I just finished teaching an interim class at my alma mater, Trinity Christian College. The class was called “Writing the Great American Novel.” In a class of fourteen students (ten of them are pictured with me here), I shared thoughts on the writing life, fiction, and publishing.
One of the crazy ideas I had at the start of the class was for us to collectively write a novel. We all agreed on a genre, a premise, and a character. From there, each student wrote a different chapter. We didn’t have many guidelines or boundaries, yet the story ended up working out surprisingly well. There were fun coincidences and interesting plot developments. On the last day of our class, we all sat around and read the 80-plus page story. My point in doing this exercise was not to have some magnificent work of fiction to submit to the publishers in New York. It was show everyone the process of writing a story from start to finish–to show how it takes strange and interesting turns.
I enjoyed meeting the students and sharing thoughts on writing. It was fun being back at Trinity and also fun encouraging writers in their craft. While I doubt I’ll ever be called Professor Thrasher, I hope to continue to share experiences and insight in writing with students and aspiring writers.
Hi Travis,
Nice to see that you’re blogging again. I had to smile when I read that your class wrote a joint novel. I did that with my creative writing class a few years back and we managed to hammer out a two-hundred and some odd page manuscript. Fascinating–and lots of fun. Especially fun was watching all the girls in the class corner one young man who insisted on continuing to kill off our major characters. He quickly ammended his ways.
Hope all is well with you!
Take care,
Nicole
Hi, Nicole. Good to hear from you! I hope your writing’s going well–I saw the cover of the next book and love it. It’s funny you mention that class. In our class, everyone made our story very dark. I kept telling the class–this is YOUR story, I’m not being blamed for how dark it is! It was a great and fun experience.
Hi Professor Thrasher — (should we have called you that!?) Just stumbled upon this blog of yours and remembered how much I enjoyed being a part of your interim class! It was possibly amongst the best two weeks I spent at Trinity! Now that I’m done with school I finally took the time to read the book you gave us — The Watermark — I really enjoyed it! Anyway — hope you are doing well and thanks again for everything!
–Elizabeth
I hope the other 4 students not pictured were guys. I see that Nicole’s story about the male student killing off all the main characters must have been written for television. I saw that the boss Michael did that on “The Office” whenever he went to his evening improv class. Have you seen the show? Actually, Michael reminded me of you the other day when I saw him pulling out all the dance moves on the booze cruise.