Does the tail wag the dog?
I took a break from writing recently. Oh wait…you couldn’t tell? Don’t worry neither could I.
Maybe it was because I’d noticed the word ‘compelling’ and ‘optimum’ being thrown around a lot, or maybe it was because I just needed time to stop and reflect. Either way, I really wanted a chance to think about the type of stories I was producing and study the writing process itself. By the way, were you aware that dialogue is important? You know dialogue? Yeah, turns out I shouldn’t be just describing the characters, just have them say something and let the reader ascertain that themselves. Also, you know how we’re always trying to sneak adverbs into our stories? Yeh don’t do that, no matter how easy it is to get repetitions. These were just two of the takeaways that I wouldn’t have needed to have if I’d just listened in Year 8 English. I have a long way to go with this sort of stuff, but there’s nothing wrong with identifying a weakness and working on it right?
The more I heard about ‘optimal’ input from Dr Stephen Krashen (I think) the more I began wondering if my stories were actually ‘compelling’? Looking at my old writing process, normally I would start with a few piece of grammar or vocabulary, play with them a bit and see what story came out of the process. I’m not the only teacher who developed stories for language learning like this either I suspect. When you come up with a good story through this process (I think my first two aren’t horrible), its great. It’s like sneaking one past the goalie or managing to hide vegetables in your kid’s food. But when you get the balance wrong, it’s like trying to hide vegetables in a dish entirely made of vegetables.
Yeh… not likely to work
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve reached a moment during a reading or story when I realized my eye was on the content and not the story - Lachlan! Pay attention and eat your damned vegetables. As a teacher who dabbles in a few different methodologies, like Story Listening, TPRS, CCR, CI (Movietalk etc.), I think there have been times when I’ve let the tail wag the dog when it comes to story writing. So what do you do when you have conflicting ideas? I suppose each of us have to look at it individually, take it all in, then wait for someone else to do all the research or just go with your gut feeling. I’ve personally realized that I need to get my priorities straight and ensure the story is great first and foremost. I think this is the crux of what Krashen is talking about in this article (I would reference properly, but I too want to hang up the academic pleasantries). In the article he says that:
I hypothesize that for most people, motivation plays no role in successful language acquisition. Rather, language acquisition is the result of doing something else: It is the result of obtaining truly interesting, or "compelling" comprehensible input. When this happens, our focus is NOT on improving in another language: Our focus is on the message. In fact, it can be hypothesized that language acquisition occurs most efficiently when the message is so compelling that the acquirer is not even aware that it is being delivered in another language.
When I first started this project, everything was difficult - the writing, the drawing, programming, even when I had the basic story from previous years. I was so focused on theory that I was holding myself back. Not to brag, but it has gotten to the point now where coming up with stories is no longer a problem, but I do have a backlog of ideas that I’m trying to work through.
Some of these may seem familiar. For every story that I tick off my note, I usually add two or three more
Taking the break and checking myself actually showed me that I’m growing as a writer. I still wouldn’t call myself a writer though, that just feels weird. I’m okay with writing so long as its in my L2 and it doesn’t have to be very long. From now on I’m going to work on keeping things compelling, whilst keeping one eye on the feasibility of telling the story.
