I began teaching students how to write stories through my work in college admissions advising. During application season, I met one-on-one with students as they tried to condense the most important parts of themselves into 650 words. And in each cohort, without fail, I saw the same pattern.
About half of my students dove straight into the most dramatic or most painful moment of their lives: losing a parent, their battle with depression, an experience with assault—the list went on. Their ideas revolved around the belief that to be good, a story must be shocking.
The other half wrote nothing at all. They were convinced their lives weren’t interesting. They had no big tragedies, nothing to shock an admissions officer into accepting them to their dream school. Or maybe they did, but the thought of putting those experiences into words felt unbearable.
Faced with a blank page and the expectation to write something meaningful, they were split between two options: write a terribly devastating story or write nothing at all.
At first, I thought this was just a quirk of the college application process. The pressure on that essay can send the mind to dark places.
But when I began teaching intro-level fiction, I found my college students in the exact same position. Faced with a blank page and the expectation to write something meaningful, they were split between two options: write a terribly devastating story or write nothing at all.
When students chose the first option in their fiction, protagonists were killed and revived for shock factor, arguments were elevated to screaming matches, and antagonists committed ultimate acts of betrayal. The most extreme stories produced the strongest reactions in their peers, so trauma became currency.
It’s no wonder. As media consumers, we understand that intensity equals excitement and interest (and clicks). However, in early writers, this desire for shock often pushes them to either mine their trauma for content or to manufacture violent intensity for the sake of drawing their reader in.
On the flip side, other students struggled to find tension and conflict at all. Things would happen on the page, but their work felt more like a report than a story. We tell students to write what they know, but what if they can’t identify the dramatic potential? How could I teach my students to see the drama in every moment, even the ones without violence, grief, or trauma?
How can we help students write from their personal traumas without feeling like they have to perform them? And how can we teach writing in a way that validates all experiences without reinforcing the idea that only the most shocking stories are worth telling?
I found the answer in the very first step of writing: inspiration. Students need to see that they have lots to contribute to the world of storytelling, and offering robust brainstorming activities gives students a place to begin. Below, I share two exercises that expanded my students’ foundation.
Four-Square Brain Dump
The Four-Square Brain Dump is a simple, low-stakes exercise that often unlocks surprising ideas. I have students divide a blank page into four squares. Each section gets a different label, but I don’t tell them until right before they begin working on that section:
- People (family, friends, teachers, mentors, rivals, anyone significant in your life, real or fake)
- Places (your childhood home, a grocery store, a city you visited, a city you want to visit)
- Memories (moments in your life that you can remember, happy, sad, funny, infuriating, etc.)
- Things You Know a Lot About (hobbies, skills, obsessions, facts they could teach someone else—this one usually takes them by surprise, but it’s essential!)
You have to write faster than the little devil on your shoulder can tell you the idea is stupid.
Then, for five minutes per square, they brain-dump as much as they can, anything that comes to mind. There are no wrong answers. The only rule is that their pencil must keep moving. I like to tell them, “You have to write faster than the little devil on your shoulder can tell you the idea is stupid.”
After 20 minutes, their papers are filled. I ask them to circle three ideas that they’d be interested in exploring deeper. Of course, they can circle more, but three is the absolute minimum.
With at least three ideas to give them a starting place, we discuss combinations. Students often falter when drawing on their own experiences for fiction because they believe that life and stories exist in a 1:1 ratio. So I use this activity to teach them that their passions/experiences/observations are ingredients to a story, not the entire thing. Why? Because fiction is a metaphor for life, and metaphors take a bit more shaping and precision.
Many students are stumped at this point, so we phone a few experts to see combination in action. We start by reading Adam Johnson’s “Teen Sniper” and try to pry apart what ideas Johnson may have started with. At its heart, it’s a story about an emotionally stunted teen boy and his attempts at friendship and love. This is where I often joke and presume that Johnson’s first circle was something like “awkward first date.” But Johnson does not stop there—he combines this awkward first date idea with this strange and intriguing world where a young boy is a sharp-shooting sniper. Here I presume that maybe Johnson had something in his fourth box circled, something like “Criminal Minds” or “high ranking CEOs.” Perhaps Johnson looked at these few ideas and conceived “Teen Sniper.”
This works for non-dystopian stories, too. We then turn to reading Julie Orringer’s “Pilgrims,” a bit of a strange story about a family having Thanksgiving with strangers. After reading, I turn the surmising to my students, asking them what they imagine Orringer might have written in her Four-Square activity. One student might guess she had something in Box 3—something about a childhood friend falling from a tree. Another student might guess this is a result of a different memory of a strange Thanksgiving.
Regardless of what they guess, the goal is to have them see that we can draw on life experiences for fiction, but we have to do a bit more than a one-to-one retelling. All of our experiences, hobbies, memories, and fears are possible components in a story.
Spark: Collection of Random Ideas
Another approach is to teach them to find inspiration beyond the confines of their experiences. To demonstrate, I pass out notecards, each with a phrase I find intriguing in some way. As students shuffle through the stack, I tell them they are simply looking for a Spark, some line that makes them stop for a moment and think, huh. That’s the card they’re meant to choose. Using that notecard, they then write whatever comes to them. This can be a continuation of the next sentence, a completely new world in which this phrase feels true, or even just a focus on one specific word.
After this activity, I pass out a second set of notecards. This time, I don’t preface, but the same rules apply: search for a Spark then write.
By the end of this 10-15 minute exercise, I explain to them that these are all selections from within the Notes app on my iPhone. I then show them the single note I have titled “Collection of Random Ideas” and scroll for several scrolls to show them just how many random phrases, news headlines or images I’ve taken down. And just like they shuffled through cards to find one Spark, I shuffle through this note when I’m looking for inspiration.
It’s often at this point where I will scroll to a specific section and read out what I find to be the most useless of the Sparks in that note: “How many licks to finish a dumdum without chewing?” I explain that while this will likely never make it into the stories I plan to write, it’s more indicative of the active ear I have tuned to my inner thoughts. What would have once been a passing pondering is now immortalized in this electronic form. And while many of those immortalizations are seemingly useless, I’m now trained to listen a bit more closely to those passing thoughts. One of them is bound to be useful eventually.
When students feel that their personal pain is the only thing worth writing about or when they relive difficult experiences without the right support, it can lead to exhaustion.
The goal here is less about giving students a very intimate glimpse into my mind, and more about teaching them the necessary skill of observation which will allow them to find meaning in small things as much as they find meaning within extremity. I then encourage them to start their own collection of random ideas. Throughout the semester, I check in with students about their collections. I even sometimes ask them to repeat this initial exercise with the notecards using their own or a classmate’s ideas.
Brainstorming can give students the option to write beyond their most shocking and painful experiences, but barring students from writing about adversity would invalidate one of the most natural impulses behind writing. For many people, writing is a means of processing emotion or experiences. At the same time, when students feel that their personal pain is the only thing worth writing about or when they relive difficult experiences without the right support, it can lead to exhaustion.
Creative imagination isn’t always obvious, and when we don’t give tools to generate ideas, we are skipping a foundational skill that can set our students up to never run out of inspiration.
Also by Mary Shaver: “Distillation and Transplantation: Teaching Early Writers to Transform Lived Experience into Fiction“
Featured photo by DS stories.
