クリエイティブ・ライティングのこと

Abstract

When I attended the 6th JACET summer seminar, I had my first experience in "creative writing," which was not only perplexing but also trying. In this course we were often asked to write under unexpected titles, such as "I woke up one morning and found I had been reborn as an opposite sex." Thus we were always required to get away from our ordinary way of thinking and viewing things. As afinal assignment we were told to pick up a stick or a rock, always carry it with us and create a unique character by observing it carefully. Though it may be next to impossible to immediately introduce this way of writing into English composition classes, it seems desirable to make a good use of it. As I pointed out, many students seem to show interest in "English composition" as well as in "English conversation." But I discovered to my surprise that most students had no knowledge of building paragraphs. They always began a new line with a new sentence and seemed to have no sense of expressing a particular idea in one paragraph with several sentences. This is partly because they are accustomed to "put into English" one isolated Japanese sentence, and partly because they have had no special training even in writing in Japanese. Such being the case, I think it is urgently necessary to train students in basic rules and skills for paragraph writing, and then we should sometimes have them work in the "creative writing." The story that follows is an experiment of "creative writing" on the part of the teacher.