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modeling
One technique I have used with some success in advance writing classes is called, simply enough, modeling.
You take a strongly written, very short piece -- no more than two pages of a short story or chapter or non-fiction essay -- and you change the premise and the characters, but you keep the sentence structure and paragraphs and try to maintain the message. I had a lot of luck with an excerpt from Henry Louis Gates Jr.'s Colored People, a collection of essays.
The part I used had to do with his recollections of family meals and cooking. (You can click on the thumbnail here to read the first paragraphs.)
Students were asked to shift the identity of the narrator to a fictional character and also to shift the ethnicity of the family and its location. I had students write about Polish families, Irish families, WASP-like families, often with great success.
When first confronted with a modeling exercise, students sometimes balk. It feels like cheating, they tell me. It feels like stealing. But in fact it's just an exercise, like playing Bach and Mozart to get yourself in a certain mindset if you compose music. By forcing yourself to use the form at hand, you are also liberating yourself to think in depth about the target issues: family conflicts, ethnic identities, public personas.
So I'm thinking now it might be useful to do some modeling on the basis of Peter's small speech. I'm wondering if I can recast that paragraph and have Peter become an elderly Italian woman insulted by her son's mother-in-law, or a young Korean immigrant who takes offense at a teacher's condescension. What will have to happen is, each line of the dialogue has to be examined for those markers that make Peter who he is, and transformed.
Stay tuned.
August 1, 2005 03:34 PM
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