Knowing When to Break the Rules

As a creative writing teacher, as a publisher and as a writer who often sees the work of less experienced writers, I meet the same common mistakes frequently.

-          Not having a proper story – often with too much or not enough drama or being very clichéd and predictable

-          Switching close third person points of view mid-chapter or even mid-page

-          Telling instead of showing.

Yet many successful novelists and other story tellers break these rules and not only get away with it but receive critical acclaim for their work.

Philip Pullman goes from close third person to omniscient narrator at the end of his His Dark Materials trilogy. Yet it works because he is in effect zooming out of the story and pre-empting our need to think about what we have just read.

Little happens in the stories of Raymond Carver yet they stay with us for days because they tell us much about the human condition.

I’m currently reading Jake Wallis Simons’ The English German Girl. It has a quite clichéd plot. Simons zooms around from the inner thoughts of one character to that of another, then steps back and tells us what the sages say about this and that. Yet the novel is captivating. The author becomes another character. The voice is astoundingly consistent and convincing.   

So why shouldn’t the less experienced writer do all of this?

I’m guessing it’s because Pullman, Carver and Simons really know what they are doing that they get away with this.  They have chosen to break the rules because they have made the decision that doing so will be more effective than sticking to them. In order to make that decision they must understand the rules well and importantly, why they are there.

This is a far cry from accdinetally going against a convention that allows the reader to feel comfortable because it is familiar.

So, the advice is, unless you have a very good reason for going against the convention, stay with it. And that, of course, means you need to understand the mechanics of it and why it is there.  

The Salford Sampler

This event rocked. We had just the right number of people in attendance. The day was kick-started by a performance from some of our students.  It was absolutely excellent I have to say. One of our graduating creative writing students read out his piece about the city whilst some of our English, Drama and Performance Studies added extra voices and acted parts out.  

Even though many of the attendees were from the university, they were from a variety of places, and not always obvious ones.  There was also a good representation form the community.

There was enough material offered that we could run parallel sessions – at one point there were three on at once. This made my session rather small, and in fact it was attended by three of my colleagues. No pressure then. I’m pleased to say, nevertheless, that within thirty minutes we had all found a Salford story and found a voice in which to tell it to a young adult.         

There were several other story-telling / finding sessions and I’m pleased to say I attended quite a few of them and enjoyed them very much. It’s good to be taught occasionally.

As the day wore on, the group got smaller so we were a really intimate bunch for the last two sessions. Nevertheless, it still felt extremely successful.   

Contact time in higher education

There’s a lot of concern about how much contact time students get at higher education institutions. Typically, students receive nine hours a week over 24weeks a year. Exams will be spreads over a further four weeks. At my institution, students enjoy 22-33 hours contact on courses which are supposed to last 200 hours.

School children typically have 25 hours of lessons on 39 weeks, with an extra half hour per day for assemblies and registrations, followed by one to two hours homework a week.

However, it may not really be as different as it sounds.

School students tend to spend five minutes getting form one lesson to another. Often, getting the logistics of the lesson right is more time-consuming: it takes longer to give out hand-outs etc. – there are more students and they are less motivated than university students. A classroom teacher in compulsory education settings spends some time on discipline. Even a really well-behaved class will spend a certain amount of time on classroom routines and rituals. There is rarely any confrontational behaviour in higher education – if a student doesn’t want to be in a class they don’t turn up and may even sneak out part way through. They’ll pick up the hand-out on the way to their seat – if they haven’t already downloaded it themselves for their VLE (virtual learning environment). It’s a given that work had been prepared before the class began – and even if, as frequently happens, students come to class unprepared - at least they know the onus is on them. Exam time is included is the 39 X 25 hours in school. Up to half of the type of work that higher education students do in the other 150 hours or so is actually done in class by school students within the 39 X 25 hours.

It’s a different quality of time anyway, in a higher education class. I personally find a two hour seminar with university students far more draining than even a whole day in a challenging comprehensive school. The students suck knowledge out of you. Even if you set them a bit of pair work in class, you can rarely sit back: they find questions to ask and you feel that because of their enthusiasm you need to be able to jump in and offer further suggestions.

In school, teachers pass on a recognised body of knowledge, often defined in part by the government. In higher education, lecturers teach about their research. As they are constantly adding to this, they are constantly adding to the VLE for the course and constantly advising students of this. As the students are keen to learn, they often email their lecturers with questions, or visit them during the two office hours offered per week. Most lecturers will see students at other times as well. Most courses timetable a fifteen minute one-to-one tutorial in addition to the 22-33 hours. And students get another three or four minutes – longer in awkward cases – feedback when assignments are handed back. Admittedly some need to spend more of this ad hoc time with lecturers than others. But it is there if it’s needed. Many students are encouraged to join in wikis, blogs and forums.  Some lecturers even use Twitter and Facebook. Lecturers have a presence too on these types of platforms.   

All in all, then, there is probably less difference between contact time in schools and contact time in institutions of higher education that one might at first think.             

