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THE NOVEL
Curriculum Connections: Student Handout
Select one the projects below to further explore the novel. Each project will require you to:
- Research a topic or idea that will take you deeper into what it means to write a novel.
- Plan or design something that allows you to communicate your new knowledge and understanding of the creation of a novel to others.
- Share your work through the presentation or display of the finished product.
Project #1: Being Open
Curriculum Focus: Creative Writing
Joyce Carol Oates
National Book Award
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I always tell my students the same thing. And that's to live life, and to read very voraciously without any definite program. To travel, to meet people, to talk to people, to listen very carefully, and not interrupt, but listen to their own grandparents speak of their families. Because older people in our families have so much to tell, and you just have to sort of inspire them and they start telling you. So to be very curious, and to take a kind of neutral position and not to be judgmental, just kind of open. You know, look at the world and see what's there. It's very beautiful. It's a very exciting but in some ways treacherous world, and all this goes into the writing.
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[ Interview ] Joyce Carol Oates |
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Challenge: Joyce Carol Oates describes how she needs to be open not judgmental in order to find material for her novels. She listens. She often listens to those much older than herself. She observes people interacting as things happen to them. She is awake and open to what she sees and hears. He doesn't watch and listen with an attitude that judges people and events as right or wrong. She takes it all in as potential material for her stories.
Outcome: Pick a location in your school or community -- maybe the café down the street. Take a notepad and sit still in this place watching and listening. Be open. Be awake. Write what you see and hear. Continue your writing fieldwork by engaging an older person you know in a conversation about their grandparents. Listen carefully and ask their permission to take notes. Use either or both experiences to write a description of a story or novel idea that could develop from what you saw and heard.
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Project #2: Hooking the Reader
Curriculum Focus: Literary Criticism
James Michener
Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
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And, I am certainly not a stylist in English language, using arcane words and very fanciful construction and so on. There is a great deal I can't do but Boy, I can tell a story. I can get a person, with moderate interest in what I am writing about, and if she or he will stay with me for the first one hundred pages, which are very difficult, and I make them difficult, he will be hooked. He will want to know what's happening on the next story and the next story and the next. That I have. And that's a wonderful gift. That's storytelling. And I prize it. I try to keep it cleaned up. I try to keep it on focus. I am wretched when I fail and feel and sense of terrible defeat.
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[ Interview ] James Michener |
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Challenge:James Michener writes enormous novels of historical fiction. He is one of the most famous novelists because of his wonderful ability to tell a story. He understands that the first job is to grab the reader and hook him or her to the story immediately. The novelist has to make the reader want to keep reading because the characters are so interesting and the desire to know what will happen next is so great.
Outcome: Select two novels that you have enjoyed and that you would recommend to friends. Review the first two chapters of each. Identify the different ways the novelist grabs your attention and makes you want to keep reading. Write an essay that compares and contrasts the way these two authors effectively hook the reader and keep the pages turning.
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Project #3: Being True to Facts -- Imaginary Facts
Curriculum Focus: Literature and Journalism
Shelby Foote
Novelist and Historian
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Shelby Foote: It's not different to me at all whether I made the facts up out of memory or imagination, or got them out of documents. They're all facts to me, and they're to be dealt with as a novelist would deal with them. I don't mean by that that you have any license as a historian to invent. In fact, that ruins it. You have to be entirely accurate. But a novelist feels that same way about his imagined facts; he has to be true to them. I don't find any difference really, once the research is done or the imagination is through fooling with it. They're very much the same.
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[ Interview ] Shelby Foote |
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Challenge:Novelist Shelby Foote believes that a fiction writer must be true to their facts even though they are imaginary. They have to accurate and consistent. They have to support the truth of the story. Like the story they are completely made up Ö but they have to be accurate and make sense.
Outcome: Select a novel that you know well. What are the facts about the setting? What are the facts about the main characters? What are the facts about the events that happen? Make a list with three headings: setting, characters, and events. List some key facts. At the end of each list add 1) a new fact that would be true to the story and 2) a fact that would not be accurate to the story.
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