and your
short story should be clear to your readers, but it should not be
stated explicitly in your story. Your job is to use the poem as a
jumping off point. You can add more images and themes, but those
that are included in your poem should be the major images and
themes in your story.
[NOTE: you could, of course, end with Step Two, having
students write poems only.]
- [Place Poem] To write a
place poem, choose a place that you remember well and want to
share with others. This poem relies on your filling in a form. If
you're unsure of the parts of speech, check your grammar handbook.
Here's the format:
3 adjectives
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cool, quick,
smooth
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an abstract noun
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beauty
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a participial phrase
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flowing swiftly
downward
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2 prepositional phrases
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over the edges of
reality
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2 participial phrases
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defying sense
compelling sighs
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the place name
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fallingwater
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You can format your poem anyway that you like. Use more
punctuation or less. Change the line breaks. Align the words with
the margin. Use capital letters, play with the arrangement of the
words on the page, and so forth. Be creative!
NOTE: I was thinking about BioPoems when I wrote this, but I
wanted to do something different, something that focused on
connecting grammar terms to writing, and something that gave the
writer more control over the content. Info on the BioPoem is
available at
Educator's Reference Desk.
- [Childhood Place] Think of
an important place or event from your childhood. Write a
fictionalized story about a child who goes to this place or this
event as a children's book for someone about the same age that you
were when you were in the place or involved in the event. Because
you're writing a fictionalized record of the place or event, your
details don't have to conform to actual truth. You can weave two
or three (or more) memories about the place together in one story.
You can make up things about the place that you're not sure of or
that you wish had occurred. Your story should show how you thought
and felt about the place or event as a child. Your reader has
never been to the place you are describing, so you will need to
use specific, concrete details which make the place vivid and your
perspectives clear.
IMPORTANT NOTE: Choose a place that you are comfortable talking
about and sharing with other people. Don't dredge up memories that
you don't want to deal with or aren't ready to deal with. If
you're having trouble writing about a childhood place, talk to me
and we'll find an alternative with which you do feel
comfortable.
- [Found Treasures]
Preparation: Gather a collection of odds and ends, and sort
them into small paper lunch bags. You might include anything you
have lying about -- a marble, a fortune from a fortune cookie, a
bird's feather, a photo of a little girl and her dog, a poker
chip, and so forth. You might have a bag for every student, a bag
for a group of students, or one bag for the entire class.
Writing Assignment: The bag you've received stores a collection of
treasures left behind by someone. Your job is to write a short
story that depicts the character who gathered the objects and
shows why the objects are important to the character. How do the
objects connect to one another -- or do they? Why has the
character saved the objects? What do they tell you about him or
her? How old is the character, and how old was the character when
these objects were collected? Do you think they were all collected
at the same point in the character's life? Spin out a tale from
these treasures that your character has left behind.
Originally Posted February 8, 1999 on
the Daedalus Website.
Posted Sunday, 12-Jun-2005 09:09:18 PDT
Copyright © 1998-2011 Traci Gardner, P. O. Box 11836, Blacksburg, VA 24060-1836.
These materials may be referenced, linked to, and indexed, but their contents
may not be duplicated without express written consent of the author. See the
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