Learning to Lie—The Importance of Including Details
Purpose: This exercise encourages students to discover and invent convincing details. This is a good exercise to use in the beginning of the drafting process, when students are busy building their early writing through the discovery of significant details--but it is also a lesson in revision in that information and detail may be added at any point during the drafting sequence.
Description: “Learning to Lie” makes use of each student’s experience, through the selection of exact details, imagery, and sense evocations, in order to illuminate the role of specificity in the writing process
Suggested Time: As little as 15-20 minutes, or nearly an entire session-- depending on the number of student samples chosen to be read aloud and questioned.
Procedure: Ask the students to write in two or three sentences, three unusual, startling, or amusing things they did or that happened to them. One thing must be true, the other two must be "lies". Ask them to use specific details.
Read one example as follows:
Elvis Presley wrote me a two-sentence letter after I sent him a poem I written about him and a picture of my sister in a bikini.
The first time I heard him play, Buddy Rich through me a drum stick during a drum roll and never missed a beat.
I asked Mick Jagger to sign a program for me, but he said he preferred to sign my left, white shoe. And he did.
Have the students write three of their own. Then have students, one by one, read them to the class. Other students are allowed to ask three questions that pertain specifically to the details. For example, someone might ask (using the example above), "Why did you send Elvis your sister’s picture instead of your own?" Or "What was Buddy Rich playing?" Or "Do you still have the white shoe?"
The writers have to be able to think on their feet, to make up more convincing details, to "lie". Then ask for a vote as to which story is true and which were fictitious. It is surprising how many students find that they are already excellent "storytellers."