Writing for the Web: Twitter as a Starting Point for Breaking News

In our fast-paced world of Tweets and instant messages, drawing a map with crayons and writing with a pen on paper provide a welcome change of pace in a magazine writing class. By starting the semester with something familiar (a childhood neighborhood), this activity motivates students to find their writing voice and tap into their creative spirit. In a fun, relaxed way, they learn to reconstruct relevant details and scenes for the narrative essay they’ll write for their first assignment. Explanation of the activity This activity takes less than two hours. 1. Give each student a large sheet of paper and a few crayons. The students will be surprised because they probably haven’t colored since grade school. Ask them to sketch a colorful map of the earliest neighborhood they can remember. Include as much detail as possible. Artistic ability doesn’t matter. A rough sketch with stick figures is just fine. • Who lived where? • Where were your friends’ houses? • Where did you play? • Where did the weird people live? • What were your secret places? • What places were off-limits? 2. After 10 minutes, ask students what they noticed while drawing their map. Did memories come flooding back? The map is a good way to access memories the students might not have thought about for a long time. It works for anything — a house, a school or a workplace. 3. Ask volunteers to explain their maps. Point out how the story they tell isn’t really about the place. It’s about the people and what they did there. 4. Now that some memories have been dislodged, ask the students to write a story from their map that holds special meaning. Don’t try to explain the whole neighborhood, but pick one scene that happened in one place. Before writing, take a few minutes to really see it. Deepen the image by asking yourself these questions: • What do you see? • What’s the light like? • What do you feel on your skin? • What do you hear? • What do you smell? • What do you want? • What do you taste? • What do you think? 5. Next, students free-write — not on a computer, but on paper. They write as fast as they can without stopping, going back, crossing out or changing anything. 6. After 10 minutes, ask the students if other things occurred to them as they were writing. Invariably, they talk about other memories. When writing about personal experiences, freewriting is a good way to deepen those memories. Explain that one of the hardest parts of writing about personal experience is silencing our internal editor. It’s our editor that drags us Schwalbe | 3