Changing Voices: The Helpful and Unhelpful Voices in Our Heads
Purpose: This exercise should be helpful when students are feeling stuck in the middle of their writing (and semester) and lack any fresh ideas--an exercise to break up the log-jam of frustration and boredom.
Description: This exercise prompts students to understand all the mental audiences they unconsciously have listening to them while writing and how this might affect their writing in negative ways. It hopefully encourages them to release those negative or critical voices that might cut out the creativity or detail they could put into their writing.
Suggested Time: 30 minutes
Procedure:
Ask students to take out a clean piece of paper and write their names on the top.
Give them a good five to ten minute writing topic, depending on your time--the longer the better, which gives some room for creativity and description, but has enough specific details that you don’t need to spend extra time thinking up ideas. For example, pretend you are sitting in a doctor’s office, or remember a real time that you were, and write about it. You can make up the details and situation, but this person has to be you. Another example: you are packing for a trip with your family. Describe what is going on and what you are thinking.
Now pass around cut-out photos of interesting looking people from magazines. Let them choose which one they want. You will want to have enough available so that the students can have lots of choices. Ask them to make up a name for that person.
Tell them to put that name on another piece of paper. This will be handed in as well, but tell them you will not know who wrote the piece—the person in the picture is the writer, and the student will remain completely anonymous. Ask them to write about the same topic, but pretend they are this person doing the writing. Write about how they experience things, what they see, what they think. Tell them to be as imaginative as they want, but to take that person seriously (don’t make fun of them; make them real).
After they are done, start a discussion about which seemed "better" to them, or more interesting. Let them know there is no right answer. Some students will prefer the first and probably the majority will prefer the second. Ask about the different writing experiences—who was their audience, what were the helpful and unhelpful voices in their head, was it good to be in disguise as a writer? Perhaps the disguise will lead you to your strongest writing voice.
Finish the discussion by talking about our own voice as writers and negative voices that inhibit writing. Remind them that although they were in disguise, they were still the ones doing the writing, and perhaps when their writing seems bland or inhibited, they should try enlarging their voice as writers.