[HPFGU-OTChatter] Re: Fanfic Ideas and the Creative Process... (was Quidditch!Ron)

[ender_w]

  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Ebony Elizabeth Thomas 
  To: HPFGU-OTChatter at yahoogroups.com 
  Sent: Wednesday, June 06, 2001 12:16 AM
  Subject: Re: [HPFGU-OTChatter] Re: Fanfic Ideas and the Creative Process... (was Quidditch!Ron)


  Hi, everyone!

  Thanks for the responses on this topic... it's one that is *really* close to 
  my heart, even more so than shipping and the HP fanfic world (j/k).

  Ever see Mr. Holland's Opus?  That just may end up being my boggart... you 
  find so *many* Mr. Hollands here... people who once upon a time had dreams 
  of their own, and either by choice or by circumstance left them to collect 
  dust on life's shelf in order to  teach generations how to dream for 
  themselves.  You see something of this on the faces of veteran 
  teachers--imagine spending your entire adult life building houses for 
  others, and in the end, not having one of your own.

  Ender wrote:
  "As far as original work goes, I've been working on two screenplays.  One is 
  nearly finished and the other is in the beginning stages.  Outside of that, 
  most of my original writing is usually done only for the benefit of my 
  students."

  Ebony answered:
  Teachers like you, Ender, deserve shiny platinum medals and a six-figure 
  salary... I know that I am not called to work with children who have special 
  needs in an educational setting.  Informally I can (all of my aunt's four 
  children are autistic--I babysit for her and her husband), but I don't think 
  I'd be able to do it in the classroom.

  Good luck on your screenplays, BTW!  I took a screenwriting class in college 
  for my theatre minor, but dramatic writing makes me itch--the conventions 
  are a bit different than for regular fiction.

  Thanks for the encouragement!  I just sent the first screenplay off to my toughest and best critic...mom.  Unfortunately she's busy with her own work right now, she's working on a graduate degree in "creative non-fiction."  She's been writing really cool stories about growing up in the 40's and 50's in a big Irish Catholic family.




  Scott wrote:
  "My English teacher and I would debate this, and usually I
  would win, characterisation *is* harder than supporting a thesis IMO."

  Ebony replied:
  Oh, heck yeah.  I used to debate with my college professors--I thought then, 
  and still think that the large majority of lit crit is crap--and I'm a grad 
  student in English *learning* crit!

  The reason why Creative Writing isn't taught extensively IMO is because 1) 
  the creative process as art is not understood, 2) most of us in English 
  education don't bother to read research, and 3) quite frankly, most English 
  teachers are *not* creative writers themselves and have no interest... which 
  is why I was able to pick up the course as a rookie teacher... as a 
  colleague said, "It's one thing to read good poetry, but it's quite another 
  to read *bad* poetry by a student who's just doing it for a grade."  I quite 
  disagree, but to each his/her own, I guess.


  My mom and I have had a longstanding feud with a few other teachers at our school who don't believe that "creative" writing is important at all and would, frankly, like to see it banished from the curriculum altogether.  "Creatvie writing" is defined by them as stories with characters.  As we try to explain, all writing is creative to some degree and giving kids the chance to be creative is not going to turn them all into novelists and leave them totally unprepared for highschool and college research papers. It is going to teach them to use their words, their vocabularies, and their ideas in new and different ways.  Even in a research paper, one needs to know how to use words to convey information in a way that interests the reader and, more importantly, doesn't plagiarize your sources.  
  My mom actually heard one of our writing teachers teach the students a particular outlining technique, prefacing it with "This is good for people who hate to write, like I do."


  ender


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