Ashok Sharma
Creative writing means writing about events in an imaginative way.It includes writing plays, poems, stories, poems etc that fall outside the boundaries of normal academic, professional, journalistic and technicalforms of writing. Creative writing sharpens the students’ minds and ability to express their thoughts clearly and use their imagination to express their ideas in their own way. It also makes them familiar with literary devices and develops their critical thinking skills.It must be borne in mind that every child has got a creative mind in respect of one art or the other.What is needed is to provide suitable and congenial atmosphere to the child to develop his creativity in the field of his interest.It is here that the the teacher is required to play an important role by organising classroom activities aimed at identifying and stimulating the students’ interest in creative writing and encouraging them to bloom and display their creative abilities. For this purpose, it is imperative that the teacher should himself be interested in creative writing.He should himself be a voracious reader and must have read a lot about different genres such as poems, stories, novels, drama etc. To start with, the teacher ought to develop sufficient vocabulary of the students and teach them how to compose small paragraphs , essays etc preferably of narrative and descriptive nature starting from guided to unguided ones, from simple to complex and advanced. The teacher must keep in mind that the students should never be encouraged to memorise or cram essays, letters and other forms of compositions. They must be motivated to write the pieces of compositions themselves, the teacher’s role being restricted to only helping and facilitating them to construct the new knowledge themselves. Once the students have acquired working vocabulary and mastered the art of writing compositions, the teacher should encourage them venture for creative writing such as writing short stories and poems.
In order to cultivate the skill of writing stories, the teacher ought to select five-six stories about animals, nature, plants, religion etc suitable to the aptitude, taste and level of the students. The teacher should then tell the story to the children in a loving and affectionate manner three or four times. He should arouse the interest of the students by asking them such questions as ‘how does the story begin?”What happens in the middle?”What causes problem to the hero?” How is the problem solved and how does the story end?’Then the teacher must encourage the students to give their views about various characters-their appearance, manners, role etc? in the story.The teacher should make use of appropriate words to help the students describe the hero, villain and other characters as well as main events of the story .The students should, then, be arranged in groups in such a manner that the group comprises students of different abilities.They must be asked to reconstruct the story by including new events or excluding the old ones in order to make it more interesting.Sufficient time must be given to them and they must be asked to work in groups and present their new version of the story as their project work.They need to be guided that many ideas about the new story will be generated in their minds but only one will be followed up on the basis of consensus in the group.The teacher must review and edit the stories by deleting unnecessary words and adding new words, of course, with the active participation of the students and then award the best story and display it prominently in the classroom.
The students must also be given practice in the use of linkers, connectives, coherence and other semantic markers to tell them how each part follows the other and how the story develops or revolves around the main character and theme.Then itmis the job of the teacher to make the students aware of the value of re-reading the story in order to assess whether it makes sense or not and whether it has a beginning, a middle and an end.To sustain the interest of the students, they can be provided outlines and the mes of more short stories by the teacher and then masked to complete the stories.Then, their work needs to be reinforced and appreciated to boost their morale and sustain their interest in this art.Story writing competitions should also be organised from time to time to provide opportunity to the students to display their creative talents and develop more interest in this useful art.
In order to stimulate the students’ interest for writing a poem, the teacher ought to select 5-6 poems suitable to the level of the students. The poems should, then, be recited one by one first by them teacher and then by the teacher with proper rhyme and intonation. The teacher should lay stress on the significance of unusual combinations of words, importance of rhyming words and comparisions such as similes and metaphors while reciting the poem. The next job of the teacher is to ask the students to prepare a list of rhyming words such as net , wet, met, get, set, let etc.or ten, men , den, pen etc. They must be motivated to write short sentences using them in creative and unusual ways and make short verses with them. They need to be encouraged to cultivate the habit of reading short stories and poems of great writers. The students need a lot of encouragement and appreciation from the teacher to develop the skill of creative writing.A lot of patience is also required on the part of the teacher to develop this useful skill in the students. It is a time consuming and laborious activity, which, if cultivated in the children at the right time can help them discover their creative talents and make their valuable contribution as poets and writers.
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