Creative Writing Assignments, etc

In one of my Russian history classes as an undergrad, the professor gave us the following assignment (more or less):
"You are one of the characters in Turgenev's Fathers and Sons. It is now 20 years after the close of the book. Write a letter to one of the other characters expressing your view on the current political situation."
This assignment provided a nice change from the other types of writing assignments I got while I was in college. It was challenging, in that it was a complicated subject, but it was also challenging because I had to figure out how to structure and support an argument about what I/my character would think based on what I/my character had said 20 years before. Figuring out how to cite "myself" was a bit difficult, but it was also fun because it allowed room for creativity.

Bean also has some interesting assignment ideas that I think could be a nice change from the run-of-the-mill type of assignments. For me, the challenge is figuring out how to incorporate those into an English 1000 class. We are somewhat limited (although not too much) in the types of papers we can assign based on the guidelines for what the three papers should be like. I think these guidelines are good, since they ensure that students will be writing the types of papers that they'll have to write throughout the rest of their college careers, but I'd also like to be able to have some more creative assignments.

One way I'm thinking of doing this is by having a class discussion board on blackboard and requiring students to post on there in response to prompts. Some of the things Bean suggests that I think would be interesting to try are writing dialogues (p. 94), writing essays from different people's perspectives (p. 95), and writing essays based on metaphors (e.g. "writing an essay is like riding a bike...") (p. 111).

Another way I'd like to incorporate a larger variety of writing assignments in addition to the longer essays is by having the students do in-class writing. We did this the first day of my honors comp II class as an undergrad, and I still remember the essay I wrote. I enjoyed that class much more than I did my honors comp I class, because in honors comp II we spent our time discussing the works we had read and writing about them, whereas in honors comp I we spent our time talking about writing.

I suppose that raises another question: How do we talk about writing to our students? In some ways, writing is something that you learn by doing, although, in other ways, talking about it can be very helpful. (I think I actually learned a lot in my honors comp I class, even though I didn't enjoy it.) Even though I learned a lot, though, the class was pretty boring; I probably wouldn't have learned nearly as much if the professor hadn't had the nerve to give me a B on my first paper. :) How can we teach these concepts to students who aren't as grade-driven as my freshman self?