Month: February 2019

Vanderslice, Stephanie. Rethinking Creative Writing. National Association of Writers in Education, 2015.

Vanderslice looks at the history of established creative writing pedagogy, much of which is based on the Writers Workshop established at the University of Iowa in the 1940s. The criticisms of the workshop structure are these. First, that the workshop was designed to be used with polished writers in an exclusive graduate program (and is now being used in undergraduate programs and with students who have far less experience and instruction in writing. Second, the workshop structure focuses on the product rather than the process of composing. Third, workshop rules (the writer does not speak, participants discuss a text, often without any input from the writer on their goals for the piece) can foster competitiveness and overly harsh criticism. Finally, some critics (including many editors) complain that the traditional writing workshop “norm” the writing being produced–critiques and feedback reward people who write “literary” prose on serious topics and discourage experimentation or writing “genre” work (romance, scifi, fantasy, westerns, etc).

Vanderslice notes many programs that are making changes, starting with expanding the number of genres offered from the traditional prose, poetry, and playwriting to include media arts, new technologies, creative nonfiction, graphic literature, etc.). Genres like new media often change the dynamics of the writing process because they encourage collaboration and early feedback (because it is cheaper to make changes in the planning level than the production level).

Another important shift Vanderslice advocates is using creative writing classes to teach students how to live a creative life — not in an existential way, but in a “pay the rent” way. College teaching jobs are scarce, as are editing jobs and staff writing positions, but the demand for creative minds who understand writing and narrative is out there if the writer opens their expectations and maybe learns skills beyond traditional writing–if not coding itself, for example, than at least an understanding of what coding can do.

Response: Many of the criticisms Vanderslice notes are relevant not only to new media but for traditional composition classrooms. Asking students to give each other feedback before all the writing can be finished seems a logical way to inspire stronger or less obvious ideas for the direction of a text-in-progress (before hours are spent on a less interesting path and before a writer becomes less entrenched in an idea).

It only took me 4 weeks to get a little meta–this post is not so much on the topic of transmedia composition and creative writing as it is on considering the philosophy and pedagogy behind two MOOCs on the topic offered through Coursera.

Like millions of people around the world, prior to this semester, I have signed up for MOOCs and then–yeah, nothing. I have had the same reasons for not completing (or even really starting) that everyone has used–work and “real world” tasks had a higher priority, I hadn’t paid for the course so my sense of obligation was low, being in a “class” with thousands of other people and no direct feedback was contrary to my idea of a meaningful educational experience. But for my sabbatical, I was determined to complete at least one MOOC. So far, I completed one, abandoned one, and am working on three more.

What made a successful MOOC for me

The University of New South Wales’s Transmedia Storytelling was a great experience; I came away with more ideas to try, more resources to investigate, more energy about this project. I believe the MOOC was successful because it legitimately offered the following things:

1. An anthology of points of view.  Each unit centered on a key concept (building a storyworld, planning the user experience, etc), and each unit was “hosted” by a UNSW professor with distinct expertise. Each of the 6 units of the course featured between 10-20 short videos, ranging from 1 to 15 minutes in length; each video developed one idea related to the unit’s main concept with insights from a wide range of professionals and academics from around the world — Henry Jenkins (the godfather of transmedia) contributed a half dozen “mini-lectures” carved out from the extensive interviews and roughly 20 other professionals.
2. A focus on the process, not the product. Although the course did ask participants to work on an idea throughout, the assignments focused on the process of creating a transmedia experience–it asked participants to list goals, to think about how different media could be used to complement each other, to plan how to engage different audiences with different media and platforms. It did not ask participants to actually create the product but to engage in the planning/brainstorming process.
3. An understanding of the limitations of a MOOC. This is not a college class, and this MOOC did not pretend to be. It was a survey-style introduction to a complex topic that gave the participant a trove of resources to use to learn more–including information about UNSW’s own program where some of these skills can be learned.

What made an unsuccessful MOOC experience for me

The Transmedia Writing course from Michigan State University was a far less successful MOOC (although I know they have an excellent program). To me, the lack of success came from failing to understand the difference between what an instructor can do in a classroom with one or two dozen students and what happens in a MOOC. These things made it less successful (for me):

1. One speaker with one set of experiences to draw from. The Michigan State MOOC featured one professor standing (I kid you not) against a white background. He seemed perfectly nice, but it was one guy talking about the basics of writing and story and peer review. He pleaded for participation in peer review almost to an obsessive level, which makes sense as peer review is the only feedback students in this MOOC get (note: you can’t acutally post your work to the boards for feedback without paying the $49 for a certificate, and even then, the feedback you get is from other participants in the class)
2. A focus on product over process. The course purported to walk students through three types of transmedia writing — the opening of a novel, the beginning of a screenplay, and a pitch document for a video game. The instruction was more or less “this is what the first chapter of a novel should do–now write a first chapter that follows these rules and post your finished product for others to comment on.”
3. Confusion between a MOOC and a college class. This MOOC was attempting to ask more from its participants in 6 weeks than any sane professor would ask from a student in a full semester, but more problematic than that was that the creator was trying to give participants the answer instead of giving them access to tools that would foster curiosity and exploration.

