Mayhew / Griffin Storycraft

How to teach narrative writing
1. Auflage 2020
ISBN: 978-1-78583-464-6
Verlag: Crown House Publishing
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 232 Seiten

Martin Griffin and Jon Mayhew's Storycraft: How to teach narrative writing is an inspiring and practical resource to support secondary school teachers in developing their students' creative writing. This book is not a style manual. Authors Martin Griffin and Jon Mayhew think there are plenty of those about. Instead, it picks apart the craft of narrative writing and equips teachers with activities designed to help their students overcome the difficulties they experience when tasked with creating something from nothing. Written by two fiction writers and English teachers with over forty years' combined experience in education, Storycraft packs in expert guidance relating to idea generation and the nature of story and provides off-the-peg writing prompts that teachers can immediately adopt and adapt in the classroom. The book breaks down the simple components that must be in place for a narrative to work the crafting of character, setting, shape and structure and shares fifty-one stimulating activities that will get students writing narratives regularly, more creatively and with greater confidence. Martin and Jon also include helpful advice in a chapter dedicated to the process of editing in which they provide activities designed to help students diagnose and improve misfiring narratives, and they close the book with invaluable tips for GCSE exam preparation written directly for students and with an impending creative writing exam in mind. Suitable for English teachers of students aged eleven to eighteen.

Having worked as an English and SEN teacher for 25 years, Jon Mayhew is now in demand on the school event circuit - delivering writing workshops to students from Key Stage 2 to sixth form. He is also a Royal Literary Fund Writing Fellow, helping students to improve their academic writing at Chester University. Jon is the author of the Monster Odyssey series and the multi-award-winning Mortlock.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Mayhew, Jon

Griffin, Martin

Leseproben

CHAPTER 2

FORGE-ING STRATEGIES

This chapter of Storycraft will suggest ten strategies for creating an abundance of micro-ideas for potential stories. The aim is to create a wealth of possibilities so that students can be flexible, resilient and creative in the face of any potential project or exam question.

As we mentioned in the previous chapter, it’s important to explore the notion of microideas with your students. We’re not looking for fully formed story ideas here; we’re collecting the individual components that will help us to craft stories at a later date. The outcomes of these activities will be scribbled notes, lists of possibilities, observations and potential story ideas. As a result, it might be appropriate to design a space for collecting the outcomes of these activities. Each student might have a journal or notebook. They might be submitting anonymised ideas on flash cards. There might be a collective online document where ideas are amassed. We’re fond of torn-off strips of paper folded up and dropped into a tray, then randomly withdrawn again.

The activities are structured and reasonably formal: you might want to try a few in class, give one or two as homework or use them as a menu of options for students. The gathering of the outcomes is up to you. These tasks won’t generate stories, but rather the seeds of stories, so you needn’t worry about huge piles of marking.

There are a number of principles that we think are important to emphasise during the pre-production phase of the creative process:

Long thinking means accumulating and keeping hold of ideas over a sustained period. There is no ‘best before’ date on ideas. Record them and sift through them after they’ve had time to gestate. Activities like Thirty-One Elevator Pitches (Activity 2), Person, Place, Problem (Activity 9) or Hearts and Clubs (Activity 10) can be returned to again and again, and should become a habitual part of idea generation.

Quantity beats quality. If one in three micro-ideas will be potentially good, we need 300 of them in order to have 100 interesting components to play with: aim for lots and lots of bad ideas and the good ideas will follow. Often our early ideas are uninspiring or derivative, so we need to get beyond them. The Cycle Courier Challenge (Activity 1) will help to illustrate this point.

It only takes a moment to record an idea. Gather everything, no matter how small or seemingly insignificant.

The dreamer must beat the critic in this phase of creativity. We should aim to generate ideas free from the practical concerns that might accompany actually using them. No need to shoot down ideas because they don’t make sense or they would be difficult to pull off. Title Race (Activity 3) generates lots of ideas precisely because the students don’t have to write the story they’re speculating about.

Combinations of ideas emerge when we observe, record, research and experiment. An idea in and of itself might appear uninteresting, but in combination with three or four others it might explode into life.

Hopefully the activities here will be useful in creating an array of possibilities, all of which can be carried into the activities in the chapters that follow.

ACTIVITY 1. THE CYCLE COURIER CHALLENGE

In this activity, your job is to list ideas in response to a scenario that’s given below. We’re going to ask you for ten of them. Before you read the scenario, though, here’s what we’re interested in: seeing when your best and most original ideas emerge. Is your first idea your favourite? Or is it the second or third? Is your tenth idea your most original? Or are all of them, in your opinion, terrible?

As you list your ideas you must do it chronologically – in the order you get them. Be completely uncritical. If a bad idea springs to mind, record it. If all ten are bad in your opinion, that’s fine.

OK, now for the scenario. Think of the cycle couriers you see in towns and cities. They usually zoom around on their bikes weaving in and out of traffic. Their bikes have large cube-shaped delivery boxes on them, usually because they’re ferrying takeaway food like pizza.

Now consider this: what if every cycle courier in your nearest town or city looked as if they were delivering fast food, but really it was a disguise and they were delivering something else entirely? What could the something else be?

Right, you’re off. Note down a list of ten possibilities.

Now that you’ve made your list you might want to consider the following:

Give every idea a score between 1 and 5 (with 1 being ‘common’ and 5 being ‘most creative’). Then design and plot a simple graph to illustrate where your good ideas came – early, late or somewhere in the middle.

Choose your favourite idea – the one you consider the best and most original. Then pick your least exciting idea. Where did the best and worst ideas come in the process?

These two activities should give you a chance to reflect on when your best ideas come – straightaway or with persistence.

Now have a look at the following table. It represents three other people responding to the Cycle Courier Challenge:

Person 1		Person 2		Person 3

1

Guns

1

Biological weapons

1

Drugs

2

Poisonous liquids

2

Bombs

2

Illegal weapons

3

Party cakes

3

Sandwiches

3

Animals

4

Smuggled pets

4

Water

4

Explosives

5

Bricks

5

Ribbons

5

Plans to create destruction

6

Chopped-off heads

6

Rabbits/pets

6

Diamonds

...