If you were a creative writing teacher, how would you structure your class?

[DokiDokiTsuna]

A sister topic to this one~

I've never been in a creative writing class, so I don't really know what to say for myself. ^^;

Furthermore, I have never wanted to be in one, based on all the weird stories I've heard...my impression of creative writing classes is basically 'Has-been/wannabe writer goes on a power trip 101'. =/
Or even more annoying, 'famous writer with actual skills caters their teaching to such low-level amateurs that it's pretty much useless'. I could get 'HoW tO mAkE a ChArAcTeR' from any bum on the street; I don't need it from Stephen King (for example).

Anyway, back to the topic: theoretically, I think I would want to center my class around goal-setting; how to figure out what you want and then make it happen. Basically, literary analysis in reverse: instead of breaking down an existing story and pointing to evidence that shows what we think is there, imagine what you want readers to find in the story, and add evidence to make a case for it.

Unfortunately, to make it a good class, I'd need a lot of research to give examples of the things I'd recommend and show why they work...which would involve more reading than I'm probably ever willing to do. ^^;;;

[Crusoe]

Honestly, I don't think I could ever be a creative writing teacher, but I would make my students write a shit ton in a lot of different styles and give extensive feedback, because I've learnt from writing academic articles that the only way to get better at them is to write a lot and get good constructive feedback for it.

[cherrystark]

I had one creative writing teacher that I adored. I took a lot of humanities (drawing, painting, writing, theatre, etc.) classes in college and I learned that the biggest difference between loving an art class and hating it, is presentation. I have worked as a teacher and presentation makes the biggest difference in a "good" class.

My creative writing teacher wanted us to follow our instincts as writers. He took us "people watching" so we could study behavior. We also watched clips from different movies where the writers nailed solid storytelling. Like Chris Hemsworth's scene in the opening of Star Trek, pure art. It's beautiful. We read excerpts from John Green. He taught us all about Joseph Campbell's The Heroic Journey. He knew how to teach storytelling that went far beyond standard English class fare.

That same semester, I had another humanities teacher cover the Heroic Journey. It was terrible. I wanted to pull my hair out. He basically glorified the legendary artists and made them seem like literary gods, instead of people who had a solid idea and worked on their craft.

The same idea covers a lot of fields. Most people hate Shakespeare, for example, because they only read the play. Another professor I had held discussions when we "read" each play. He talked about different terms from the era that could be confusing and made references to help us understand the work. If there was an SFW version of the play, we had class potlucks and watched the play. If not, we watched Youtube clips of Branagh's performances. He knew that Shakespeare is best watched performed. At the end of the semester, I grew to love Shakespeare. My friend who took Shakespeare from another professor, despised it because they only read the plays and took impossible tests.

[NatAberdeen]

I've never been in a creative writing class, so I honestly don't know what I would do if I taught one. For one though, I would stress the importance of community feedback. Nobody starts out good, so it's important to hear other people's opinions and takes on what you write.

I would also emphasize the fact that your first draft is never your final draft. It's actually pretty convenient that you posted this because I recently just thought of a series of stages in the writing process (I doubt I'm the first person to think of it though) that I've been meaning to share. Pardon the analogy, but: Skeleton, muscles, and skin. The skeleton stage is writing bare structure of the story, figuring out your plot and knowing what you want to write about. Then the muscles go over the skeleton. Muscles make the story move. It's taking the broad plot and diving deeper and making it finer, actually writing dialogue, interactions, and narration. Finally, the skin stage is the writing nuances you include. Strong words, vivid descriptions, and humor if necessary. It takes a lot of refining, re-refining, and redoing, and I would make sure that my students know that.

[linaket]

I was a creative writing professor.

Depends on what level the class is

Intro/200(0) level:
Structure generally depends on if it is a Mon/Wed/Fri class or Tue/Thur. I prefer and usually chose Tue/Thur with longer classes. One day is for reading essays on writing/discussing technique, the other is for critique. 2-3 students per week turn in on Thursday (the day for the discussion of writing technique/essays) and Tuesday is the day for group crits on other students work.

300(0) level or higher, it's just all turning in your writing and discussing it. Usually you turn in one class, discuss the next. class and next group turns in. Maybe a few random essays brought in for quick discussion if the class is of a longer length (in grad school my classes were 2x a week, 3hours long, so more common in that) but otherwise at this level its generally accepted that what you need is focus on your actual work.

This is more for fiction and nonfiction and novel writing seminars, though I preferred my poetry ones that were structured this way as well. I've heard of people having poetry seminars where people just bring in their work and discuss in the same day but I always prefer letting students (or myself) sit with a work for a little while in order to form proper critiques and discussion points. It also gives people time to think of other works to suggest for the writers to check out in order to compliment their work.

[imagineemmajun]

I have been to a couple of creative writing classes and I've done it a few different ways. In one we started building a project from the go and as we tackled different subjects (characters, settings, perspective) we added them to our plan so that by the end we had a first chapter. I've also just done deconstruction of existing characters, stories, settings, etc and then had assigned short writing exercises as homework. Both ways were fun.