Thursday, January 14, 2010

My ideal Creative Writing class setup

If I ran a university's Creative Writing department, I'd design a curriculum to fit these requirements:

1. No more than 10 students in any CW class.
-The concept of "workshopping" requires a small-group environment, so that everyone can be heard, and adequate time can be allotted for each student to read his/her writing, and have it critiqued.

2. Every CW class will last at least 2 hours per day.
-see above for time allottment. This timeframe will also allow...

3. Multiple in-class exercises to promote character building and setting construction.
-These exercises would be based around off-the-wall objects from which students will design characters and settings to be used in later writings. To accomplish these exercises...

4. Every CW class will take place in a computer lab.
-This prevents common wrist problems from occurring, and ensures every exercise will be legible and able to be saved, to a student's flash drive or online.

5. Introductory CW class will include materials to instruct in critique and revision techniques.
-This allows students who are not familiar with a particular literary form to learn about it, and learn how to give constructive criticism and apply others' criticism in revising their writing.

6. Every CW class will require no more than 4 major writing assignments, each of which will be a different literary type chosen by the student.
-Two writing types should be areas in which he or she is familiar and relatively comfortable, and two should be areas in which he or she has little or no familiarity.

7. Publishing information will be made available to Senior-level CW students, who can prove that the writing they wish to publish has been revised at least twenty times.
-This should help students choose what they wish to publish well in advance, and require them to invest a significant level of effort and ability into their writing.


Yeah, that would be awesome.

Mostly an amalgamation of Clay Randolph's general Creative Writing class at OCCC, and James Dolph's Fundamentals of CW I and II at UCO.

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