MOOCs & JCCC English

I do not foresee and doubt I would even recommend the creation of a MOOC from the JCCC English program, but as an exercise in brainstorming, I am writing this–If I were going to try to create a MOOC, I would keep these things in mind:

1. Create an anthology of voices covering the range of possible things to learn
2. Focus on encouraging participants to want to learn more, not in trying to answer a question completely
3. Distinguish between the goals of the MOOC and the goals of a traditional class.

All that being said, to create an anthology, the first and most challenging task would be to bribe, blackmail, hypnotize, and cajole my colleagues into participating in the creation of one collective MOOC, perhaps for JCCC’s literature classes — not as a substitute for any of the classes but to promote a love of stories and the desire to get more from literature. The goal would be to encourage thought about what literature is or how it affects us. The course would need to be organized into logical units (perhaps based on genres like prose, poetry, media arts, performance pieces), and colleagues would be pressed into creating short videos to explicate one literary element (character, setting, plot, flashback) or form (sonnet, ode, epic, comedy) by lecturing on one piece of literature they are passionate about. The names of all JCCC lit classes where they could learn more would be heavily featured in the materials along with an extensive list of resources.

That only sounds like a couple of hundred hours worth of work!

 That Dragon Cancer

When game designer Ryan Green and writer Amy Green’s third son, Joel, developed an Atypical Teratoid Rhabdoid Tumor (AT/RT) shortly after his first birthday, the Green family was thrown into another world. Ryan decided to tell their story in the form of a game. Using voicemails and messages from the struggle with the disease with a distinctive blank-faced animation style, the game creates a textured representation of their family ordeal.

Why is this game important?

That Dragon, Cancer is an award-winning example of a genre called a “serious game.” A serious game, according to computer scientists from the University of Toulouse, France, is any games whose purpose is not purely entertainment. Traditionally, serious games have been used in education, training, healthcare, and other fields. That Dragon, Cancer, however, falls into the literary/memoir genres (which are not categorized as “entertainment” because… I don’t know why; the same reason “Science Fiction” and “Westerns” are not classified as “Literature & Fiction” I guess).

That Dragon, Cancer has a short play-through and its interactivity is less fully developed than in most commercial console games. The story unfolds in 14 successive chapters. The storyline is tightly controlled and several scenes end with the kinds of forced failures that can feel manipulative in a first-person shooter or adventure games, but which are part of the story and the impact the designer hopes to create. The explorable worlds presented in the scenes include three types of discoveries: the narrative elements are often presented in the character’s own words: a voice message from Amy to Ryan reports her frustration with the lack of a diagnosis or an overwhelming scene where the player points to representations of Amy, Ryan, and two doctors on a child’s See ‘N Say to literally spin out the news that Joel’s cancer has returned, there are no more treatment options, and that the hospital is “very good at end of life care.”

The interactivity is not, as a cynic or skeptic might assume, gratuitous but where used successfully — in my interpretation, anyway — brings to mind Poe’s charge to have a single effect upon the audience. Mixed in with the scenes of anxiety and sadness, there are scenes of bliss that spark hope. Some of the interactivity is pure escapist — like when the player and Joel hijack the red cart used for infant chemotherapy and careen around the hospital floor in a go-cart race. Other moments are smaller, like turning the camera case toward the hospital crib and seeing the 2-year old version of Joel (who the doctor have diagnosed as deaf) bouncing up and down to music,

Is this the best way to tell this story?

There are “single effect” moments created by the interactivity that would be much more difficult to achieve in other formats; the two most effective are two of the “forced failures.” It is the forced failures that perhaps give the user the greatest insights into what the Greens are trying to communicate about the emotional roller coaster of pediatric cancer. In the first, Baby Joel is carried away by a bouquet of helium-inflated into space. The user’s task is to avoid the thorny objects that pop the gloves. But this is a forced fail because the only way to move forward is for all the balloons to pop and for Joel to fall.

The other forced fail comes in a scene that looks straight from 1980s era arcade game where Joel heads off to slay the dragon, accompanied by Tim, a young man from the Green’s church that we have learned has already died from cancer. Here again, we know we are fighting a battle that will be lost — we know because Tim is already dead, and doctor after doctor have told us that there is no hope for Joel; and yet, even knowing they will lose, the player is compelled to fight on until their lives are lost.

The drawback of telling even a purposefully designed story in this format is the reliance on functioning technology and a savvy user. I played this on both the PC and through an iPad app. It functioned much more smoothly on the PC, and that was central to the story experience. Late in the game, you are trying to calm Joel and nothing works. At first, I appreciated the unflinching look at what it is to be with a very sick child, but after trying everything in the digital space several times, it seemed clear something was wrong. As I say, at first I thought the single effect the scene was going for was the overwhelming helplessness of not being able to offer any comfort (and I am certain that was the point), but after several more attempts to get out of the scene, I saved my place on the iPad, moved to the computer, and played to the end of the scene successfully. This is not a problem I’ve ever had with a book.

What I learned from this text

As I will doubtlessly write about in a later post, a large percentage of game narratives are based on Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey. In part, this is because — as Campbell says — many stories are based on that pattern. However, another major reason for its popularity is that The Hero’s Journey is taught as the formula for a successful story in most film and game programs. That Dragon, Cancer represents an evolution beyond that basic recipe.