Learning by Doing: Writing a Novel in English Class

Abstract

Imagine a basketball team that spends all of its time watching videotapes of great basketball games of the past. For a particularly good move by a Cousy or a Mikan or a Chamberlain, the coach freezes the frame on the tape, discusses the significance of the player's accomplishment, and rewinds the tape so that his players can watch it again. The players take notes on different kinds of offenses and defenses, on how to shoot free throws, on effective rebounding. Once every week or so, they go through some layup drills and take some shots from the floor. But never, never, do they play an actual game. At the end of the season, they earn their letters by taking a written test, on which they are expected to identify Great Moves in Basketball by player, game, and significance, and write essays discussing offensive and defensive strategies. My scenario is ludicrous, of course. The whole purpose of a basketball team is to play basketball. And yet this imaginary basketball team represents figuratively what happens all too often in English classes studying the novel. Our students read novels; discuss point of view, tone, imagery, characterization, plot construction; articulate themes and emotional responses. And while they may learn much about particular novels and particular novelists, they still regard the novel itself as some longer version of a short story, a lengthy product that cannot be planned or crafted, but that springs through some mysterious inspiration from the forehead of The Artist. They have no sense of plan or choice on the part of novelists, no sense of their decisions on what to dramatize and what to omit, what point of view to employ, what characters to develop. Such gaps in learning can disappear f we ask our students to write a novel-if we get them into the game, so to speak. My modest proposal is not as outrageous as it sounds, for I speak from experience. Over an eight-week period, my fifteen students in junior English wrote a novel. It was only one novel, for which each student produced one chapter, and it was only ninety-one double-spaced, typed pages long. Nevertheless, it comprised all the characteristics of the books we study in school: a coherent plot, fully developed characters that experience some change in the course of the story, a sense of place, a consistent point of view. Moreover, it taught the students what a novel is: a carefully planned narrative with a distinct beginning, middle, and end. They learned how to introduce characters, how to integrate exposition with dialogue, how to keep characters alive, and how to make plot twists probable. No academic integrity suffered for the sake of this exercise in creative writing. The junior-year sequence here at Woodberry Forest is broken into trimesters, with students rotating among three teachers during the three trimesters to study respectively poetry, drama, and the novel. I saw these students for a total of only ten weeks, and in those ten weeks we studied Fitzgerald's Great Gatsby, Faulkner's Light in August, Wharton's Ethan Frome, and Conrad's Heart ofDarkness. We also covered eight units of vocabulary and wrote five analytical essays. The writing of a novel did not displace this core curriculum. It was not until we had read The Great Gatsby and were ready to start on Faulkner, in fact, that we began the process of writing our own novel. The first step was to decide on a general type-histor-