Social Media and Creative Writing

Social media has introduced people to a new way of looking at literature and ways of conducting literature. While browsing, I came across a truly intriguing idea that would interest students who may not have a genuine appreciation for poetry. Most students find poetry to be boring or difficult to understand, but by giving it a modern interpretation may entice students to engage with the idea that poetry can be entirely different than they could have imagined. A user on the site "Novel Novice" introduced an idea that was so ingenious regarding having students design either a short story or poem by using words or ideas found by browsing sites like twitter and facebook. The intent would be that students would engage with their social media, which is presumably used daily, in a completely different way. The task would be to browse for about an hour "eavesdropping" on others online interactions then collect comments that you find either amusing or interesting. Once the student has collected about a page worth of comments, they must some how find a way to piece together the words or phrases to make a coherent creative story or poem.

I think this assignment would go over really well in the classroom because it can guide students away from the cliche of poetry being entirely over sophisticated and instead make it completely approachable. If I were to give this assignment I would first inform my students to pick APPROPRIATE material. Sometimes if you give students an inch of freedom they will take a mile. Second, I would urge them to use grammatical errors they find and perhaps highlight or underline them to show they understand the grammar or spelling is incorrect, but that is how they found the items they chose. These words or phrases they are using are “borrowed” so it will be difficult for them to give a works cited page due to privacy issues. I would go on faith that these words and phrases are in fact borrowed and not completely fabricated. I believe I would have the students try out this task as a poem using only single words they found first just to introduce them to the idea of “Social Media Creative Writing” and then have them branch out to complete a short story made up of short phrases. The students would be very amused by what their classmates have found through their computer research and how they interpreted those words and phrases.

This activity may also be an opportunity to teach children about other in class activities regarding the same idea. “Exquisite Corpse” is a game I have played in my poetry classes where students are given a sheet of paper and they must write down a word which will then be folded and put into an object to later be drawn. Students will then be grouped together and as a group form a poem by picking at random words provided from their classmates. This activity would perhaps even be a precursor to the online assignment to familiarize the students with the concept of creative writing.

As a related activity, students could write a short story using a Twitter feed using a hashtag. They would be able to, as a class, create a story with each part only using 140 characters or less. I would have to first introduce the students to Twitter and show them how to get an account and essentially how to use it. We can take a trip to the computer lab and go round robin posting our contribution of 140 character or less. I would then piece together the story and present it to the class during our next session and perhaps post it for everyone to view and show their friends and families how we were able to use social media to construct a truly creative online short Twitter story.



http://novelnovice.com/2010/04/14/creative-writing-prompt-social-media-musings/

http://learning.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/03/28/less-is-more-using-social-media-to-inspire-concise-writing/