Mick White, novelist and short story writer, has an answer

This semester, many high school sports stories that attempt to retell heroically the play by play of some game, even though I told them not to do that. I wish they'd at least invent their own game, like, say, kangaroo races, or male mud wresting at a gentlemen's club for women.

I used to be a plot guy.  I talk about external and internal conflict, but I think Mick has the answer:

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    Lowell Mick White I have seen this phenom also--we just have to keep emphasizing that they need to be writing about people, not events....

    
    

More than Once, They've Admitted they're the ADD generation

   And by ADD generation, I don't mean they need to go on medication, but that they often lack the ability to concentrate on anything for more than three minures. It's as if their minds are channel surfing.
    I am talking about my current crop of students. They've informed me that Texas A&M is a top tier research institution, so apparently these are the best minds of their generation.
    Last Thursday I told two students whose work had been workshoped to wait for a few minutes. The class had gotten out early (This is a new phenomenon; workshops finishing up before class time is over). I needed to explain to them what to do next, but I also needed to talk quickly to a few other students.
    Did those two students wait? Well, yes they did, for about three minutes. Then they split, even though class time was not officially over. I turned around and they were gone. I looked out the window for them. Nope.
    Well, it was a beautiful spring day. I wanted to tell one student that he'd have to take a zero or rewrite his story, because he wrote a journalism piece, a feature article on a sport. I didn't want to make him feel bad telling him during the workshop that he'd apparently zoned out on all the discussion of what a short story was, and that he hadn't consulted the handouts I'd given him.
    Creative writing is a very interactive class. I change up what we're doing about every twenty minutes. In workshop, different students are speaking, and different questions are being addressed.
    I don't know if I can change the topic every three to five mnutes to satisfy the short attention spans of the ADD generation.  Now there's a challenge!  But it's a challenge I don't wish to meet. I'd like to help them learn to concentrate on one thing for, say, at least ten minutes.
     Hey, but it's only creative writing.  I walked through the architecture school Friday and watched hard concentration over long periods of time by students designing buildings on their laptops. Maybe drawing concentration is easier for this generation than word concentration.
    Still, I am impressed with the time and energy my students put into reading their fellow students' writings, marking them up, and then making usually quite perceptive verbal comments in class.  They put a lot of time into it, and they are often dead on with what the problems were in a poem or story. Most of them have a strong desire to help each other.
    Perhaps they do the reading and marking in their dorm rooms, while emailing, texting, watching TV, eating supper, and talking to their roomies.

Your Writing and Your Teaching

     I used to worry that I'd talk my ideas out in my creative writing classes, but I've found that to be a false fear.  Working materials up for class actually gives me the chance to come up with new ideas that I might then apply to my writing.
     I got interested in emails as a form for fiction. We tried it out in class.  I ended up writing a story based on an email exchange--way back in the early 1990's.
     When you take on a new project in writing, as I did in writing my memoir Saving Sebastian, the new things I learned by writing the book, by taking a workshop, and by reading up on memoirs, I could then pass on to my students.  You ought to order and read Saving Sebastian if you have been attracted to the memoir form but as yet have not tried it out. It will give you good ideas on book design, subject section, and form--plus you will get to enjoy a heart rending but ultimately happy ending book.
    Saving Sebastian should give you some good ideas about teaching memoir in class. Everyday life is often dull.  You can't fictionalize in a memoir to make the book exciting. So how do you make memoir writing dramatic? My book will give you, and perhaps your students if you let them read it, some ideas.
    I still won't teach memoir, in either short or long forms, in a beginning creative writing class of undergraduates of about 19 years old.  Because a memoir is true, and they know everyone will be reading and commenting on their memoir pieces during workshops, I know many of them will be blocked and won't want to or won't be able to find dramatic material to write about.  The young ones, they need the cover of fiction--to claim, whether it is true of not--that what their classmates are reading is "made up."

Do you ever get asked questions?

