Timothy A. Grady
Writing fiction can be both one of the most difficult things in the world and one of the easiest. Over the course of the last four years I have taught the art of writing fiction in the Creative Writing department at Cooperative Arts & Humanities High School in New Haven, CT. Working with students who have often never written a piece of fiction before, I have found that the art of fiction has to become the craft of writing. In other words, instructions such as, "write something from your heart" have been exposed as directionless and vague when given to a group of teenagers-you get either terrifyingly dramatic hallway break-up stories or depressingly lost looks as students stare at blank pages. Teaching fiction to teenagers, who are sometimes reluctant writers, and always self-conscious, must be a step-by-step crafting process. Writing, viewed as a craft, can be forged through concrete stages and procedures that still allow immense creative freedom while imposing order and guidance on the process. One of the recurring difficulties for students in this crafting process has been the creation and interplay of fictional characters with depth. The development of this unit is driven by the need to demystify the effective creation of characters and characterization in the works of fiction written by my students.
There are countless writing manuals, by authors of note and of obscurity, which touch upon the necessary elements of character and characterization. Such texts usually offer up anecdotal stories about muses striking and midnight inspirations, and then provide some general exercises for developing characters (write about a stranger, fill out a police report, etc). Not to discredit these sorts of text (I own quite a few myself and have become rather protectively attached to the notions some advance), but they are often useless to a new writer when it comes to the construction and reshaping of the actual prose. Too often the prospective student (on the advice of such manuals) fills out fact sheets, writes detailed character backgrounds, and hacks away at every sentence, trying to squeeze a little more characterization in, only to find that the characters in the prose are awkward, unbalanced, and flat.
This unit is an attempt to fill in the missing pieces of typical books on writing fiction. The unit utilizes the PROPEL methodology created by Project Zero, but the overall guiding vision for its construction comes from my practical experience as a writer of fiction. Over the years of study, creation, revision, and publication, I have found that success or failure lies in the construction of the prose-not in exercises or anecdotes, nor in passion or vision. The word-by-word labor of crafting prose is king in the writing game. Unfortunately, it is just that word-by-word instruction that is missing from most texts dealing with the creation of fiction (and thus characters and characterization). In teaching my students, I have become painfully aware of the price I have paid to develop the instincts for the working of prose; I would spare them some of the years of self-instruction, study, and reflection I found necessary because no practical guide existed. Oddly, it was when I became a teacher that I discovered that I had essentially pushed myself through a version of Bloom's taxonomy, from simple facts to advanced levels of conception and self realization (or what Marzano and Kendall refer to as a "self-system"
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), as regards the act of creating fiction. As such, the general framework of Bloom's taxonomy, moving from knowledge through analysis to creation, is a theoretical support for the unit's sequence.