Heard today that my proposal has been accepted for the Pedagogical Panel of the Association of Writing Programme Conference, the biggest network of Creative Writing in the States, and so the world. It’s a great opportunity to give a talk, but much more importantly it’s a chance to network with writers/academics of the same sort as myself throughout the US and maybe beyond it, and to start up partnerships.
So hooray, and so on…but the hard work starts now. Here’s the proposal, if you’re interested:
Synesthetic Games: A Thematic Practice in Creative Writing and the Writing of Drama?
Kandinsky and Nabokov were its sufferers or beneficiaries. Fischinger tried to reproduce it in his animations. Real-life experience of the crossover between the visual, the written, the audible and the tactile has sometimes been brought to art. Can synesthesia be brought to techniques in teaching?
The University of the West of Scotland offers degree programes which use creative writing including the writing of drama for the screen and the stage. Pictorial, musical or enacted stimuli are used to provoke, encourage or startle original, high-level pieces of writing from students. The recently established Creativities Research Group examines how these stimuli operate within the arts, especially in places where music, hypnotherapy, writing and art can overlap.
The use of ‘triggers’ has long been a staple of creative writing teaching. Almost always, students willingly produce in response pieces of work that are at least competent and tap deeply into the individual’s subconscious. A similar process takes place in teaching drama, where initial exercises take the form not of writing but of enacted moments, of improvisation, of miniature scenes. In all cases the sense of experimentation, of play – of there being infinite possibilities within a set of rules – is strong. These games lead to larger pieces of work that can in turn become important to that individual’s life, the process of multiplication resembling in many respects Conway’s ‘Game of Life’. How much more powerful might these games be when based on more than one stimulus at once in different media? Can we, by bringing the senses together, develop a powerful educational tool, and should we?
At a recent workshop at the European Affective Education Network Conference some synesthetic games played with an audience of volunteers produced an astonishing effect. Some were astonished, all were moved, some wept. Simultaneous stimuli in games engaged at a deep emotional level and enabled productive work: the workshop members, perhaps, were able to “feel deeply and think clearly at the same time” (Pat Barker).
This paper argues that a thematic approach towards game-playing in the teaching of writing and drama with synesthesia as its basis can provide teachers of creative writing in all its forms with an educational tool that is powerful and coherent. But is that level of deep disturbance with a class of students always advisable? And what other uses, such as the teaching of games narratives, and perhaps even the teaching of creativity itself, may it be put to?