"4 Inspired Reasons for Teaching an Online Class" ☕
Excited to share that my article, “4 Inspired Reasons for Teaching an Online Class,” was published today at Women on Writing.
To learn more about my class, starting March 5th, click here: Creating an Online Creative-Writing Class.
Read the article below.
4 Inspired Reasons for Teaching an Online Class
By: Melanie Faith
“When one teaches, two learn.” –Robert Heinlein
Like most of us, I’ve held many jobs and learned something about myself from all of them: choir-music librarian, research assistant, camp counselor, and journalist to name a few. By far the most creatively-enriching job I’ve ever had is teaching creative writing online. Let’s look at some motivating benefits for teaching an online class that might just inspire your own course in the near future.
Why teach an online writing class?
Online classes are flexible.
Online classes are wonderful for just about any schedule. Some courses operate over Zoom, Skype, Google Hangouts, and other platforms at particular times of the day like in-person classes, say 7-8 pm. Other classes are scheduled asynchronously, via message boards, discussion posts, and other posted content like PDFs which students can access at a time that suits their schedules.
As an online instructor, you have a lot more freedom to choose how you’ll present your class—such as through posted videos on an asynchronous class or a group meeting/lecture at 3-4 in the afternoon or a mixture of the two—than if you were assigned a brick-and-mortar classroom in a lecture hall.
Your home office and your students’ abodes are your classrooms. You’ll have no commute. You can invest that extra time into our lessons, student communications, handouts, or even your own writing.
Online classes are great fun.
Writing is a topic that’s endlessly fascinating. Each writer brings their own style, themes, characters, projects, and/or goals to the course. There will be a great variety of skill levels and native talents brought to your classroom.
Part of the marvel of teaching an online class is the opportunity to nurture the best skills writers have to offer while challenging and inspiring fellow writers to enhance their writing.
Writing students tend to be diverse, lively, and creative thinkers. They’re often widely-read, curious about life and others, and visionary thinkers. What’s not to love about any of these attributes?
Online classes are a wonderful way to build a writing community.
One of my favorite aspects of teaching writing online is when my students email me, even after our class has ended, to let me know that they continue to write, that they have submitted work to literary magazines or agents, that they have gotten acceptance letters.
During the weeks I spend with my students, our class becomes a community and a support network, and this network often continues in some form after our course. For example, several students have become friends and found writing critique partners in my classes, and they’ve continued to encourage each others’ novels, poetry, and/or memoirs long after the final day of class.
Group dynamics vary in any class, but creative writing students tend to be generous with their time and efforts.
Students have been some of the greatest supporters of the nonfiction craft books I’ve written for writers, and their interest in my past, current, and future projects continues to hearten and inspire me.
Online classes are a great way to evolve as a working writer.
Teaching creative writing provides the occasion to talk about a subject that I’m passionate about with a target-audience of people who actually care about the same topic.
Who else in my daily life would care about the latest interviews with my favorite authors who dish details on their writing process? Who else would want to take for a spin a writing prompt I just wrote? Who else understands the challenges of a third draft as compared to a first one and wants to bounce ideas for a better editing process? Or to share ideas about marketing out literary brainchildren?
There’s camaraderie and inspiration when teaching writing online. We may not be sitting in the same room, but we’re experiencing the same joys and struggles with our works in progress (WIP). Any frustrations my students are having with their protagonists or antagonists or scenes I can identify with because I’ve either had the same frustrations or may even currently be experiencing the same with my own WIP.
Interacting regularly with motivated writers supports my own growth as a writer. I can’t tell you the amount of times when, after having a great discussion with students about some aspect of the writing or editing process, I’ve suddenly known exactly the next step I should try in my draft.
✨ "3 Suggestions on a Saturday Night" ✨
I have the pleasure of guest blogging today at Nicole Pyles’ wonderful blog, World of my Imagination.
Check out my “3 Suggestions on a Saturday Night” for some literary, movie, and audio amusements.
"Journaling as a Discovery Tool for Current Projects" 🖊📕
Splendid news: I’m guest blogger today at CreateWriteNow!
My article, “Journaling as a Discovery Tool for Current Projects,” was published this morning.
Also check out journaling prompts, Mari’s marvelous book, Journaling Power, and other inspiring journaling resources at CreateWriteNow!
