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Writing for Change
The Power of Storytelling & Using Your Voice to Create Change
Why Write for Change?
“Write what should not be forgotten.” — Isabel Allende
“Denial is the heartbeat of racism, beating across ideologies, races, and nations. It is beating within us.” — Ibram X. Kendi
“Denial is the heartbeat of racism, beating across ideologies, races, and nations. It is beating within us.” — Ibram X. Kendi
Writing to create and enact social change can be taken up in any genre and form of writing. When we're writing for change, we're writing to deliver deep cultural, personal, and political meanings to ourselves, our readers, and our communities.
Whether we're building a fantastical world in order to explain and explore the feeling of otherness and discrimination on this planet, or we're crafting a social media message as a call for action, we're making a decision to use writing to examine what it means to be human and, in many ways, to determine what our responsibilities to each other and the environment are. For millennia, writers have used their words to ignite in their readers reflection, conversation, debate, rebellion, and revolution to bring into sharp relief societal ills and critical issues in which the status quo cannot be accepted.
Below is a very short list of writing genres and prompts to explore as you determine which genre(s) might be most effective for your own writing-for-change work. Explore other pages in this site as well. For example, Creative Nonfiction, Science Fiction, and Fantasy are very popular and important writing genres that invite and deliver critical cultural, political, and historical commentary on the human condition.
Whether we're building a fantastical world in order to explain and explore the feeling of otherness and discrimination on this planet, or we're crafting a social media message as a call for action, we're making a decision to use writing to examine what it means to be human and, in many ways, to determine what our responsibilities to each other and the environment are. For millennia, writers have used their words to ignite in their readers reflection, conversation, debate, rebellion, and revolution to bring into sharp relief societal ills and critical issues in which the status quo cannot be accepted.
Below is a very short list of writing genres and prompts to explore as you determine which genre(s) might be most effective for your own writing-for-change work. Explore other pages in this site as well. For example, Creative Nonfiction, Science Fiction, and Fantasy are very popular and important writing genres that invite and deliver critical cultural, political, and historical commentary on the human condition.
Creative NonfictionNonfiction entails writing about what happened and is happening. This big genre of writing is circumscribed by the truth with diligent attention to the facts and putting those facts into contexts. Genres of "nonfiction" include articles, essays, reports, memoirs, proposals, investigative journalism, historical accounts, personal narratives, profiles, and more.
This genre of writing is particularly powerful in that it seeks to reveal the ways in which we are influenced by the histories and stories we are told and those that we're not told--those that have been erased or forgotten. Many nonfiction writers seek to unerase these histories and stories so that we can better understand where we've been in order to understand where we're going, and how we might structure and shape our paths moving forward. Subgenres
Examples
Writing Prompts
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FictionFiction is an expansive genre of creative writing that can be used across different forms and medium. This genre typically consists of people, events, settings, and more that aren't strictly based on history or fact.
Fiction, like any genre of creative writing, has been used to reaffirm and even create damaging and dangerous stereotypes and tropes about people and communities that have been historically, politically, economically, and culturally marginalized and oppressed. A lot of H.P. Lovecraft's works do just this. However, many, many writers from communities that have experienced systemic marginalization and oppression have used fiction to claim and reclaim their histories, stories, and voices, as well as to foster social change. Below are some sub-genres of fiction that may help you make decisions about which sub-genre(s) of fiction you are most interested in reading and taking up for your own fiction writing intended to help foster social change. Writing Prompts
SubgenresLiterary Fiction:
Plays:
Literary Fiction James Baldwin Tommy Orange Tommy Orange’s ‘There There’ Is a New Kind of American Epic (Published 2018) Science Fiction Octavia Butler Historical Fiction Toni Morrison Mystery Kelly Oliver Horror/Suspense Fantasy Ursula K. Le Guin Young Adult Tomi Adeyemi |
Graphic Novels & MemoirsA graphic novel story expressed via a combination of visual art and text. There's quite a lot of debate about what kinds of stories fit within this definition or category. Scott McCloud argues in his graphic novel exploration of the medium, Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art, that these kinds of novels are "juxtaposed pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence."
Art Spiegelman referred to the genre as a "big comic book that needed a bookmark." His graphic novel, Maus, won the Pulitzer Prize. This novel is a striking, haunting, and powerful story about the Holocaust. This article breaks down a plethora of different places to find graphic novels, and also links to resources for specifically teaching about diversity within graphic novels –https://ncte.org/blog/2018/08/diversity-graphic-novels/ Writing/Creating Prompts:
Subgenres & Related GenresPersonal Narrative and Memoir
In any medium, personal narratives tend to be shorter and more focused on the emotional impact of one specific event to the author, whereas memoir typically contains a collection of experiences from the author’s life. The visual aspect of graphic novels evokes complex emotions that often cannot be conveyed with words alone, making it a powerful vessel for sharing and processing personal stories or even traumatic personal events.
Non-fiction
Graphic novels, in their unique display of narrative and dialogue through illustrated panels, have potential to add new depth and humanity to both undiscovered and well-known histories and accounts.
Fiction
Narratives that are imagined, or not necessarily based on reality, such as those you’d expect to see in science fiction, fantasy, or even historical and realistic fiction, are a perfect match for the creative and illustrative nature of graphic novels.
Comics
Like graphic novels, comics incorporate images or illustrations in sequence to tell a story, however they are typically much shorter, with narratives spanning across multiple issues. They can be as short as a few panels, as might be found in a newspaper, or several pages long, such as in a comic book. Popular comic serials are sometimes also compiled into graphic novel-length collections.
Manga (mahn-guh)
Manga is a broad term for Japanese comics and graphic novels, which have become increasingly popular with readers outside of Japan as well. They have distinct styles and sub-genres, and are read from right to left, even in translated versions. Historically, manga as an overall genre has had a complicated and problematic relationship particularly with representation of Black and LGBTQ people and communities. However, as many manga series continue to gain momentum with more and more diverse audiences, so too has the call for wider, more positive representation and elimination of stereotypes among typical characters.
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PoetryOne definition: A poem is a form of art in which the skillful choice and arrangement of words achieves a desired emotional effect.
A poem can create deep emotional responses and connections, vivid images, striking rhythm, reflection and introspection, and/or biting wit and wisdom. Writing Prompts
Subgenres & MovementsHarlem Renaissance (from the poetryfoundation.org)
“A period of musical, literary, and cultural proliferation that began in New York’s African-American community during the 1920s and early 1930s. The movement was key to developing a new sense of Black identity and aesthetics as writers, visual artists, and musicians articulated new modes of African-American experience and experimented with artistic forms, modernist techniques, and folk culture.” I think we can call the Harlem Renaissance a sub-genre of poetry because of it’s specific impact and the nature of the works from the movement such as the following works: Other Examples
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