Posted on: 20/06/2019
The planning process is an important one especially when tackling extended narratives. It acts as a bridge between children doing sentence/word level work, writing short extracts, and knitting all of these skills together into cohesive and finished stories. It allows them to recognise the various story shapes that exist, bringing fresh innovation to centuries-old tropes and plot devices
As I write this, schools are in the midst of writing moderation season for both primary key stages. The moderation process is a snapshot of how a child has developed as a writer at a particular moment in time – Y2 and Y6 - and whether or not they are secure in a variety of skills.
Whether we agree with this approach to assessment or not, it can sometimes have unintended side-effects and pitfalls. In response to the pressures of evidencing coverage, skills can often be ‘shoehorned’ into children’s writing creating a stilted, checklist effect. In some instances, children only get opportunities to write short extracts whether it be setting/character descriptions or a discreet piece of dialogue. Where children get to write longer pieces, these can often simply be retellings. While these writing opportunities are important and are great to help focus on a particular skill, these alone are not enough.
Before children make that intrepid stumble into Year 7, we strive in primary to give them a range of real experiences and opportunities to write in a variety of genres for different reasons and contexts. We ideally want them to have a nuanced bouquet of vocabulary at their fingertips and to be able to weave and stitch grammar and punctuation through the fabric of their writing with precision. At the end of it all we want them to have a sense of authorial control. Control to be able to create sustained and purposeful pieces of writing - creating their own extended narratives is an essential part of this journey.
Narrative in itself is an umbrella term for a smorgasbord of genres and formats: myth, fable, adventure, horror, sequels/prequels, missing chapter, sci-fi to name just a few. Under this umbrella dangles an array of skills – sentence structure, tense, dialogue, description - to be attempted again and again through the years in different contexts with varying degrees of success. As children develop their stamina and awareness of audience, they can edit more skilfully for effect and their sense of story cohesion – how the story hangs together - can grow.
The late Kurt Vonnegut, acclaimed American author of classics such as Slaughterhouse Five and Breakfast of Champions, has given much advice - often hilarious - regarding the writing of stories. In his more anthropological thesis, taken from Dispatches from a Man without a Country, he describes eight plot structures which all stories follow – he draws these as graphs (see graphic).
The fundamental idea is that stories have shapes which can be drawn on graph paper, and that the shape of a given society’s stories is at least as interesting as the shape of its pots or spearheads.
For each graph he first draws a vertical G-I axis which represents the amount of good or ill fortune the main protagonist will have through the story. He also draws a horizonal B-E axis for the beginning and end of the story. He starts off by describing the story structure for Man in Hole.
You will see this story over and over again. People love it and it is not copyrighted. The story is ‘Man in Hole,’ but the story needn’t be about a man or a hole. It’s: Somebody gets into trouble, gets out of it again [draws line A]. It is not accidental that the line ends up higher than where it began. This is encouraging to readers.
It’s as simple as that. He goes on to map out other story structures such as the Cinderella story structure which, according to him, is such a winner that when adapted successfully - ‘someone makes a million’. He was also delighted that the Cinderella structure is identical the New Testament story arc. And so we see how even the most unlikely story comparisons can be drawn.
These diagrams are similar to the emotions graphs that we often do in lessons allowing children to map out the fortune of a protagonist and notice similarities between stories. Michael Rosen often points out similar story patterns and draws comparisons with Robinson Crusoe and The Martian; The Odyssey and Where the Wild Things Are. These story pairs follow similar if not identical structures even though they are set in very different places with different yet familiar characters.
The idea that there are underlying story structures and archetypes has been with us for a long time. Joseph Campbell most notably in his work The Hero with a Thousand Faces (first published in 1949) embarks on the ambitious project to draw parallels between various myths and mythological heroes. Myths that follow identical structures, but which are separated by thousands of years and were written worlds apart. These structures, Campbell argues, are printed deep in the human psyche, and form part of what he terms the collective unconscious.
But where do all these literary theories leave us as teachers when faced with a class of children and a sequence of lessons to teach? They emphasise the fact that we have to give children time to plan the structure of their stories, drawing on the structures that have gone before and, if not attempted already, to allow children to innovate on these by changing features like the setting, era or characters.
I recently read a Y6 child’s version of Macbeth set in the Old West which worked beautifully and was a perfect example of a child given time to innovate on an existing story structure. When children know these structures well, they may even want to break these patterns and toy with the readers’ expectations.
Most of all, we want children, when faced with a blank page, to not be staring helplessly into a void. We want them to look at those blank lines and see the familiar story shapes of which Vonnegut talks, to take these shapes and run with them, letting their own tales of adventure, struggles and tribulations emerge from their pens. Stories that describe their worlds and let them, as authors find a way through.
Posted in: Curriculum