Photo courtesy of Nick Morrison at unsplash.com
"3 Ways Receptivity Leads to Authentic Writing" 🙌📕
Great news! My article about authentic writing was featured today at Women on Writing. Read on!
“3 Ways Receptivity Leads to Authentic Writing”
By: Melanie Faith
We writers tend to be natural observers. Sometimes, that means noticing little nuances of behavior or movement that others might not pay attention to at all. Other times, that includes thinking about an overheard conversation or wondering about the tension within someone’s voice minutes, hours, or even days later.
This receptivity often leads to amazing results and renewed vitality in our writing. According to vocabulary.com, “Your receptivity is your ability and willingness to take in information or ideas.”
Why receptivity? Overall, we writers are meaning-seekers and meaning-interpreters. Not only do we have to choose (or be chosen by) our subject matter, but also we write and edit to bring out symbolism, metaphors, and resonance so that readers will connect to the main ideas and themes we explore. People who are closed off, even partially, tend to miss countless excellent ideas that come their way. The world is jam-packed with ideas waiting for you to notice them.
Here are three top tips for staying open to quality material you might be bypassing:
1. Receptive writers cast their nets widely first and narrow down later.
Since March, millions of workers around the world have worked from our home offices. Conferencing online at a distance has become an ordinary new feature of how the workplace functions in 2020 and into 2021. It can be pretty easy to feel isolated and in one’s own bubble when the majority of social interactions after the workday are also often at the click of a button rather than in our living rooms or at restaurants.
As much as my inner introvert rejoices at a good curl-up-and-read fest, I recognize the need for hanging out and absorbing ideas from friends and fellow creative makers. Nobody is an island, even with Covid-19 social distancing. We need to keep coming into regular contact with others’ everyday conversations about hopes, dreams, fears, complaints, and even the seemingly silly minutiae or anecdotes that used to be more commonplace before quarantine.
Art thrives on community and the spontaneous mingling of ideas. Cast your net wide and get a few recommendations to keep ideas flowing.
If you’re not conversing or overhearing juicy, disparate, random or rambling conversation on the regular, you’re probably missing out on some very important ideas that could positively impact your writing. Don’t immediately scroll past an argument or debate on Twitter or Facebook—read through strands of comments, even if you don’t comment.
Put your favorite podcast on while you work out at home or take a quick run around the block. If you don’t have a favorite podcast or book or song at the moment, text a friend or ten and find out what they’re listening to or reading recently.
2. Slow and steady: receptive writers listen and give themselves time to reflect before creating.
I’ll admit: this is a hard one for me. My mind is almost always bursting with ideas, and never more so than when I read an article that inspires me or watch a video or overhear a conversation that strike a chord. It helps my writing, though, to remind myself that when I come across new inspiration that I need to tune in and give the information a little bit of time to settle before reacting.
Give yourself some time to take in new ideas by keeping a notebook handy to jot down initial impressions, conversation snippets, or notes, but then give that information some hours or even days to rest in your notebook before using them in a new piece. This little grace period between gleaning exciting ideas and integrating or exploring them will deepen your pre-writing period. Your subconscious mind will make connections between ideas that may surprise and delight you.
Great news: often, in the hours or days in-between first hearing or learning of something and beginning to write, several other tangentially- related ideas or pieces of information will also cross your path and enrich or change the focus of your initial idea, enriching your theme in the process. We’re a fast-paced culture, but our writing process doesn’t have to be rocket-launch speed.
We hear not nearly often enough: slow it down, reflect. I’ll say this again because it’s just so soothing: slow it down.
3. Receptive Writers don’t put too much pressure on a single idea.
Here’s something we don’t tend to talk about much, but it’s as true today as it was a hundred or even a thousand years ago for scribes: don’t expect your entire writing career or reputation to be built on one magnum opus. Realize that there are many, many ideas out there and likewise a multitude ways to interpret, structure, and create art from those ideas.
Think of your writing as a marathon run, rather than a sprint. Explore each idea to the best of your ability with what you know now, but realize that you have many chances to edit and/or add to your ideas during the course of your writing career. Also, if the piece doesn’t immediately gel or if it changes focus or shape, that’s a natural part of the process. If this project doesn’t pan out after endless weeks or months of struggling, it’s okay to let it go and begin another project. There are endless other possibilities to pursue at any given time that may refresh your writing—remain flexible and open-minded about beginning again.
