I'm a Girl!
No, I'm not, really, but that's the title of something I wrote up quickly today. See, as an exercise in creative writing and differing perspective (kinda) I gave my year ten class the following activity:
You go home tonight. You go to bed. Tomorrow morning you wake up and—gasp!—you changed sex overnight! Now you’re a boy—what happens? Write 2 or 3 short scenes showing what happens… a conversation with your mum, or a change in your morning routine, for example.
Well, like I said, I figure a teacher should demonstrate every now and then the same skills demanded from the students, and that goes beyond answering 'how do you spell...' questions in the classroom. So I wrote this thing up in about twenty minutes or so. (Always hard to tell how much time flows by when writing, actually.
***
Back to Work
For several long moments the woman stood outside the classroom, gripping the door frame so tightly that her otherwise delicate-seeming fingers turned white. The red nail polish seemed all the brighter in contrast. She could hear the happy morning chatter of the girls. Why shouldn’t they be happy? the woman thought. It was just another school day for them. After a few, deep steadying breaths she stepped into the room.
They didn’t recognize her at first. How could they? She stood there in front of form 10T, one hand alternately twisting in the fold of her skirt and then smoothing the wrinkles away. Her friend Amber had brought her on an emergency shopping trip the night before. Standing wobbly in two inch heels that her friend had assured her were ‘sensible’ but that nevertheless cruelly pinched her feet; in a skirt that felt too short and tight and with a shirt—a blouse!—that felt cut too low and exposed too much; in stockings that seemed comfortable on the walk to work but that now felt scratchy and sweaty in the stifling hot room; and otherwise dressed like any other professional woman in the workplace, she wondered what strange, surreal nightmare she’d stepped into. The colours of the clothes seemed all wrong, bright and painfully feminine. A cloying floral cloud enveloped her, her friend’s choice of perfume. The tickle of longer hair across the back of her neck was a constant distraction. The taste of lipstick was thick and strange and wrong on her lips. Everything felt wrong and surreal and she suddenly wondered what the hell she’d been thinking, coming to work like this, she should’ve taken another sick day no matter what the headmistress had said . . . .
The class fell silent as all eleven girls suddenly turned wide-eyed to this sudden feminine intrusion into their class. They somehow all seemed taller and larger than a few days ago. The woman realized that it was she who had changed, lost height and mass, her body twisted into a shape and odd proportions she’d hardly recognized when she woke up a yesterday morning.
It must have been the ever-present laptop case, held in her right hand, which confirmed her identity.
“Mis . . . ter N--?”
“Miss N--,” she answered dryly. “For now.”
***
Nothing spectacular, but gets the point across. Actually, even if not a stellar display of writing ability, it does use a number of skills that are easily taken for granted. For example--well, you can't tell because of formating issues with blogger--indenting new paragraphs. Amazing how many students don't know about that. Actually, paragraphing full-stop is a tricky skill. There's some loose skills governing when and why to start a new paragraph, but I have to admit I just kinda picked it up through practice and lots of reading. Students who don't read? You have to teach 'em how.
And, well... so much other stuff. The format of dialogue: quotation marks, commas, starting a new paragraph when a new speaker begins, or how to split a single speaker's dialogue across a single paragraph.
Or how to get information across implicitely rather than explicitly--showing nervousness or anxiety rather than just writing something like she stood nervously by the open door.... I overdo it, of course, in the above bit but I'd like to think it's to prove a point. Though I really do overdo it in my own writing.
Or use of semi-colons, something else I also abuse in my own writing, though far less now than I used to. Sentences of varying length, and the effect such variation has... something done more by instinct than intention, which makes it particularly difficult to teach. The taste of lipstick was thick and strange and wrong on her lips, I write, and I'd say the repeated use of 'and' is to capture an equal weight to each adjective as well as some of the mental confusion, or at least captured attention, of that mind. The taste of lipstick was thick, strange and wrong on her lips, reads slightly differently, no? Or maybe it's all in my own mind. Any opinions?
As an aside, I posted the update to Choices on FF.net a week or two back, and response has been mostly good, and has brought a huge jump in the number of hits to that story, which is good. The number of reviews finally breached 100, although that's not what's important. (Of course.) The writing's been kind of held up because of the demands of work, but hopefully I'll get back to it soon. In the meantime I've got other peoples' writing to look through, my students' assignments, and corrections to make and advice to offer. Wow, I sound like a real prat, don't I? What the hell do I know about writing? Just finished Death of a Salesman. You want some good writing? That's good writing. Characterization? Dialogue. Fuck. Way out of my league, painfully so.
