Welcome to Your High School Creative Writing Teacher newsletter. My name is Liz Prather. I am a writer and a teacher of writers. A decade ago, I proposed my first book to an editor. The book was about using creative writing in the regular ELA classroom to engage students and build community.
“Hmmm, what else you got?” the editor said.
Books about creative writing, she went on, don’t sell well. There’s more than a million ELA teachers in the United States, and while many of them may teach creative writing as an elective, only a fraction teach creative writing full time.
I went on to publish three books about writing - project-based writing, argumentative and informational writing, and building the confidence to write. But my original desire to publish a book about creative writing for high school students was never far from my mind.
I currently teach writing at a creative and performing arts school, but for seventeen years, I was a regular ELA teacher. And during that time, the very best lessons were when students were free to tell a story that only existed in their mind, a story only they could tell.
I teach broad-spectrum creative writing, which includes everything from personal narratives to screenplays to analytical essays to poetry to blogs to vignettes to short stories. All of these forms require my students to look at the world as a writer, to observe human nature, and to understand language. To tell stories, they have to understand narrative time, to organize events logically, to wrestle with abstractions. Writing’s higher-order thinking also develops discipline, fluency and identity in my students.
But most of all, it’s fun. So absorbed in the expression of the story they are trying to tell, they don’t even know you’re slipping in skills. All that good medicine is wrapped in the tasty treat of their own imagination.
The format for this newsletter is simple. I will try out a writing lesson with my students and see what happens. Sometimes, maybe nothing. Sometimes, maybe an amazing thing with wings. But whatever appears, I will post about it here in my newsletter, and you are free to try it out with your writers.
Fellow teachers, I hope you find something here you can use year after year to delight your students even as the hounds of standardized testing stand baying at your door. Throw them a bone, shut the door, and turn your kids on to the greatest test of all - their imagination against a pristine, white sheet of paper.
Let stories rule the day.