Countdown to Creative Writing

Step by Step Approach to Writing Techniques for 7-12 Years

Stephen Bowkett

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• eBook ISBN:
  9781135246556
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Developing children's writing abilities boosts their confidence, creates enjoyment and relevance in the task and cultivates a range of decision-making and problem-solving skills that can then be applied across the curriculum. The Countdown series provides all the support you need in helping children to improve their prose, poetry and non-fiction writing.

Countdown to Creative Writing is a comprehensive and flexible resource that you can use in different ways:

• 60 stand-alone modules that cover all the essential aspects of writing a story
• countdown flowchart providing an overview showing how modules are linked and how teachers can progress through them with the children
• photocopiable activity sheets for each module that show how to make the decisions and solve the problems that all writers face along the road from first idea to finished piece of work
• teachers' notes for each module with tips and guidance including how modules could be used as stand-alone units, but also with suggestions for useful links between modules, and curriculum links
• a self-study component so that children can make their own progress through the materials, giving young writers a sense of independence in thinking about their work
• 'headers' for each module showing where along the 'countdown path' you are at that point.

In short Countdown to Creative Writing saves valuable planning time and gives you all the flexibility you need - teachers might want to utilise either the self-study or 'countdown' aspects of the book, or simply dip into it for individual lesson activities to fit in with their own programmes of work.

Modules 14–10
Part 1 Getting ready to write

General guidance

These modules give pupils some guidance about narrative structure with an emphasis on the manipulation of time within the story. Inexperienced writers tend usually to think of narrative in a simple linear way. This ‘mind set’ is reinforced by the lesson that stories have a beginning, a middle and an end, which is perfectly true of course but can create at least two problems:

1. At the outset, when pupils are doing their first thinking, they sometimes don’t realise it’s fine to have an idea about the end or the middle of the story first. While we (rightly) encourage pupils to make sure their stories have a ‘strong start’ it can result in an overemphasis on the beginning with a corresponding lack of creative energy later on. Pupils sometimes ‘run out of ideas’ because they believe they can’t think of anything else to say, they become bored and dispirited and quite frequently abandon the project.
2. The beginning-middle-end template often becomes a habit of thought over time, locking pupils’ thinking into a restrictive linear way of envisaging story. This manifests itself in what I call the ‘and-then syndrome’. The syndrome can be recognised by the following characteristics in the pupil’s writing:
   • Simple linear B-M-E narrative structure.
   • Little or no manipulation of time in the form of flashbacks or other ‘chronological jumps’ (for example ‘A year went by …’ or ‘Three weeks later …’).
   • Often a corresponding lack of movement in space. By that I mean the writer’s (and subsequently the reader’s) attention stays with one character throughout, even if the story is written in the third person.
   • A noticeable lack of creative energy later in the story. This shows itself in various ways, such as the pupil actually repeating ‘and then’ often sometimes coupled with an abrupt and unsatisfactory conclusion. One also finds less zest in the writing coupled with little innovation: the plot limps along and one can imagine the writer struggling and wanting only to fill the required space on the page.

More confident and experienced writers don’t worry about confusion. This is an interesting word because while it’s usually interpreted according to its Latin root, to confound or throw into disorder, it can also be considered as con+fusion and read as ‘flowing towards fusion’ as in the confluence of two or more streams. The streaming of ideas from the subconscious level builds inexorably towards a plot that makes conscious logical sense.

This I feel is a vitally important point educationally. Many studies on how children learn reveal that when youngsters feel comfortable in the presence of ambiguity and uncertainty they learn more effectively. This is because they are not trying to ‘guess the right answer’ (as Edward de Bono might say) and, indeed, accept that there may be many possible answers. Such young learners also show a greater willingness to explore various alternatives and possibilities and are often more tolerant of other people’s ideas, suggestions, theories and conclusions. For our purposes, pupils who exhibit this behaviour are likely to be more flexible and patient in their thinking as the story evolves ‘organically’ in their minds. They realise that the story is ‘in there somewhere’* and that developing a narrative is not about trying hard to work it out but relishing the joy of discovering that actually they know more than they thought they new.

Note: Many teachers I’ve met worry greatly that pupils need to produce writing of a desired level during SATs and often exhort pupils to ‘hurry up and get it down on paper’. My belief is that when pupils feel capable and confident and have a range of thinking strategies available to them their ‘thinking time’ even under test conditions can be done quickly and effectively, and this will be reflected in the quality of their writing. The aim of all of the modules in this book is to elevate young writers to that degree of competence: the following batch of modules focuses particularly on time within narrative structure.

*I’ve met many people, children and adults, who feel that they’ve got a book inside them somewhere, ‘but if only I could get it out’. I’m reminded of an anecdote where, I think it was Benjamin Disraeli fell into conversation with a rather tedious wannabe writer at a dinner party. The aspiring author, seeking to impress, announced that she had a book inside her, to which Disraeli dryly remarked that that was probably the best place for it.

Module 14
Timespan

Inside and outside

Imagine that we’ve got our world (the ‘outside world’) and the world inside the story you are writing. The amount of time that passes inside the story from the beginning to the end is called the story’s timespan. This doesn’t have anything to do with the length of the story or how long it will take you to write it.

When people are learning to write stories they sometimes pay little attention to the story’s timespan. Also in such stories time always moves along at the same rate—although this is more to do with the pace of the story rather than the timespan. (You can find more information about Pace in Module 13.) Having said that you might already have thought about the timespan of your tale. How much time passes from the beginning to the end? Does the whole story happen in a day? Or a week? Perhaps it’s the other way round and all the events in your story take place within a few minutes or an hour. It’s up to you of course because you’re the author, though to be a good author you must give at least some thought to this matter of timespan.

