Creative writing for creative teaching

“The teaching of writing,” Wallace Stegner could not say often enough, “is Socratic.” By this he seems to have meant that, like Socrates, the writing teacher is a midwife, assisting at the birth of a student’s creation and checking it for signs of life. The method behind such teaching—what is now called the workshop method, was described by Plato 2,300 years ago as “benevolent disputation by the use of question and answer without jealousy.” The teaching of writing, in other words, is Socratic in being an invitation to participate in a conversation. The writing workshop can further the kind of critical thinking skills that students are already being encouraged to use in other aspects of their learning.

Making up their own stories helps students learn material in fresh ways. By being actively involved with, and actively interrogating their involvement with the elements that make up our written and oral communication, these young writers of fiction will gain an intuitive and intellectual understanding of its operations. Simply put, one can best understand how something is constructed by attempting to put it together yourself.

Creative writers are asking us to believe in their dreams, and this requires that they “get the details right.” Even stories that are based on fantasy or science fiction, with monsters and space aliens, need to obey various rules of logic; they need to “make sense.” For instance, what might the monster eat? What kind of planet would the alien come from? This kind of questioning can open up many new areas of intellectual and emotional interest for student writers of fantasy or science fiction. These are areas that they might not have as easily accessed through other types of writing. Thus, their understanding of their world is deepened.