What’s your motif when writing the story?

In my time, as a teacher, I have seen numerous lesson plans for schemes of work on story writing; and, if I am honest, they have bored me. Creative writing, sometimes, is boiled down to the following structure: 

Opening

Complication

Crisis

Resolution

Now, I am not a published author, nor am I a renowned critic, nor am I an expert on stories, but, this typical structure for stories, we often teach our students, has no relation to real stories. I think of the last five books I have read and none of them can be squeezed (with the flabby bits hanging over the trousers) into this framework. Yet, again and again on TES and other teacher sites I see this structure enforced on students. It just doesn’t work for me. I never see myself comment on a student’s resolution and I never criticise a student’s crisis in their crafted story. In fact, in exam reports I have never seen the following comment:

‘Students are commonly producing over-the-top complications and their resolutions never tie up any previous plot threads. Please avoid sub-plots. There seems to be a growing trend of students ending their stories with a cliffhanger, which is honestly disappointing for the reader.’

In fact, I find, all too often, that the way we teach creative writing tends to be from a lobotomy point of view. I, and many others, have taught schemes of work on the basis that the students in the class haven’t a clue about how stories work. Remember to use characters in your story. Don’t forget to use a setting. It isn’t that important for students to be told this. I have yet to read a story that has been set in an empty nothing and it is populated by no characters.

Having children of my own, I see that a lot of what has happened in the past has been spelling out the basics. My daughters could tell me, at seven, what a good story needs. In fact, they intuitively know. So when they tell me a story about Stinky the Mouse and his journey on a boat, they know what will make the story better. They know if Stinky loses his cheese, the tension will be raised. They know that Stinky must find his cheese, friends or home at the end of the story. You can see that, unlike me, my daughters have a better chance of starting a writing career than me.

I feel partly annoyed with myself that I taught creative writing in this way. I feel as though I have been teaching in such a basic way. I can’t take all the responsibility, because the National Curriculum enforced this structured way of teaching story writing on me, you, us.

This term, I have been working with Year 9s to write dystopian stories. You’ll be pleased to know that I haven’t even muttered the words ‘crisis’, ‘complication’ or ‘resolution’. I did use the word ‘opening’ and that’s only because they are writing their opening to their dystopian story. So, what did I use to help them structure their stories? Motifs.

When reading the opening of ‘Divergent’ I noticed how hair was mentioned. This hair motif is a constant pattern in the books. In fact, it is a constant motif used in dystopian fiction. We were able to make connections with ‘Hunger Games’ and how all the stories featured a scene where a character has their hair cut or style. Occasionally, this is through their choice or, as typically, in dystopian worlds the new hairstyle is forced on them. Of course, the symbolism of the motif is clear, but the message of the motif is far more profound. Do we fit in? Or, do we rebel?

To get the idea of motifs, I used the short film, Alma. Here is the link on YouTube:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tECaYQ1AzkM

We had to watch it twice to get the idea of the window motif.

The boy looks though a window.

The doll look through the window at the boy.

The boy looks at the glass eyes of the doll.

The boy as a doll looks out of the doll’s glass eyes.  

Another child looks through the window.

Clearly, the phases ‘the eyes are a window to the soul’ springs to mind. However, the idea was clear for the students.

We then, as a class, looked at possible motifs we could use to reflect the idea of a dystopian society:

·      

   Cracks

·         
Shattered glass

·         
Reflections in mirrors

·         
Mistakes

·         
Watching

The class then formed a visual plan around the motif. I picked up on the ‘crack’ motif. No sniggers, please.

[1] A small crack in a wine glass

[2] A crack in a tile on the floor

[3] Two characters are splitting up – a crack in their relationship

[4] A news report on an earthquake

We were planning visually, creatively and symbolical and there wasn’t even a ‘crisis’ in sight. I had one lovely example of a student looking at ‘observer’ motif.

[1] A man watches another person

[2] A CCTV camera

[3] A bird

[4] An object

I noticed when the students started writing that the motifs told the story for the students. I didn’t need to worry about the overall structure.  As long as they knew that their motif had to be subtle and they had to avoid the same adjectives and verbs with each motif, then they would produce some great writing.

I know that if I focused on the opening, complication, crisis and resolution, I would have a typical Hollywood Summer Blockbuster, including 20 billion scenes involving CGI explosions and seven two-dimensional character, written on four sides of A4.    