           

Transitions Day at All Hallows RC High School with Salford BEP

I had a really fun time yesterday delivering four workshops on storytelling to year 4 students from feeder schools to All Hallows RC High School, Weaste Lane, Eccles. The idea behind the Transitions Day was to help students from the feeder primaries get used to the high school building and each other. Four groups of students took part in my story-telling workshop. I was aided by one of my very capable Level 6 students, who in fact ran one of the workshops herself, skilfully tailoring it to fit the reduced time we had -  the coach bringing two of the groups had got held up in traffic.  

Salford BEP – Business and Education Partnership supplied all the materials, set up the room for a rotation of workshops and organised the event really well.

We used several exercises to get the creative juices flowing:

Each student had to say something about themselves and Salford. They started off “Once upon a time there was boy / girl called ….. . Then we looked at some photos of Salford old and new. They had to bring what they saw into the story they were creating. Next, we passed around the magic box and took out an item for ourselves. Then we passed it round again and took out another item to give to someone else. We added these items into our stories. For the last five to ten minutes the students wrote their story on a post card. There were some amazing results.  

I’m going to do a version of this at the Salford Sampler event of 15 July 2011.

Free School Visits

To celebrate some recent publications – Kiters and Hipp-O-Dee-Doo-Dah for children 9-11 and Babel for 14+, I am offering free school visits. I offer a reading of the book, a Q & A session, a short creative writing exercise and an opportunity to buy signed copies of the books at a discount. The visits would be up to 90 minutes long and I only ask that travel expenses are reimbursed.

It would also be possible to book a full day (normally £350 plus travel, but including all resources) and have a 25% reduction if part of the day can be conducted as described above.  If you’re interested, please contact :      gill.james@btinternet.com.       

Salford Sampler

Salford Sampler
I am leading a story-telling workshop on 15 July in Salford. I’ll be working with young and young at heart people about telling their story and stories about where they live. We’ll end up writing a story on a postcard. I’m doing something quite similar with some youngsters at All Hallows School, Eccles on 29 June. Looking forward to it!

A Day in the Life

This describes the day of someone who is paid to be a writer, has over fifty publications in print, and earns a little directly from her writing.
8.05 – Wander round the corner to vote.
8.50 – Arrive at the office. It takes about ten minutes for my computer to boot up – it has to connect to an intranet and its insisting on installing new downloads. Ah! It’s supposed to do that before it switches off at night. It takes ages to open Firefox. But at last it does. As usual, I start my day by looking at Twitter. I go back no more than an hour, though. Or I’ll never start writing.
9.10 Start writing. This actually. But I’ll be spending most of my writing time today on The Tower. Reluctant to start as usual, but I know I must. I also know I will be able to and it will be okay.
9.55 I finish one of the extra chapters for The Tower. Reward myself with a little look at Twitter. Much discussion of how people have voted.
10.00 Continue writing until 10.23. I work on the chapter after the new one. It now needs altering and I also realise I need to alter the one before the new one.
10.43 The other chapter did not in fact need any altering. So. I’ll make ginger and lemon tea to celebrate.
11.27 Finished working on The Tower for the day. I’ve completed one new chapter, edited another and planned a third. I’ve written 895 words in total. I’ve also just chatted to one of our support staff about some Erasmus exchange applicants. Next job: deal with work emails.
12.45 Finished going through work emails AND ate lunch. Nothing too controversial. I’ve had to rearrange a meeting with one of our exchange partners and I’ve had to help a student find PMC _ Personal Mitigating Circumstances forms. Much discussion of timing and conduct of PMC committee that meets next week.
13.35 I’ve spent most of the last hour chasing up students who have not submitted work. The bad news is there are nine students missing work. The good news is that there is a logical explanation in all but one case. It takes time, though, to check that you have got all the facts right. I only had to contact two in the end. Phone calls failed, so I contacted them via email.
15.30 I’ve just spent two hours on admin. This has included throwing away a lot of paper. I’ve also spent a further hour trying to process paperwork from a trip abroad – complex travel expenses and a report about the trip.
16.30 Set off for John Rylands library on Deansgate, Manchester, to hear Sherry Ashworth talk about her research on Enriqueta Rylands, founder of library. Sherry and I are like twins – bot the same age, both teaching creative writing at university – she at MMU, me at Salford, both have two children, one of whom married two years ago, she lives in Whitefield, I live in Radcliffe, she is Jewish, I’m married to a Jew, we are both novelists, we have both had our hair cut short recently and for gawd’s sake, we were both wearing the same earrings tonight. And I can see a lot of connections between what I’ll be doing on my sabbatical and what she is doing now. We’ll both indulge a little in using fiction to unpick fact. The talk was very interesting.
19.45 Home and time for a few domestic tasks. I decide to eat later.
20.10 Back at my computer. More looking at Twitter and more checking personal emails from six different accounts. All connected with writing, though.
21.00 Chill out time. A bite to eat and comforting rubbish on TV. I’ll probably read a little of a book I have to review before I go to sleep.
What a day!