Top Ten Kit: Non-Stop Writing

Lady Gaga has mentioned that the ideas of her songs are usually created in about fifteen minutes. It's like this vomiting up everything you have in you. I totally get this. But great art is not about the first fifteen minutes. It's about the revisions, the fine-tuning, building up, expansion, polishing, tearing things down and rearrangement. And most times, the final product is never what you first imagined it to be.

I see Nonstop Writing, mentioned on page 92 of our Content-Area Writing book, as a great way to take a mental dump. I actually use this, when I've got that jittery, restless feeling of, "gah, I gotta do something I GOTTA MAKE SOMETHING."

Within an art class, our prompts would be rather open-ended, and gives kids a very easy way to put down their thoughts in a short amount of time. It helps to get the brain revved up when "I don't know what to draw." So here are some prompts to work with:

• When was the last time someone made you mad? 
• What does joy look like? 
• What's your biggest concern for the future? 
• Write about a particularly vivid scene you read recently. 
• What do you see when you hear a favorite song?

I really liked the list given on page 94, of ideas for going back and really honing in the important bits of a writing. Underlining key sentences, circling really descriptive words, crossing out filler that doesn't relate to the main point.

It would be amazing to start new projects in this manner. Like the "draw a song" project. What formal elements visually describe this song? What colors and shapes set a tone? How do you use line and texture to indicate the tempo, or the severity of a bass line? What about the lyrical message of the song itself? What sort of representational images would you use to reflect the message of the song? How would you arrange these in the composition?

Everyone loves this project. I'm serious. And it makes kids feel so good about themselves, especially when they stand up to present the finished product and say, "my song was 'this and that' by 'so-and-so'" and all their peers make that "ohhhh" sound of "I totally see it." Because that's when you know that student has communicated something really well.

One problem with it is you don't want students to be recreating recognizable images. I think the Word Dump (that's what I'm calling it from now on) might be really good to combat that because you're really asking the students to describe what's in their heads. And they have to stick to that as their basis for the creative process.

I don't know; makes for a good experimental lesson plan.

Here's Gaga.

We miss you, Clarence.