Getting your head around time

Remember we looked at Narrative lines in Module 38? You can use a similar idea to get your head around the passage of time in your tale. I once wrote a short Science Fiction story called Awakening. It starts ‘For many thousands of years Earth’s people had slept’. The next page goes into more detail about how people had gone into hibernation for centuries after a global war while the planet recovered. After that they intended to wake and get on with their lives. But the plan goes wrong and the computers controlling the hibernation chambers malfunctions. The sleepers don’t wake for hundreds of thousands of years.

So the timespan of the first half of the story is hundreds of thousands of years. The second half takes place over just a few minutes. We focus on one man, Andros, as he wakens slowly, not realising that such a great length of time has passed. He thinks that everything is normal as he opens his eyes and sees blurred movements beyond the misted glass of his sleep chamber. But things have changed terribly. He thinks that his friends have woken before him and are coming to help him now—though he’s in for a shock.

How would you end that story if you’d written it? Think about it before looking at the ending I chose below:

‘The lid of the cabinet was wrenched open. Andros had no time to scream as the rat dropped down on him. It was as big as a man, and it held a knife in its hand.’

If we used a line to show the timespan of the story it would look like this (Figure 27).

When I wrote about great spans of time in the first half of the story my language was quite vague and general. I used phrases such as:

• Earth’s people had slept
• great wars had devastated the planet
• whole continents had been laid to waste
• global superpowers had battled
• civilisation’s last resources.

Notice that I don’t go into any detail here. It would be the same kind of thing as saying ‘a week went by’. You might put a bit of detail into what happened during that week, but the main purpose is just to mention the passing of time so that you can get on with the story.

On the other hand, in the second part of my story I do mention details. It’s as though, in the time machine of our imaginations, we have materialised in a definite place and so we can notice little things like:

• the hiss of air being pumped into the sleep chamber
• the opening of Andros’s eyes
• glass being smashed
• the glint of the knife in the mutant rat’s hands.

Figure 27 Timespans

This is a useful trick to learn. If you were writing a Romance story for example, and wanted to mention the early weeks of the characters’ relationship you might describe things in general terms: the characters dating and falling in love, going on holiday, telling their friends, planning a future together. Then if you wanted to write a crucial scene where one character finds out that the other is let’s say an international criminal, that scene, which may last only minutes, would contain more precise details.

Activities

Activity: Look again at a few stories you have really enjoyed and notice how the authors move the action on through time.

Activity: As you watch a movie or episode on TV, pay attention to the way the director lets you know that time is passing. We can learn a lot from these visual techniques and use them in our own writing.

If you want to find out more about pacing your story leap through the time portal and materialise at Pace (Module 13).

Module 13
Pace

How fast do you go?

Pace means the speed or rate at which action happens and events pass by. Although many people like fast, pacy, action-packed stories the reader’s enjoyment can be increased by varying the pace—or in other words deliberately slowing things down in between the action sequences. When the pace of a story is slowed it allows more descriptive details to be included and the characters can physically be sitting, walking, sleeping, etc. Or you can think of it the other way round, that by adding descriptive detail that slows the pace. Think about riding a horse. As the rider you sometimes want it to walk or trot and at other times to gallop. All you need is to have control of the reins.

How can you control pace?

So how can you make the horse gallop—how can you increase the pace of a story?

• Build in some action-packed incidents.
• Use shorter sentences and short paragraphs.
• Write brief scenes with frequent changes of scene and viewpoint. Several things happening at once can make a story zoom along, but you have to keep control of the action and be careful not to confuse your reader.
• Use strong powerful adjectives and punchy verbs (words ending in ‘ing’ also quicken the pace). Use adverbs that indicate speed and suddenness. ‘Suddenly’ is a good example.
• Use phrases that suggest speed—in no time at all/in the blink of an eye/all of a sudden/without warning …
• Include plenty of quick-fire dialogue, but balance dialogue (speech) with description. There is nothing worse than pages and pages of speech by itself—except pages and pag...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Overview – How to use the book
• 60 Getting started
• 59 A few tips
• 58 Good writing habits
• 57 A writer’s rights
• 56 What is a story?
• 55 Having ideas
• 54 Ideas for a reason
• 53 Plot bank
• 52 Plot, characters and background
• 51 Inspiration
• 50 All of your senses
• 49 Metaphors
• 48 ‘Sounds as it says’
• 47 The structure of a story
• 46 Forms
• 45 Diary
• 44 Play format
• 43 Letters, texts and other ideas
• 42 Basic narrative elements
• 41 Sub-elements
• 40 Tips on planning
• 39 The six big important questions
• 38 Narrative lines
• 37 Genre
• 36 Fantasy
• 35 Science fiction
• 34 Horror
• 33 Crime/thriller
• 32 Romance
• 31 Animal adventures
• 30 Further ideas for genre
• 29 Audience and purpose
• 28 Characters
• 27 Names
• 26 SF and fantasy names
• 25 Picture a person
• 24 A bagful of games
• 23 Character ticklist
• 22 Personality profile
• 21 Settings
• 20 Visualizations
• 19 Map making
• 18 Place names
• 17 Titles
• 16 Word grid
• 15 Mix and match
• 14–10 Getting ready to write: part 1
• 9–4 Getting ready to write: part 2
• Review
• Bibliography