Ease off the pressure for the latest project to showcase every single one of your writing talents, and ease into the openness to each idea’s potential to bring out new qualities in your writing during the writing process.
Using our natural observational skills will deepen our writing. In addition, such receptivity will work wonders for creating fresh, authentic writing again and again.
Care to learn more? Clickety-click: Developing Your Authentic Voice. Starts January 8, 2021. Sign-ups now open!
"3 Common Myths about Writing Graphic Novels"
Thrilled to say that my article about writing graphic novels was published today by Women on Writing. Ta-da!
To learn more, check out my Fundamentals of Graphic Novel class. Sign-ups open now through the first day of class: Friday, October 30th.
“3 Common Myths about Writing Graphic Novels”
By: Melanie Faith
I’ve enjoyed reading graphic novels for the past ten years. These character-driven books are often humorous and fun-loving, but they can also be thought-provoking or even gritty and dramatic page-turners. They might explore historical landscapes, our current world settings, or a future planetary colony.
The astounding variety of graphic novels earns this genre a coveted spot on my overflowing bookshelves, always.
If you’re anything like me, though, you might initially have thought, this is so cool, but I can’t even draw a person to scale. I could never do that.
Let’s dive into three of the biggest myths about crafting graphic novels and take heart that not only can we read graphic novels, but we can write our own quite well, too:
1. You have to be a great artist who gets compliments on their drawing talent. False. By far, this is the myth I hear most. The thing is, if you can draw a stick figure, you can craft a comic. If you can sketch a caricature, you can create a comic. If you can run computer software, you could also make a graphic novel using software. If you have a pal who loves to draw, you could team up (you craft the story, they craft the illustrations) or you could hire an illustrator to bring your dialogue and characters to life for a collaboration that way.
Comics are an elastic, vivacious art form, made in all of these ways and more. For example, sometimes elements such as photographs and collage are also the art in “drawing” a comic.
There are as many styles of comics as you can imagine: from hand-made photocopied zines to computer-drawn animations and figures, from works produced on a shoestring budget of a single author with a day job in another industry to comics backed by an international corporation or a local small or regional publishing house, and everything in-between. Best of all: they are all legitimate art forms.
Just as we wouldn’t say that Gertrude Stein was any less of a poet than Shakespeare, they just both had vastly different literary styles and subject matter, a one-person, hand-sketched comic still belongs to the art form.
We can always take art classes later to improve our drawing skills if that’s our aim; what’s most important is that all of us, starting where we are, today, with whatever our native talent, can create an outline or caricature with personality and have fun exploring just what and where that drawing will take us and our stories. With the skills we have at this very moment.
2. You have to have an earth-shattering plot to begin a project like that. False. There are graphic novels about as many happenings under the sun as one can imagine, from cooking (Relish: My Life in the Kitchen) to living with mental illness (Mania, Depression, Michelangelo, and Me). While some awesome comics do celebrate celebrities (Josephine Baker and Photographic: The Life of Graciela Iturbide) or are set against a backdrop of political revolutions (Persepolis), just as many great comics detail what it’s like to be an everyday person with hopes and dreams that are frequently dashed in this topsy-turvy world.
There are graphic novels that explore familial and relationship turmoil, what it’s like to be a teen or a college student living away from home for the first time, or an immigrant learning a new language and culture, or a struggling middle-aged father who has lost a child, or someone living with an infertility struggle.
If it’s happened to you or someone you’re close to or if you’ve observed a truth about life, it could make an excellent graphic novel. Comics are about human experience, and the range and breadth of human experience is vast and breathtakingly promising for a writer.
3. You have to have the entire plot figured out before even bothering to start. False. One of the great aspects of writing comics is that you can begin by brainstorming a protagonist. Someone with a personality. Someone with struggles. Someone with a set-back and hidden (or not-so-hidden) dreams. And that protagonist’s little (or big) corner of the world (aka: setting). And that protagonist’s antagonist. One spark of inspiration builds and leads to the next.
And hey, you don’t even have to create a fictional character from scratch if you don’t want to—you can be the protagonist of you own story in graphic memoir. Many established and award-winning graphic artists, like Alison Bechdel and Lucy Knisley, are heroine characters in their books. Graphic memoirs can be autofiction, too. What a diverse genre!
It bears repeating: it doesn’t take a degree or special talent in art per say to create a narrative that meshes with artistic imagery to develop story. If you can doodle some forms in a margin, you can create a comic sketch. If you can pen a vignette or a short story-length tale with some conflict and characterizations and setting, you can develop the working start for a great graphic novel.