So, when I am going to get students to write a piece of creative writing now, I am going to ask them one, simple question: What is you motif?

Thanks for reading,

Xris

P.S. ‘Stinky the Mouse and the hunt for the lost chunk of cheese’ will be available from all good retailers in December.  

MacGyver teaching - getting back to the basics!

Sometimes I liken my job to being MacGyver….

I have friends who have travelled the world. Yet, I bet none of them have had anything like the experiences I have daily. They probably haven’t witnessed the birth of a new acronym in education. They probably haven’t discovered the delights of the YPO catalogue. They probably haven’t even uncovered the mysteries of how gluing a sheet into a book is somehow a genetic trait that only 34.5% of the human population can ever master. They probably haven’t lived.  They haven’t lived when faced with fifteen minutes to plan a lesson with three staplers, twenty sheets of paper and a bit of mouldy chewing gum.

Anyway, there I was in my classroom thinking of a lesson. The usual panic I have lasts a full fifteen minutes. I laugh in the face of a 5 minute lesson plan! I think and check my emails. I think some more and move some papers about. I think a little bit more and then move some books. It so happens that this happened to me this week. I needed to plan a lesson with my current Year 11s. They have a mock exam in a few weeks and I wanted them to get some practice on the writing section. I didn’t know what to do. All I had was a sheet of A3 paper and a board pen. This is when I came with this idea:

It is partly inspired by a NATE (I will cite the author when I find my copy) article I recently read, but it also links in to my ongoing idea of teaching students how to structure texts differently. Students are coming to our school with a solid grounding of grammar basics ( thank you, primary schools) and the ability to use onomatopoeias, but I think my lesson on what a simile is, is slightly defunct. I, maybe we, need to change how we look at teaching English. ‘The what’ isn’t my priority now, but ‘The how’. I am teaching a Year 7 about villains and they have written a description about villains. In the past, I have been slightly obsessed with chucking everything at the description. Come on, use a simile. Use a bit of pathetic fallacy. Naturally, over time I come to the idea that these things tend to be fluff compared to the basic content and structure.  Without a solid basis for ideas, students are floundering. We might get sparks of brilliance from a weak student where they happen to use words in an interesting combination, but the majority of times brilliance is happening by accident. Or, it is happening intuitively.

I have been exploring teaching how to describe a setting and how to describe a character here. Providing students with these structures ,to hang their writing on, has been a phenomenal change of perspective for me. I am now exploring choices made by other writers in relation to a student’s own choices. The previous default model has always been: see that; try and copy it in your own work.

Right so there I was in the classroom thinking and I came up with this little document. And boy doesn’t it look ropey?

I don’t care how it looks, because it changed the way my students wrote. Instantly. Non-fiction writing isn’t the easiest of things for students to master. They know the rules of writing stories because they are immersed in seeing, watching, telling and reading them. Non-fiction doesn’t have that level of familiarity. This gave students a chance with structures to hang their ideas on. Previously, my group had the ideas, but they struggled with the presentation and communication of these ideas. Yes, we’d try to dress things us with a rhetoric here or there, but they didn’t really have the method to convey the idea. Now they did.    

Because of this…

The writing changed.

No longer did my class write endless lists of reasons. They shaped an idea. They modelled a thought. They selected the best vehicle for the job. The most enjoyable thing was that a student openly told me that he mixed two up, because he thought it was best way to get his point across.  We know PEE is a problem for students. It doesn't produce effective paragraphs for analysis or non-fiction. This option allows students to see a number of possibilities to present an idea. Oh, and it is easy to memorise them.  

What I like about it most is that I am teaching students to read non-fiction texts at the same time. I am teaching them to read how writers structure their writing in non-fiction texts.  The simplicity of it is great. However, I am, in a way, preparing the way for the new GCSE. The focus on structure and how texts are structured certainly links to this.

I could have made this sheet look better. I could have typed it up. I could have made it look pretty. But, do you know what? I don’t want to. It served its purpose in MacGyver sense; it got me out of scrape. It doesn't have the fluffy stuff added to it. The photocopy is basic, but it gets the job done. If we want students to be better writers we need to revise how we  teach structure and content. We need to look at how we teach it and how we guide students to write non-fiction texts.

Now I am off to plan a lesson for 'A Christmas Carol' and all I have is a Hello Kitty sticker, a white crayon and Barbie doll. Let's see how I get out of this situation.   

Thanks for reading,

Xris