By Adrian Kuek
Creative writing courses have been done to death, so when we asked by Chung Cheng High to conduct a 2-hour session for Sec 1 students, we knew we had to raise the level of sophistication. After a bit of brainstorming with my employer and founder of Write-Handed (Marcus Goh), we decided to focus on 4 key concepts – Narrative Structure (The Hero’s Journey), Humanising Heroes, Setup and Payoff and Symbolism.
For the Hero’s Journey, we wanted to link the different stages to a story that all students would be able to relate to. We settled on Frozen. The theme song is grating on the ears (Marcus: I like it though) but we give credit where credit is due – in this case, its narrative coherence. It proved to be the right choice, as even though it’s a 3-year-old movie, the students were still able to name their favourite characters.
In Humanising Heroes, students learned that the most endearing heroes are those who are multi-dimensional. They had fun picking on the shortcomings of favourite heroes. “Hermione is a smart-aleck!” “Frodo has hairy feet!”
My favourite part of the lecture was asking the students to identify the ‘setups’ that set the stage for the ‘payoff’ in a short cartoon clip. ‘Setup and payoff’ is a literary device in which a seemingly irrelevant detail is planted early in the story, which actually has great significance as the story unfolds later on. In the clip, the payoff is the fact that the Superman who was incapacitated by the gold Kryptonite was really Batman in disguise. The ‘setups’ were really subtle, so I wasn’t expecting the Sec 1 kids to identify all of 3 of them. But lo and behold, they did! No doubt the promise of designer notepads for correct answers played a part in motivating them, but I was impressed nonetheless. See if you can spot the 3 setups for yourselves. (Answers at bottom of page)
I thought symbolism, which is rather abstract, would be more challenging for students to appreciate, but here I was proven wrong again. They could appreciate the fact that the broadcasting of the brutal competition in the Hunger Games is a parody of the reality television of today, and that the mockingjay pin is a symbol of bravery, defiance and resilience.
For all you fellow creative writing instructors out there, here’s a private joke.
We’ll be continuing to do enrichment workshops for schools, so if you’re keen, hit us up at enquiries@write-handed.com. We do writing enrichment workshops, and we tailor it to the school’s requirements. Check us out on Write-Handed!
Answers
Setup 1: El Dorado demonstrates his shape-shifting powers. (4:50)
Setup 2: El Dorado reveals he has a plan. (7:50)
Setup 3: ‘Superman’ does not have his usual superpowers. (8:05)
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