On Saturday I went to the pet shop for some chicken feed. The young shop assistant you atttended to me claimed that the laying mash she offered for sale was the mash she feeds to her three chickens and that they lay five eggs a day! Could this be true?
The young man who waited to take the large bag of mash to my car was named Billy Sleep. He was tall, quite heavily set and somnulent, his eyes partly obscured by a long somewhat greasy fringe. A nice boy. Very chatty.
Billy Sleep. If this were not a lived experience I would perhaps wonder whether the name was the invention of a novelist.
I teach creative writing to middle school students and recently offered them the opportunity to write about themselves after first modelling a story about myself with obvious untruths in it. I did this to demonstrate that writers sometimes wrote fact and sometimes fiction and sometimes a combination of the two. By lessons end some of the students had concluded that it was easier to write fiction because facts were restricting. You could make the details of the story or description fit the words which came to you easily, when writing fiction, but when fact dictates more words than you readily know, the task is much harder.
In my first lesson with this semester's cohort I wrote the verse for a poem to model the form and process for them. In the verse I said my hair was blue. It had to rhyme with true so why not? This gave us the opportunity to discuss the wisdom of interweaving fact and fiction in our writing. We decided it was also quite a good idea as it made us laugh. It engaged us. A successful writer must engage. Success, in the first lesson!
The young man who waited to take the large bag of mash to my car was named Billy Sleep. He was tall, quite heavily set and somnulent, his eyes partly obscured by a long somewhat greasy fringe. A nice boy. Very chatty.
Billy Sleep. If this were not a lived experience I would perhaps wonder whether the name was the invention of a novelist.
I teach creative writing to middle school students and recently offered them the opportunity to write about themselves after first modelling a story about myself with obvious untruths in it. I did this to demonstrate that writers sometimes wrote fact and sometimes fiction and sometimes a combination of the two. By lessons end some of the students had concluded that it was easier to write fiction because facts were restricting. You could make the details of the story or description fit the words which came to you easily, when writing fiction, but when fact dictates more words than you readily know, the task is much harder.
In my first lesson with this semester's cohort I wrote the verse for a poem to model the form and process for them. In the verse I said my hair was blue. It had to rhyme with true so why not? This gave us the opportunity to discuss the wisdom of interweaving fact and fiction in our writing. We decided it was also quite a good idea as it made us laugh. It engaged us. A successful writer must engage. Success, in the first lesson!
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