creative writing and thinking through use of the novel
The Namesake
by Jhumpa Lahiri.
This is an excellent opportunity to work closely with language in a way that privileges it over plot. Many students read for content – what’s happening now, what will happen next – but skim over the “boring parts” where the author has painstakingly created a setting in order to bring the characters and their situations more fully to life. By creating a situation where a close attention to detail is essential, I hope to help students understand how a writer creates the entire picture that makes a piece of fiction “work.” This knowledge will help them in any creative writing they do from poetry to prose to script, but it will also lay a solid foundation for the telling detail, the precisely right example, the perfect observation that moves essays, persuasive, narrative, and argumentative writing from the serviceable into the spectacular.
By investigating how an author places one word next to another and creates people, places, events, and motion, and by having them try to accomplish this feat themselves, I hope to plant an interest in fine tuning their own writing of any type. This will help them not only in terms of exams, college entrance essays, and college papers, it will allow them to communicate more fluidly and to recognize and appreciate good writing when they find it.
I called the last lesson prior to the presentations “This is Hard Work!” because I want students to understand that I know how hard it is, and that part of what I want is for them to know it too. I believe that this can work to assist the reluctant writers especially – those who think that everyone else just sits down and composes with ease while they’re the only ones who sweat over every word and never know where to put the commas. These writers are very dear to me, and it is important that lessons be developed that foster the exposition of understanding in terms other than the straight essay writing they have learned to dread. I think this unit plan can encourage them by permitting their non-textual intelligence to be primary in a place where that is not usually the case – namely, the English Language Arts Classroom.
This unit plan was designed with an 11th grade honors English elective in mind, although it could also be used with a very motivated 12th grade class in the middle of the semester -- after they’re used to the teacher and before they’re completely distracted by their pending release.