By Dean Kritikos
Much of the work I find myself doing in Writing Center sessions is helping students understand their assignments. More specifically, I try to help them appreciate the specifications of their assignments or norms in the genre or field they’re working within in a positive light, as guidance or permission.
The generative power of constraints is something I often tap into in my own creative work when I’m experiencing writer’s block. There’s a rich tradition of exercises geared toward helping writers tap into their creativity. These constraints can be as simple and open-ended as imitation. For example, imagine reading a few pages of Joe Brainard’s I Remember, then, like him, writing or speaking a line starting with the words “I remember…”—what comes next, like magic, will probably look, sound, or feel something like Brainard’s own poetry. Or it won’t! But something will come next. Those two words work like a springboard.
Writing exercises can also be highly specific, like CA Conrad’s (soma)tic rituals, embodied experiments that force writers to reckon with an experience outside their comfort zone, take extensive notes, and write from whatever that produces. I like to think of the best assignments and writing prompts I encounter professionally as a writing consultant as part of this same tradition, distant cousins of Bernadette Mayer’s writing experiments, like keeping specific journals documenting only colors or shapes, respectively, or writing in such a way to “Systematically derange the language,” limiting given piece to only prepositions, or other such oddities.
Of course, not every writing exercise or prompt feels generative for every writer. Not every assignment is fun. More often than not, students I work with cannot un-see the requirements of their projects as restrictive or otherwise burdensome. Often, this feeling is related to another: that the requirements of students’ assignments are alien or contrived relative to the ways they write and speak in everyday situations.
When I can, I like to help students see that strangeness itself as a gateway to creativity or expression rather than a barrier. I might introduce, briefly, OuLiPo’s n+7 constraint: every noun in a given text is replaced with the 7th word down in a dictionary (or thesaurus) of the writer’s choosing. Modeling this on a piece of writing, such as the assignment sheet itself, can help open up thinking about constraints, contrived or not, as ways of unlocking fun and creativity rather than limiting them.
Beyond this, I like to emphasize thinking creatively about how students might approach their assignments: negotiating requirements. I urge students to try something different in their writing and see if it fits within the constraints they’re dealing with. If they’re having trouble summarizing a particular piece of an article, I might ask them to tell me or write down whether they liked the article or not, and why. Within this little prompted writing or speech, there’s often something that might work for their assignment. If it doesn’t, I have them think about why not. Most importantly, though the idea is to focus on what does work, why it does, and how to produce more of it: what kinds of changes, incremental or radical, can help ensure that their thinking/writing does fit?
Published August 8, 2019