Whether you chose to buddy up with a trained artist or collage the scene yourself or incorporate photos or draw outlines and squiggles of your own or explore computerized software to craft drawings, you already have the basic building blocks to begin in this fascinating genre.
Photo courtesy of Unsplash, by: Mahdiar Mahmoodi
Interview :)
Image by Jon Tyson on unsplash.com.
Great news! I was interviewed by writer Annalisa Crawford. We dish on writing, new projects, and more. Check it out: interview.
Enjoy Annalisa’s amazing book: Grace and Serenity.
Also, check out Photography for Writers and my other writing craft books to get that inspiration flowing: Books.
Image by Nacho Capelo on unsplash.com.
My Article Published: "4 Photo Hacks to Inspire Your Writing"
Great news! My article was published today. If you like writing & photography, then this one’s for you. Enjoy the writing exercise at the end.
“4 Photo Hacks to Inspire Your Writing”
By: Melanie Faith
Last week, I shot my first roll of film in over a decade.
Up to this point my photos, like a lot of my writing drafts, were entirely digital and screen-manipulated. This analog film process was nothing like that computerized process, refreshingly; it shook up the way I thought about crafting my work.
That first roll of film last week was also a lot of other firsts: first roll of black-and- white film, first time loading 120 film (I used to shoot 110 and 35 mm), first time shooting medium-format square negatives, first time using a cute, plastic Diana F+ camera.
120 film has just 12 negatives per roll. Unheard of in the digital world of endless do-overs and deletes. I still love digital, but practicing image-making on film is teaching me to approach my making creatively.
What can photography lend to our writing process?
• Renew your beginner’s mind.
I’ve been photographing since I was a teen, and yet here I was, trying several new photographic styles that were entirely fresh to me.
Many of us have been writing creatively for years, yet we, too, can capture that beginner’s mind and use it to create innovative drafts.
If you normally write prose, give poetry a shot. If you often write novels, try a short story or two.
Or pick a genre you’ve never practiced: perhaps flash memoir or writing a graphic novel or jokes for a stand-up routine.
Or switching POV from your standby third-person to first-person or second-person.
Or it could be as simple as writing a first draft longhand.
These changes won’t necessarily be permanent; they will, however, bring out new ideas and imagery that will surprise and motivate.
• Add a few restrictions to your art and watch it flourish.
In both photography and writing, sometimes if you put obstacles or limitations in your path, you can create something remarkable.
I know: paradoxical.
When shooting with film, I had just 12 clicks of the shutter. I also couldn’t preview it after taking the shots; the Diana F+ camera has a tiny viewfinder, but it’s not entirely accurate to what the lens will capture—it’s more like playing pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey than aiming at a dartboard. It’s a machine made for teaching how to approach and then let go of expectations.
I had my film for four days before I took that first roll for a spin; four days of narrowing down possible subject matter “worthy” of my twelve little compositions. Seven turned out well enough to submit to a literary magazine. I certainly don’t approach my digital photography that way.
• Approach your writing with more of your full attention.
Because the camera and the shutter-release (on the side of the plastic lens!) and pretty much everything else about the camera was new to me, I had to slow down… and then slow down again… and then a third time. I watched a YouTube tutorial on loading the film about 12 times; no joke.
I quickly learned to trust my instincts more and to rule out certain subject matter in favor of other options, because I knew that I was paying $7.50 for the roll of film and almost $20 for developing.
Even though the cost isn’t exorbitant to practice film photography (especially getting third-hand cameras at an auction site like I did), that it COST me something made each shot precious.
What does your writing cost you? Sleeping in? Time out with family or friends? We value our art more when we sacrifice something for it.
• Think thematically.
Just like writers begin a novel, short story collection, poetry manuscript, or series of essays that surround the same theme or characters, photographers often challenge themselves to create a series based on the same subject, setting, or motif.
The other day, I took a twenty-minute walk with my new camera and then found, in storage, two lawn chairs that had almost been thrown out several times—their worn green webbing and silver metal bases redolent of my parents’ youth and endless picnics and fireworks displays. Yet they’d been stored away.
Gleefully, I dug them out from behind the staircase and arranged them in various configurations on the lawn. Six of out my twelve shots became a mini-series about the chairs.
