ENHANCED CREATIVITY, ENHANCED WRITING, ENHANCED LEARNING!

Abstract

If a story is a story with its characters living and/or dying in it, then the main concern of short story writers is to create and enliven them. This paper aims to show an alternative way of initiating creative writing in a literature class by encouraging students to move the characters created in different genres such as poetry, painting and fiction into a new time and space while writing a short story. One might argue that revitalizing already existing characters in such a way might limit students' creativity. However, evidence provided in this paper highlights that it rather enforces creativity which results in more interesting short stories and enhanced learning experiences. This paper reports my own experiences with this exercise as a practitioner, which has proven to be very productive for students.