I teach college fiction, poetry, and music journalism, so it’s not rare for me to go down a music rabbit hole. About a year ago, I found myself nostalgic for ’90s radio, and I was trying to remember the songs I liked best. One of the first songs to come up was The Verve Pipe’s “The Freshmen,” and as the chords started, I shivered. It was such a visceral memory, almost like a sound painting. But the problem became evident pretty quickly:
This is not a likable narrator. He’s making every excuse possible, the biggest justification for his girlfriend’s abortion and/or suicide being that they were only freshmen.
That’s not wonderful. But what is wonderful is the lines that come in front of it—and I immediately knew it was going to lead to some strange things in the classroom. I have used this with adult learners, advanced classes, poetry classes, and, ironically, freshman intro classes, all to great success.
As a writing exercise, I first ask students what they have agency over in their own lives—and then what they don’t. After that, I tell them a little bit about the song, and I share these lyrics:
I can’t be held responsible
She was touching her face
I won’t be held responsible
She fell in love in the first place
In fiction, the first goal is to make a list of things that people would not want responsibility for; this has run the gamut from “grandfather dies and man has to quit high powered job to run a bodega” to “a dog she doesn’t want keeps coming around.” Then I tell them to pick whichever one they think has the most potential for conflict and anxiety and to force a character that they’ve worked with in a previous story into the situation. Because, of course, that character is in a different story and shouldn’t be held responsible for a problem in another story. In poetry, we make a similar list, but then we see if taking the words “I can’t be held responsible” off the table completely still clarifies the situation and shows a rejection of responsibility.
Most of my students are new to being responsible for themselves, much less anything else—a relationship, a pet, a friendship that becomes complicated, sometimes even figuring out how to do laundry. This exercise forces them to think about what stumbling blocks they have in their own lives and then forces them to go further. What is the worst thing you could do that you wouldn’t want to be held responsible for? It is the only prompt I’ve used that, within the first minute, caused every single pencil to be moving. Because, really, we all want to be the hero of our own stories, but we know the stories in which we don’t look good, and if we fictionalize or explain ourselves in fiction or poetry, it feels a little safer to make a mistake.
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Katie Darby Mullins teaches creative writing at the University of Evansville. She is an editor with both Measure Books and the University of Evansville Press, and she has work forthcoming or printed in The Rumpus, Barrelhouse, Iron Horse, BOAAT Press, Harpur Palate, and Prime Number. She is also the executive writer for Adam Duritz & Friends’ Underwater Sunshine Fest.