MacDonald, John D. Guidelines and Exercises for Teaching Creative Writing. Creative Writing in America.

MacDonald, who has written more than 70 novels and 500 short stories (according to his biography in the back of this book), says his teaching experiences with writing are limited (83), mostly at summer conferences and, interestingly enough, a semster at New College here in Florida. This might speak once again to the tendency of colleges hiring actual practitioners of creative writing -- journalists and authors, rather than scholars of writing -- into the creative writing programs, which might be another reason why composition and creative writing are considered different entities in academia.

However, MacDonald's point is well taken: In order to be a creative writer, you must be both prolific and prepared to work. (Perhaps this is why authors make better creative writing teachers -- we know the art of it, as well as what it takes to do the actual work and have a finished product.)

MacDonald states basic statements that are thought of as common truisms of all writers: That you must read a lot in order to be a good writer, in order to find out what's been written before, what's cliched, what history we have in political, social, philosophical, economic and scientific thought, mental images of different settings, and basic understandings of artful sentence structures (83-84). This will help with a writer's need to create reader empathy -- more than relating a writer's thoughts and intentions, (s)he must also relate it in a way that is understandable and relatable to the reader, so the message is both conveyed and meaningful.

Some exercises MacDonald does that I thought interesting include:

1. Point of view: Create 10 different characters who have witnessed a car accident at a familiar intersection. Now, tell the story of the accident from a first-person account of each character's point of view, including what was happening in the character's life before and after the accident happened. This can help readers understand that writing is more than just "beautiful self-expression," and begins to detach them from ego-image writing and instead focuses them on a world of character, or different voices, or different rhythms of speech (85).

2. Dialogue: Make two strangers have a conversation with each other. They must reveal who they are, what they think, what they believe, how they live, through conversation. The writer can make the students get into a "hot dispute about a matter that the student does not feel strongly about." This helps students understand that a "story is something happening to somebody" (85).

3. Demand production: MacDonald recommended five thousand words of fiction per week as a "meager minimum." He believes the teacher does not have to read it all, but can select students at random to read specified portions of their work for class, for open criticism by all. The students will learn more about production and writing than by anything the instructor critiques on the page, MacDonald believes (85-86).