Exercises for Beginners
by Dan Moreau

1. Welcome your students to Creative Writing 101.
2. Have your students introduce themselves.
3. Bribe your students with praise.
4. Pretend you know what you’re talking about.
5. Nod with interest when one of them says she’s only taking the class because Kayaking was full.
6. Ask the guy in the A’s baseball cap to turn down his iPod.
7. Say something about yourself. This needn’t be lengthy. A summary of your publications, degrees, awards should do. Don’t feel the need to share overly personal information such as the time you were committed for running naked across the Jefferson Highway.
8. Go over the syllabus. Review attendance and grading policies. This will avoid a messy end of semester scene involving parents, department heads and lawyers.
9. Assign your first exercise. Listen to a girl with a nose ring read a fifteen-minute account of her last gynecological visit.
10. Try to find something insightful to say about a story in which a group of thieves robs a sperm bank, knocks over a shelf of vials and decides to replenish them themselves. Start off by saying, “I really enjoyed reading your story ‘The Bank Job’…”
11. All instructors must hold office hours. This includes you, even though the only person who shows up with any regularity is the cleaning lady.
12. Assign for reading “A Good Man Is Hard To Find”. Nod with interest when the girl with the nose ring says, “I thought the grandmother was annoying. I’m glad she got blown away in the end.”
13. Midterm grades due. Give everyone an A.
14. When students stop showing up for class, mark them as present. If you see them later in the quad tossing around a Frisbee, nod and say hello.
15. Marvel at the myriad ways in which oral copulation is described in the student stories you read.
16. Assign the following exercise. Have your students describe someone or something without naming it. If the guy in the A’s hat describes you as a chubby bald dude with bad teeth, smile and compliment him on his powers of observation.
17. Read stories about hitmen, drug smugglers, casual sex, drinking, parties, video games, dead parents, divorce, breakups and gay roommates. Smile. Find something good to say about them, even if one of them is about a teacher who forces his students to read “gay ass” stories and makes them do “stupid” creative writing exercises. Read about the teacher’s ensuing death in a fiery car crash. Tell yourself it’s only fiction. Yeah, fiction.
18. As the weather warms up, ignore your female students’ plunging necklines.
19. If the student with the A’s cap dozes off in class, offer him a pillow.
20. Realize there’s nothing happy about Happy Hour. If anything, it should be called Lonely and Depressing Hour.
21. If the girl with the nose ring challenges you in class, don’t lose your mettle. Calmly explain you’d be happy to talk to her after class but now isn’t the time to discuss male systems of female oppression.
22. Show an interest in the personal lives of your students. Invite them to your cramped apartment for a dinner party. Consider the evening a success until a freshman pukes and passes out in your bathroom. Pray the authorities don’t charge you with supplying alcohol to a minor. Revise policy on socializing with students.
23. Read more stories about oral copulation and gay roommates.
24. Last class. Hand out evaluations. Thank everyone for a wonderful semester. Give everyone an A. Hope they liked you. Take the last five minutes of class to read over your evaluations. Try not to take personally comments such as “This class was a waste of time” and “I hope the instructor, whatever his name is, drops dead.”
25. Spend spring break working on your fiction and getting your landlord to fix your water heater. Write all of one paragraph. Beg your department head for a contract extension through the fall. Accept a ten percent pay cut. Arrive early to class. Scan the bovine faces in the room. Welcome them to Creative Writing 101.

 

DAN MOREAU lives in Utah and holds a master’s in creative writing from the University of Texas at Austin. He teaches creative writing through the continuing education department at the University of Utah and is recipient of a grant from the Elizabeth George Foundation. He recenty won the Hayden’s Ferry Review Halloween Writing Contest. His work appears or is forthcoming in Redivider, McSweeney’s, and NANO Fiction.

t o p
short story short stories poem poetry fiction nonfiction non fiction flash fiction creative writing publish publisher photography