Balancing a story – story structure and more with St Mary’s Catholic Primary School, Bath Spa

It was a fabulous sight. Practically every person, including all of the staff and the headteacher, were dressed up as characters out of a book. We had Puss-in-Boots, several Wallys, form Where’s Wally, a harry Potter and a Hermione or two, several Alices and many, many more. It was clear that everyone had gone to great deal of effort. The costumes were convincing. It was also good to see so many books lying on tables.

Creative Writing in Other Languages – Again

European University, Nicosia, Cyprus
We sat in a round room on comfortable executive-looking chairs. A great space actually for creative writing. There were thirteen of us. We started on the theme of “April”. The trick was to jot down as many words as we could think of. And then look for the opposites. This was quite easy for the people here in Cyprus. They speak fluent English though are certainly not “native speaker” level. It was easy for them to find the opposites and write their “Hello Goodbye” poem.
We then went on to the “Demons and Angels” exercise, but used “sun” and “moon”. There was the usual discovery of extraordinarily original sentences as we put the two halves together.
These students were not familiar with haiku, but they did the usual trick of counting sounds on their fingers. Yes, even I do this when I write haiku. The haikus, as haikus generally do, turned out to be rather pleasing. The not-quite-native-speakerness of the students’ language heightened the charm.
The acrostic poems also were quite easy for these particular students, yet even they would have benefitted from using a bilingual or even a monolingual dictionary.
I introduced them to OULIPO and we invented some language games of our own. One student’s growing snowball was particularly effective.
The piece de resistance was the writing with the senses. I had expected them to produce mainly prose but they actually produced something mainly akin to poetry.
“Does it matter if it doesn’t rhyme?” asked one girl.
Well, of course not, but this just goes to show that we take a certain level of knowledge / familiarity for granted.
As usual, writing with the senses produced excellent writing all round. I was particularly encouraged by one piece that had a lot of repetition, where at the end there was a sentence that was different. Had the writer remembered the “turn” from the haikus? Had she picked this up from an example I had given in another exercise?
She didn’t know.
“I just wrote it because it seemed to work,” she said.
That says it all really.

Build a Book in a Day

I did one of these sessions in a school on Monday and I’m doing another one on Friday. One learns and refines as one goes along.

Both of this week are in primary schools, Y5 and Y6.

It’s a hectic but very productive day.

The students do finish between two and four pieces of work. In the afternoon, they’re involved in editing, designing, marketing and illustrating.

Well, on Monday we did it. We produced enough material for a whole book and a good one at that. It was chaos, but chaos always does lurk behind beauty. And it isn’t chaos, really. It is just proactive cause and rewarding effect.

I have worked out how to make the writing part go more smoothly. I won’t expect full length stories. We’ll use the introductions to build plot driven and character driven stories to then write some flash fiction. I’ll ask the Y5 teacher if they feel comfortable introducing the acrostic poems. I’ll then introduce haikus to Y6. Then I go to Y5 to introduce plot driven stories. Back to Y6 to introduce character-driven stories. Then to Y5 to introduce Flash Fiction. Y6 to introduce Flash Fiction. Y5 then do opposite poems, going through the Gargoyles and Angels exercise. Y6 can do Flash Non-Fiction. Finally, default activity, crosswords for Y6, wordsearches for Y5. I’ll create a group story with each year group, which I’ll write up and can be included in the book.

But I haven’t yet got my head around the chaos of the afternoon session. Perhaps that is something which will become clear on Friday.