BLACKSBURG -- Creative writing professors at Virginia Tech have drafted written guidelines for dealing with students who submit disturbing and violent work.

Frequency of violence in student writings can be a sign that a student may be troubled, though the guidelines, which have not been approved by the university, caution that violent behavior cannot be predicted by writing alone. The document encourages professors to follow their instincts and take a measured and conservative approach to dealing with disturbing writing.

The effort is not designed to limit what students can write about or to set up specific protocols for faculty, said Ed Falco, director of Tech's creative writing program. He came up with the idea after the April 16 shootings to pre-empt attempts by others that could stifle creative freedom.

With federal, state and university groups reviewing the shootings carried out by Seung-Hui Cho, an English major who authored many violent works for classes, that seemed like a very real possibility, Falco said.

"What's at stake is a robust academic environment for creative writers where we have the sense of freedom of expression, freedom of creativity," he said. "You can't be a good writer if you're afraid to write about certain subjects."

Falco, who taught Cho in a playwriting class last fall, writes novels, plays and short stories designed to make the reader look at the world differently. Sex, drug use and violence are prevalent in many of his works.

Falco said that while some of his best writing is disturbing in that way, some of his weakest writing shocks for the sake of being shocking. The guidelines suggest ways to tell the two apart: "Do characters respond to everyday events with a level or kind of violence one does not expect, or may even find frightening? If so, does the violence seem more expressive of rage or anger than it does of a literary aesthetic or thematic purpose?"

The document suggests faculty concerned about a student's writing follow a series of steps: speaking to the student, encouraging the student to seek counseling and involving university administrators.

Falco said the guide, written by a committee of creative writing faculty, reinforces what professors already are doing. But Rick Trethewey, an English and creative writing professor at Hollins University, said he bristles at such a policy. A friend of Falco's, he said professors should be trusted to deal with students responsibly without a document to guide them.

"If we see something that is really strange, I think we would know," he said.

Violence is a part of life and shouldn't be ignored in writing, Trethewey said.

But that doesn't mean his students are allowed to write about anything they want. "Writing is a discipline, and there are certainly things that are expected of students," he said.

While former department head Lucinda Roy and English professor Nikki Giovanni both have said poems Cho wrote were disturbing, it was his anti-social behavior in class that led to Roy's privately tutoring Cho and speaking to university officials about him in 2005.

Cho's works from the 2006 playwriting class are filled with violence, but Falco said he saw nothing in them that would cause him to go to officials. He has taught for 24 years and said he has never spoken to administrators about a student's writing. He wouldn't discuss what happened in his class with Cho, other than to say that his fellow students treated him with "compassion and decency, as a student who was quiet."

Falco said the issue of student writing had never received the type of attention it did after April 16, when Cho's plays circulated via the Internet. But he is confident universities won't make any knee-jerk reactions.

"Universities, they guard their freedoms pretty avidly," he said. "I don't think people would stand by and watch creative freedom taken away from them. It would be a terrible legacy of one violent act."