4/22/2019 0 Comments Day 1The Braided NarrativeWe started today with a free-write because it has been a while and I would like to get back into the routine of daily writing in this unit. Students wrote extended metaphor poems about childhood; very good stuff happened. Next, I braided my hair. Yah, you read that right. I told them that in this next unit, we would be working on writing not one, but TWO or THREE complete stories. Then I told them we would be working on braiding these stories, as if each story was a strand in the braid. First, we reviewed our next novel a bit. We read the first few pages of the first six chapters and stopped as we went to notice the subtle ways the writer distinguishes between characters through their narrative style, punctuation, format, grammar, etc. We also created an outline of narrators (and since we dont know any of the narrators yet because we have not started the book yet, we used what we know) Chapter 1: Oskar Chapter 2: Very clearly not Oskar 1 Chapter 3: Oskar Chapter 4: My Feelings person (or Very Clearly not Oskar 2) Chapter 5: Oskar Chapter 6: Very Clearly not Oskar Then we talked about how this is ONE WAY to do it. I told them that over the course of the unit we will be reading MULTIPLE and by that I mean, A LOT of braided narratives. Braided narratives are EVERYWHERE these days, and as people and technology get more sophisticated, so does our story telling. We will be reading Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close because it shows us ONE amazing way of braiding narratives (we will know those when we finish and collect notes and ideas along the way). We will also be reading excerpts from a few other books (Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami and Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann), we will watch some episodes of tv shows, delve into some Science Fiction, and listen to some music. From each of these experiences, we will collect LOTS of strategies for weaving stories together. THEN, each student will use whatever strategy makes most sense for their stories or for them as a writer. Basically, there are lots of ways to braid your hair. They seemed pretty on board with this. A few of them wanted to start writing already :) BUT Instead, we watched this great TED talk that I feel the need to share with all of my creative writers: (alert: there is some language and a rather inappropriate joke in the first three minutes of this talk, but the rest is pure gold!).
After watching the talk, we discussed how important it is let your writing be driven by a theme that you care deeply about. In all creative writing, even fiction, you should be telling your truth (we invoked the great Anne Lamott here), I talked about how choosing a theme you love will be one way of weaving your strands together. Lots of stories can diverge to develop one theme. Students seemed to follow me here. Homework for next class? I'm glad you asked: Read EL&IC through page 141 Practice your POL poem for Friday Write down a few themes you want to explore/develop in your braided narratives
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