When Writing, Unexpect the Expected

A simple exercise for students to freshen up their writing.

Nov 09, 2024

Welcome to the Plug & Play section of Desk Notes! Every week you’ll receive an ELA/creative writing activity that I’ve had success with in my classroom.

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TLDR: Use any of the following practices to help students dig deeper for writing that is fresh.

I have a bet. If I were to say “peanut butter and…” followed by a pause, chances are your brain will say jelly. Our minds tend to autocomplete as a result of our past experiences. When writing aligns with our expectations, it provides stable ground. The risk, however, is monotony. Too much of the expected and the page becomes barren even if it’s filled with words. Exciting writing keeps a cadence of regularity and garnishes it with the unexpected. It’s that layer of newness that tickles the mind.

What follows is an activity to help students practice pushing beyond the autocomplete of their mind and search for something unexpected.

If you’re in the middle of a creative writing unit, or if you want writing to be a more regular part of your classroom, this activity would be a great fit for you. In its simplest form, you only need 5 minutes of available class time. The principle can, however, be expanded and carried through more of class.

The Plan

Overview:

Introduce the principle.
Practice the principle.
Apply the principle in student writing.
Ideas for extending the activity.

Introduce the Principle

To introduce the principle of “writing the unexpected” I have students read this excerpt from Arthur Plotnik’s book Spunk & Bite:

“Even as you set out to be surprising, gangs of predictable idioms and images will bully their way into first drafts. Let them appear, as they tend to do when the brain is spewing words. But in the editing process, show no mercy. Occide, verbera, ure! Kill, beat, and burn—sniff out and destroy everything that smells predictable, clichéd, formulaic, labored, or lazy. Force yourself to fill the gaps with language that hoists a big exclamation point (but not a question mark) above the reader’s head.
“Use familiar words in a new way; raid the coffers of poetry; recruit fresh words and images from specialized fields; tweak clichés and paired words—not the usual phrase all agog, for example, but something surprisingly else agog (radioactively agog?). Dare to use unfamiliar words with attention-getting qualities, such as mofongo or barmy. Concoct your own words now and then, as novelist Jonathan Kellerman did with firp (jerk) and yog (thug). You won’t score surprises every time with these efforts, but you’ll create pleasures an editor never expected from the slush mound.
“Consider this sentence: He crosses the consulting room’s red carpeting, his grotesquely ugly face like a big toad’s. No surprises here; just a tired word pair (grotesquely ugly) and a sorry metaphor. But if you were novelist Will Self, author of How the Dead Live, you’d have written: “He cresses the consulting room’s endometrical carpeting, his marvellously ugly face like a clenched fist in a glove puppet.” Three surprises hit me here: “endometrical,” because it is shockingly uncarpet-like, yet in keeping with the chapter’s context of medical horrors; “marvellously ugly,” and effective paradox; and the dead-on “glove puppet” metaphor for a scrunched face” (11-12, italics original).

After students read this, they share what they learned with their peers.

I work to emphasize Plotnik’s warning that their writing should hoist “a big exclamation point (but not a question mark) above the reader’s head.” I say something like:

“The path to fresh writing is fraught with pitfalls. The writer can easily misstep to the cliché on one side or the brash on the other. Cliché writing comes when the writer accepts their first thought without a second glance. Brash writing comes when the writer tries too hard to be unique and selects words and images that aren’t settled into the piece or purpose for writing. In an effort to be unique the words end up feeling out of place. Your writing can be unexpected in delightful or distracting ways. We’re going to learn to find the balance.”

Practice the Principle

Here are practices that help students turn what is expected/predictable into something unexpected.

Option 1:

Students generate a list of clichés.
Students write what the cliché is communicating.
Students write something unexpected to communicate the same thing.

Option 2:

Students write one sentence to describe how a character looks using an adverb+adjective pair. (This follows the example from Plotnik’s book: “his grotesquely ugly face” vs “his marvelously ugly face.”)
Students then brainstorm different adjectives or adverbs and “shuffle” the pairs together to see which ones they like best.

Option 3:

Students revise any of the following sentences by replacing the word in brackets with something more unexpected:
1. The way nobody responded left him feeling [insignificant].
2. The sunrise was so [peaceful].
3. The engine [rumbled] as she drove past.
4. I’ve never had a pizza this [delicious].

After practicing through some of these options, have students exchange their ideas with others. It may prove interesting to do some of your own writing on the board and have students share their opinions on which ones strike the best balance between being fresh without being too strange.

Apply the Principle in Student Writing

Now that students have spent a bit of time learning and practicing the principle through some exercises, it’s time for them to use it in writing of their own.

Steps:

Students open to something they have recently written.
They reread what they wrote and look for parts they’d like to “unexpect.”
They revise with this intention.

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Students show their original and revised versions to classmates without telling them which is which. Their peers tell them which version was the clearest and the most unexpected.
Expand the scope of what you unexpect. Start at the word level then progress to a metaphor or whole phrase. The principle can also be applied to the plot of a story and the things characters do.
Have students sit in an ordinary place and ask them to write down what they notice, looking beyond their initial observations to something more “tucked away” from immediate perceptions. The Learning Network suggests that students might stare at one painting for 10 minutes, doing nothing besides learning to really see.

Thank you for reading! I’d love to hear from you if you use this activity or any adaptations of it in your class! If you find something that makes it better, let us know in the comments.