If I’d had limitless shots would I have found the chairs as compelling, especially for a series? Maybe. But probably not.
It’s very common for writers, like photographers, to take part in creativity challenges that encourage such project-based thinking. Practicing your art with a group of like-minded people for consecutive days will more likely yield workable results.
We writers have NaNoWriMo in November and NaPoWriMo each April. Photographers have challenges like the 365 Project and monthly challenges, such as at Instagram where photographers post themed lists of ideas.
These challenges are often informal but incredibly liberating.
Both writing and photography rely on intuition and self-exploration. A mixture of knowing some things and making up the rest. Both arts often include elements of self-doubt or curiosity that are assuaged with practicing your craft on a regular basis.
Try this exercise: Make a list of five themes you could explore as a series in prose or photography.
Want to learn more? Try my May 2020 online Imagery Power: Photography for Writers class.
Take a perusal of Photography for Writers, my exercise-packed, creativity-fueling book. Signed copies also available at my Etsy: WritePathProductions.
Courtesy of Women on Writing https://www.wow-womenonwriting.com/classroom/MelanieFaith_Photography.php
Want to Teach Online? I've Got You: Craft Article Published Today at WOW!
“3 Exercises for Launching an Online Writing Class for Profit and Enjoyment”
By Melanie Faith
The Timing has Never Been Better to Teach Creative Writing!
The field of teaching creative writing online has flourished in the past decade. When I started teaching online classes, most universities and colleges didn’t offer any online courses and I didn’t know a single freelance writer who did, either.
Happily, in 2020, the tide has turned and opportunities abound for educators who are passionate about their love for writing.
By the way: it’s not a requirement to have taught English for years offline in public schools or to have published a book before sharing what you know with eager learners.
If you’re organized and communicative, enthusiastic about self-expression, and motivated both in your own writing practice and to direct other writers in theirs, there is sure to be a program to fit your teaching goals (or you’ll create one!) and students keen to study with you. Read on!
Why Teach Online?
The vast majority of my teaching is now as a freelancer online instructor and professor, and I love it! Let’s look at cool pros to teaching online.
A highly-flexible schedule. As a freelance teacher, I am free to go to lunch with a friend or to grade at 2 in the morning without waking at 7 am to report to a brick-and-mortar classroom.
Most classes are asynchronous, meaning that students and teachers literally can pop by any time of day and night to leave and answer messages and download/upload content, so teachers and students can communicate at 4 am in their pjs if they want.
Many online programs, including Women on Writing, offer great instructor freedom to choose texts, a class topic, and to develop a course and hand-pick or write handouts of our own choosing. This support for unique and individualistic course content inspires instructors as well as student writers.
Community building with fellow writers. I regularly make friends with creative writers from all across the world who share many of my same writing and life goals, including keeping my writing and publishing life active and lively.
The pleasure of making another writer’s path more-informed and supported. Much of what I learned about writing and publishing during my first ten years as a creative writer was through my own slow process of blunders. It’s very rewarding to offer fellow writers advice, and then to see them and their writing make their own pathways to editors and readers.
Motivation for my own work. Nothing keeps me engaged in my own writing process like encouraging others in theirs. As I often tell my students and clients: “We’re all writers in this writing journey together.”
Get Started Today! 3 Helpful Exercises
As you begin to consider writing topics you might teach, here are three thematic questions to get your wheels turning about the kind of class you might offer and the unique skills you will bring to an online classroom. Consider answering each question as a free-write, setting a timer for at least fifteen or twenty minutes for each question.
1. What genres have you written in the past five years? What style or genre of writing has most
inspired you recently? List any books (such as craft books about writing, novels, poetry collections, essay anthologies, etc.) as well as writing websites that might be fun to share.
2. What excites you most about the opportunity to teach online? List as much as you’d like. Pinpointing the qualities that encourage you will integrate this zest into your online classroom preparations, creating an environment where writers flourish.
3. Write a paragraph to introduce yourself to your ideal student. Describe what brought you to teach this class online and something about your writing journey. Feel free to share a dream for your own writing. Then, ask your delightful ideal student two or three questions you’d like to know about them.
This exercise is one I wrote and offered to a client who was considering teaching online, and he found it very insightful to his writing process and to picturing his targeted class audience.
Over the course of a few days, your answers will point you in exciting directions for your genre, class topic/theme, and potential texts for a future course.
