Ramblings of a total Zack girl

I don't care for self-insert either, though I acknowledge that, if I got my way about life and got to teach a "Literature/Creative Writing Through Transformative Works" course or whatever, there are probably perfectly valid lessons I would stumble across along the way where that might be a useful tool? But that's not where it actually has the most impact. Your thing about "knowing what you know about Juliet, how would she react to the zombie attack" is an excellent and important question. There's a POINT to that. Also, my ex-husband accidentally invented fanfic, before we knew it was an actual thing, as a series of writing exercises to help me with individual issues I was having with original work. I bitched to him that my characterization tended to wander throughout a story; he said, "Write me an episode of Buffy. You don't have to invent characters, you don't have to invent a universe or whatever. You know these characters. Just write, and if they start out looking like themselves and they end up looking like themselves and they look like themselves all through the middle part...you win." And it helped. We did that exercise when I was having trouble keeping my stories on-task, and when I was having a hard time wrestling with handling multiple plot threads in a single story, and even when I needed to learn to create stronger characters myself.

Idk. That kind of wandered into what is probably actually a little beyond your average creative-writing unit in a high school course, but my point stands: Fanfic in schools. Someone needs to make more of this be happening. =D