On the Importance of Play

(note: this was originally written as a critique for the "Teaching Creative Writing" class I am taking at UMass Boston as I pursue my MFA in poetry)

A Critique of Janet Burroway’s “Imaginative Writing”

                The element of Janet Burroway’s “Imaginative Writing” that I appreciate the most is the emphasis placed early on the value of play.  Her vignette on a class day combining choreographers and writers was inspiring.  Both groups of students are trying to create an experience for the audience to witness, feel, and engage with.  While the writers were unsure, looking for what to do “right,” the choreographers were focused on exploring what was possible, laughed off their missteps, and kept going.  This was a very, very useful metaphor for a play-centric approach to early stages of writing that suggested a lot of ways creative writing students can learn from the practice of other forms of art and make “serious” art without worrying whether we’re doing things “right” or not.  Mess around.  See what happens.  Keep fiddling.  Keep tweaking it.  Let it be what you’re focused on consciously and unconsciously, allowing it to continue to evolve.  Disappointingly, this book did not live up to that promise and could use a good dose more of play in its prompts and samples.

                While there are interesting things in a wide variety of the prompts and samples, maybe because of the sections this book is broken into, or maybe due to Burroway’s biases, the prompts and much of the model texts seem to be concentrated more on capturing what is the focus of the chapter than exploring it with/through a sense of play.  This is vital if an emphasis on the importance of play towards imaginative writing can actually be instilled. 

In this day and age, play is something that has to be retaught to students who are out of grade school.  Play is seen in our society as important to early childhood.  It is how children are often allowed to take in the world and develop the skills needed to learn.  Then around middle school we are taught that it is no longer a form of learning and engaging with the world, but a “childish way” that must be “put aside.”  This is especially true for “serious” writers in high school or college.  This is especially true for millennials and current students, many of whom grew up around television, internet, and videogames as forms of fun: a much more passive, less tactile or full body form of play.  Play is not an active or allowed element for most students in regards to creating “serious” work.

Let me share an example from my own life: I am a college junior in a theater class where there is a guest instructor leading a workshop on clowning.  I see this opportunity as giving no direct challenge to me as I am used to what I believed to be clowning around in my art and everyday life.  After some exploratory group exercises, one by one he tells us to walk across the room and let something surprise us, deal with it as a clown would, and continue on.  Halfway through, I fall down.  He tells me I planned it.  I honestly thought I surprised myself, or at least wanted to believe that.  He says no, go again.  Allow yourself to be surprised.  Before I am even halfway through a sudden noise in the room triggers me to imagine a wasp that I must swat.  By the time I finally catch it in my hands it in my hands to kill it, it stings me.  And my hand swells.  It swells so large that it is soon stuck to the ground until I can squeeze out the swell and move on my way.  Obviously, this is a much more vivid scene than falling down.  And it explores something very human.  Safe to say, it’s also a series of events that I never could have thought of if I hadn’t been forced to surprise myself and actually play.  I learned to let my inner critic go, be in the moment, and do. 

Learning and adapting the skill of play made me a more creative writer.  Instead of worrying about what was “right” and making my edits and choices relatively simple once I had come up with a concept, I learned to explore what is possible.  I began writing pieces in my notebook randomly that might go nowhere.  Or might become one of my best works for that time period.  So now how does one actually teach play?  There are two overlapping methods I would like to propose:

(1) Forcing students to have no choice but to create new and differently.

(2) Learning from the methods and products of other art forms. 

                Forcing Students to have no choice but to create means, like birds thrown out of nests so they can fly, pushing them out of their comfort zones and watching with a caring eye.  This means encouraging experimentation.  This means giving prompts that might include word banks, weird challenges, and surreal images that gives them no choice but to create.  It means using an abstract piece of art for an ekphrastic writing assignment.  It means gathering lines of imagery, being given a different context than the place they were gathered in, and forcing students to write.  If there is no way students can write something “correctly” or “incorrectly” but have challenges they must contend with, they will have almost no choice but to write something in an imaginative way that pushes new possibilities out of them.

Like the promise of working with dancers, students should learn process, value, and other skills from other arts.  Pull imagery from a painting.  Like the jazz musician, explore the value of listening and what it can give you to play off of.  Play with movement and explore what the body does to craft a walk that then becomes an improvising voice that then becomes the speaker of a monologue that once embodied is then frantically written from.  Then worry about what the monologue is doing and what bigger work it may or may not be part of.  Chances are students have at least a mild background in some other art form, the very least as an appreciator, and can explore what they value.  What are the elements they love in a painting or an album?  How can they make it happen in their work?

While doing a class or homework exercise (a “try this” as Burroway calls them) focusing on trying to capture a reality or vision are useful, an intro to imaginative writing should force more play out of its students.  If they’re choosing to take a writing class, chances are they already have at least a few things they want to write about.  And will.  Force them to play around and explore what else is possible.  Like the two minutes of clowning that have made me a better writer ever since then, forcing students to play will better prepare them to write what they really want to write.  Besides, who doesn’t like a good excuse for play?