You go home tonight. You go to bed. Tomorrow morning you wake up and—gasp!—you changed sex overnight! Now you’re a boy—what happens? Write 2 or 3 short scenes showing what happens… a conversation with your mum, or a change in your morning routine, for example.
Well, like I said, I figure a teacher should demonstrate every now and then the same skills demanded from the students, and that goes beyond answering 'how do you spell...' questions in the classroom. So I wrote this thing up in about twenty minutes or so. (Always hard to tell how much time flows by when writing, actually.
***
Back to Work
For several long moments the woman stood outside the classroom, gripping the door frame so tightly that her otherwise delicate-seeming fingers turned white. The red nail polish seemed all the brighter in contrast. She could hear the happy morning chatter of the girls. Why shouldn’t they be happy? the woman thought. It was just another school day for them. After a few, deep steadying breaths she stepped into the room.
They didn’t recognize her at first. How could they? She stood there in front of form 10T, one hand alternately twisting in the fold of her skirt and then smoothing the wrinkles away. Her friend Amber had brought her on an emergency shopping trip the night before. Standing wobbly in two inch heels that her friend had assured her were ‘sensible’ but that nevertheless cruelly pinched her feet; in a skirt that felt too short and tight and with a shirt—a blouse!—that felt cut too low and exposed too much; in stockings that seemed comfortable on the walk to work but that now felt scratchy and sweaty in the stifling hot room; and otherwise dressed like any other professional woman in the workplace, she wondered what strange, surreal nightmare she’d stepped into. The colours of the clothes seemed all wrong, bright and painfully feminine. A cloying floral cloud enveloped her, her friend’s choice of perfume. The tickle of longer hair across the back of her neck was a constant distraction. The taste of lipstick was thick and strange and wrong on her lips. Everything felt wrong and surreal and she suddenly wondered what the hell she’d been thinking, coming to work like this, she should’ve taken another sick day no matter what the headmistress had said . . . .
The class fell silent as all eleven girls suddenly turned wide-eyed to this sudden feminine intrusion into their class. They somehow all seemed taller and larger than a few days ago. The woman realized that it was she who had changed, lost height and mass, her body twisted into a shape and odd proportions she’d hardly recognized when she woke up a yesterday morning.
It must have been the ever-present laptop case, held in her right hand, which confirmed her identity.
“Mis . . . ter N--?”
“Miss N--,” she answered dryly. “For now.”
***
Nothing spectacular, but gets the point across. Actually, even if not a stellar display of writing ability, it does use a number of skills that are easily taken for granted. For example--well, you can't tell because of formating issues with blogger--indenting new paragraphs. Amazing how many students don't know about that. Actually, paragraphing full-stop is a tricky skill. There's some loose skills governing when and why to start a new paragraph, but I have to admit I just kinda picked it up through practice and lots of reading. Students who don't read? You have to teach 'em how.
And, well... so much other stuff. The format of dialogue: quotation marks, commas, starting a new paragraph when a new speaker begins, or how to split a single speaker's dialogue across a single paragraph.
Or how to get information across implicitely rather than explicitly--showing nervousness or anxiety rather than just writing something like she stood nervously by the open door.... I overdo it, of course, in the above bit but I'd like to think it's to prove a point. Though I really do overdo it in my own writing.
Or use of semi-colons, something else I also abuse in my own writing, though far less now than I used to. Sentences of varying length, and the effect such variation has... something done more by instinct than intention, which makes it particularly difficult to teach. The taste of lipstick was thick and strange and wrong on her lips, I write, and I'd say the repeated use of 'and' is to capture an equal weight to each adjective as well as some of the mental confusion, or at least captured attention, of that mind. The taste of lipstick was thick, strange and wrong on her lips, reads slightly differently, no? Or maybe it's all in my own mind. Any opinions?
As an aside, I posted the update to Choices on FF.net a week or two back, and response has been mostly good, and has brought a huge jump in the number of hits to that story, which is good. The number of reviews finally breached 100, although that's not what's important. (Of course.) The writing's been kind of held up because of the demands of work, but hopefully I'll get back to it soon. In the meantime I've got other peoples' writing to look through, my students' assignments, and corrections to make and advice to offer. Wow, I sound like a real prat, don't I? What the hell do I know about writing? Just finished Death of a Salesman. You want some good writing? That's good writing. Characterization? Dialogue. Fuck. Way out of my league, painfully so.
posted by Emlyn | 3:14 PM
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