Samantha NeCamp & Connie Kendall Theado
Assignments & Activities Archive
Assignment Description
“Don’t wait for the muse. As I’ve said, he’s a hardheaded guy who’s not susceptible to a lot of creative fluttering. This isn’t the Ouija board or the spirit-world we’re talking about here, but just another job like laying pipe or driving long-haul trucks. Your job is to make sure the muse knows where you’re going to be every day from nine ’til noon. Or seven ’til three. If he does know, I assure you that sooner or later he’ll start showing up.” ~Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
Truth be told most writers we know, including ourselves, have dabbled in magical thinking from time to time. Whether it’s waiting for creative inspiration to strike or simply indulging our belief in genius, karma, or luck, we soon discover that writing doesn’t happen by chance. Instead, and just as Stephen King suggests in the epigraph above, writing happens deliberately— when we start showing up for the work, swap out our faith in the muse for a dose of self-reliance, and make time to write. While tempting, the myth of the muse is ultimately a trap, not just because it offers us easy refuge from the everyday hard work of writing but also because it enables another stubborn and equally unproductive fiction: that writing itself is a solitary act. Perpetually waiting for the muse keeps us from seeing ourselves as part of a wider community of writers with whom we might collaborate. Despite our field’s well-established emphasis on collaboration in writing (see Alexander; Ede & Lunsford; Martorana; van Steendam; Winzenried et al.), many writers—experienced and novice alike—are reluctant to seek out both readers for our unfinished work and collaborators with whom we might compose. When we do choose people to collaborate with on writing projects, whether as readers or as co-authors, we often choose those closest to us, either in physical space or in ideological stance. In other words, we still rely too much on chance to find our writing partners—being at the right place, with the right colleagues, at the right time—rather than deliberately cultivating productive writing relationships. We then bring that attitude to the classroom, relying primarily on chance or a vague sense of similarity in style or writing topic to pair students for peer review activities. While there is much to be said for sharing space and stance, actively pursuing collaborative relationships with people whose strengths, styles, and stances are different from one’s own can be much more productive in actually improving writing. To do that, however, it is essential for writers to know their own strengths and weaknesses and to feel comfortable sharing and valuing those writing proclivities during interactions with other writers. In this sequenced assignment, we invite students to begin where they more typically end: with a written reflection on their beliefs about themselves as writers and about the nature of the writing process generally, drawing from their past writing experiences to create a portrait of themselves. We then ask students to share their self-portrait with others to identify classmates with whom they might usefully collaborate. By using a 2-minute round-robin interaction, similar to a speed-dating scenario, this process encourages students to gain insight into each other’s writing strengths and weaknesses while avoiding the uncomfortable silences that often characterize getting-to-know-you activities. Keeping this pace also allows for the activity to happen in a single 50-minute class period. Next, students are asked to reflect again in an out-of-class composition, but the focus this time is on the round-robin interactions in an effort to identify classmates with whom they do and do not have common qualities. Using student reflections to guide us, we can craft peer review groups built on the premise of dissimilarity, looking for those students whose skills compliment and fill gaps rather than those who are bonded by shared interests, topics, or stances. Following peer review and the completion of the project at hand, we again foreground reflection so that students can discover what feedback was most helpful for their writing process and identify the kinds of reviewers they should seek out in the future.