Part of the post-graduate English pre-sessional at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, Scotland, is an Academic Engagement class where students write four 200-300 word reflective pieces and one final creative nonfiction piece of 500 words.
Writing creative nonfiction can be a challenge for students who are solely used to writing academic essays in their undergraduate degrees. The audience level is their academic peers, so while it should not be overly academic, it should not be completely informal either. Finding this balance proves difficult for many students.
One exercise that helps students in writing creative nonfiction reflective pieces is old-fashioned letter writing. This can be done either on paper or electronically.
The students are given a topic for reflection, for example, the academic concept they will use to write an annotated bibliography in their other class on the pre-sessional programme. Students in the class who are studying an M.A. in English Literature, for example, chose concepts like Modernism in American Literature or Defamiliarization in the 20th century. They can reflect on things like why they chose the topic, what interests them about it, and what they have read so far about the concept.
The first step in the exercise is writing a letter about why they chose their concept to a 12-year-old version of themselves. They are told, within reason, that they can write as colloquially and informally as they like. The important point is that the 12 year old will be able to understand what they have written in the letter. Writing to a younger audience has the added benefit of making the students think about their concept in a different light and will hopefully increase their understanding of it.
The second step is writing a formal letter to a prominent literary figure, for example, Anton Chekov or Virginia Woolf, on the same topic. The overall information should be the same, but the informality should be removed, and it can be as academic as they like. They should, however, stay in first-person narrative mode and use “I.” Some students drift into third person, defeating one of the important purposes of the reflection in that it is about how they feel and what they have learned.
The first two steps of this exercise are beneficial for not only their creative nonfiction, but their fiction writing as well. The students are in effect writing two different first-person characters when writing the same letter to a different audience.
The third step is using both letters to produce a middle-ground piece of writing that is suitable for their peers, and this is the piece that they will submit. By reflecting both informally and formally, they will not only have a better grasp of what their concept means to them, but they will have thought about it in different ways and will make their reflective writing stronger.
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John Gerard Fagan is a Scottish writer and an assistant professor of English who has worked at Meikai University, Heriot-Watt University, and the University of Edinburgh. He writes in both English and Scots. His debut novel, Fish Town, will be published by Guts Publishing in late spring 2021.