by Irfan Shah

Created on: January 05, 2010

Explain That! A Creative Writing Activity

‘Explain That!’ is an activity designed to encourage creativity by turning the writing process on its head. Instead of starting with the dreaded blank page, students create a scenario which they then have to explain.

I got the idea for this activity after watching the comedy hit ‘The Hangover’. A key scene in the film comes quite early on when three of the main characters wake up in a hotel room in Las Vegas with no memory of what happened the previous night and no sign of the groom whose stag night they had been celebrating.

This scene is the engine which drives the rest of the film as the characters have to work out exactly how they ended up in a penthouse suite with a chicken running free; one character missing a tooth; a baby crying and a tiger locked in the bathroom!

The sublime chaos of the scene really appealed to me, and the thing that struck me was that it felt like it could have come out of a screenwriting workshop exercise. It just felt like an elegant twist to the writing process – imagine a vivid ‘conclusion’ and work out how it came to be.

My next thought was why confine the activity to screenwriting? It could be used in English lessons to provide a new perspective on creative writing in general.

I decided to turn this idea into a classroom exercise, but first I wanted to add a twist. I wanted the key scene that would have to be explained, to contain random elements. I wanted to circumnavigate, as much as I could, the fear of the blank page.

And so I decided that the students would create the key scene by picking picture cards at random. The cards could be split into groups: characters, objects, keywords and locations.

A student therefore might pick cards and get three characters who find themselves in a hotel room with a python, a bust of Shakespeare, ticket stubs for a wrestling match and an empty bottle of pills.

The keyword will help set a tone or context. It could be ‘Amnesia’; ‘Tension’ or ‘Lonely’ for example.

Once the opening scene has been established, a story must then be planned and written that traces the events that lead up to it.

This activity is scalable as you can use as few or as many cards as you like. This means it can easily be tailored to a variety of ages and abilities. If you’re teaching a whole class, just imagine the variety of stories you will be marking. Apart from anything else, think what a nice change that will make from marking thirty almost identical pieces of writing!

The activity also encourages stories with more ambitious content and with more ambitious plot structures as well, as students work to pull together disparate threads of narrative into the key scene.

And if a class is being encouraged to be more adventurous with vocabulary and sentence structure then surely it is only fitting that this goes hand in hand with attempts at creating more adventurous plots?

This is an easy activity to recommend. It encourages originality by smashing clichés to smithereens. How can you be boring when you have to explain why someone dressed as a clown has woken up in a prison cell holding a goldfish bowl!

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