Judith J. Katz
The discipline of writing every day, at the same time each day, is also part of the practice inherent in the development of creative control and is an important part of this unit. It is my objective as a teacher at all times to keep my students on task. The way in which I do that in regards to this unit is to make sure my students know that there are many parts to writing not all of which are writing the final Haiku.
It is not always easy to write when your mind, heart, body, psyche are not in it. We must train ourselves to write, or do "writerly" work at the time we have set aside. My creative writing class is scheduled for 2 hours a day, from 7:30 am to 9:30 am. Sometimes neither my students or I are feeling productive, creative, or even articulate at that hour.
It is my goal to give my students the skills they need to "jumpstart" their creative process when it doesn't show up on it's own.
Taking the time to observe, to "shop for" more descriptive words in the dictionary or thesaurus, to list the possible properties of an object like the many colors it might be made up of are "writerly" tasks that do not call upon us to create something from thin air. They are another form of scales. There are many parts of the writing process that can help us paint a picture that will take us to the Haiku moment. I will be utilizing these techniques in my class plans and will be discussing them in more detail later in the paper.