   We've come a long way since the late sixties and seventies when students would actually drop by your office, at times, to talk about the subject they were studying with you in class.
    It may just be the southern university where I work, but I hardly ever get a question related to anything except the grade. I feel there are a few out there who would like to ask questions, but they are intimidated by the grade obssessed.
     I don't think, in my generation, any but those who were determined, for whatever reasons, to go to college ever studied in high school. I wanted to escape a dysfunctional family and get out of suburbia, so I worked two jobs and studied. I couldn't get sports because you were working hard without pay.
    I have watched however my daughter through school and now into college in this era of big test taking as the major measure of knowledge. One can ask, who is testing the tests?  To get a good grade on a test online that allow 15 to 30 minutes, by daughter uses the index to her textbook. She doesn't read it.
    Which brings me to what I see as the decline in reading skills and writing abilities. Also, I see a decline in the ability to think--or is it they are afraid to think? I keep telling them just think and provide reasons. There is no wrong or right answer here. Still, they refuse to do it.
     If you don't read, if you have limited writing skills, and if you can't think and can only repeat what your church or nation state have told you--how can you be a writer?

Depicting characters of the opposite sex

I was taught to never write from the opposite sex's point of view. Being stubborn, I took this as a challenge and wrote a story from a female point of view, and failed miserably, according to the one female I asked (my wife).

I often think with the billions of people in the world, it's impossible to make generalizations about people male or female.  The kind of female I depicted might indeed exist out there in the world.

Here is something I just posted on facebook:
I tell my female creative writing students, when they dip inside the heads of men in their short stories using the omniscient narrator, that they make their male characters more thoughtful than men are. I asked a woman student my age what she thought. Her reply: there are a small fraction thoughtful men out there, well trained by their mothers.

Is Anybody Listening?

    With my students, if you write something on the board, underline it three times, and tell them to remember it, they won't remember it.
     That's because they don't take notes. It's creative writing after all. We're here to have fun and be creative, which seems to mean to them at the beginning of the semester--anything goes, free writing, doodle time.
     It could be, since I'm talking about the first class offered here, taken by freshman and sophomores mostly, they weren't required to take notes in high school. Maybe notes don't help when a teacher teaches to the test.
     Notational writing, and being able to listen closely, especially to the ques given my the instructor as to what is essential knowledge, is an important skill they will need to have for many forms of work.
    A friend of mine turns the lights down in the classroom, in part, to prevent students from texting in class. I have never noticed anyone texting, but they could be doing it.
     So I'm going to require students to take notes, and to turn their notes in at the semester, as part of their grade.
    I've tried putting much essential knowledge on handouts, but you can't put everything on a handout. Often they leave them behind. Often they never look at them again, unless you put points on the handout and tie it to how an assignment is graded.  Students need to learn how to listen and concentrate. They need to take notes.  ADD generation they may be, but they can learn to listen and to take notes.
     Listening is such an important skill in this world not only for a career but for interpersonal relations and for being a writer. I can't even turn off listening even when I'm hearing a bad sermon in church. I look around me, and a lot of people have their eyes closed, or eyes glazed, staring off in space.
      Few people seem to be able to listen.  You have to have a few years on you to notice that the gradual decline, but Americans, I personally don't think, haven't been good listeners for a long time. Listening cramps their individuality, their own free expression.  I'm guilty of the crime of not listening at times myself. Who isn't? It's a bit of a challenge to drive, listen to the radio, talk on the cellphone, and pay attention to what my daughter is saying in the back seat.
     Reading--a one media art--just words on the page, no music, no visuals--is another way to teach people to listen. When you read a novel, you are listening to one person talk for a long time.

Double Consciousness and the Writer

Watched a documentary about graffiti artists, angry teenagers who now have gallery shows and houses in suburbia these days, and they were discussing their once hostility toward suburbia, calling it "artificial".  What may grate on the young artist about suburbia is its lack of diversity and its isolation from action, from what others are doing.  An artist--including a writer--needs a double conciousness.  Otherwise, they are like the fish who doesn't know it swims in water, in terms of their own culture. Without a rub between you and the culture, there's little to spark creation.

You can start developing a double consciousness by moving into a big city if you grew up in suburbia, by moving to the South if you grew up in the North, by moving to a foreign country, by being aware how your ethnic background makes you different from what is considered "normal".

You also acquire it through age.  With age, you can contrast how it was with how it is now.  You shouldn't  be inconiclastic and turn sentimental, rating the past as always better, but you clearly have a double consciousness.  It may be personally unsettling at times, but it is good for a critical eye on the the world you live in, and for writing creatively.

Double consciousness is, of course, what young writers in creative writing are unlikely to have. So we should be kind and understanding about their first efforts.