My Creative Partners project is all over bar the shouting – I have to attend something called a wash-up meeting next week! Don’t you just love modern management jargon?! I have learnt a great deal from the project and could rant at a few politicians about a variety of educational and social issues as a result. But as a writer who works in schools I am fascinated by what I observed about little children and what, for them, constitutes a story. Tomorrow I will be working in a different school and will work with gifted and talented children from years 1-5 but the teacher, although she wanted me to work with year 1 and 2 wasn’t quite sure what she wanted me to do with them – something about writing stories and having fun – but she wasn’t sure what. And suddenly, I didn’t know what to suggest. I explained that from what I have observed, small children have nothing like such a strong sense of the structure of a story as adults do. This ought to be obvious, I think. We presumably learn the structure of story gradually over the years as we read and hear more and more of them. Some of us enjoy stories that break the rules, where the basic structure is experimented with and the ‘rules’ are broken – I do myself. David Mitchell’s ‘Cloud Atlas’ is brilliant in my opinion – Sarah Water’s ‘The Night Watch’ is less successful but I admire the attempt to subvert the structure. Others hate all that – many are the moans I have heard about the ambiguous ending of ‘Atonement’. But when I was 5 or 6, I was still absorbing how stories worked – I certainly couldn’t have explained that a story had a beginning, a middle and an end, let alone that there was something we could call a ‘build-up’ and a ‘resolution’. I know I wrote stories that went on until I got fed up with them and then they just stopped. And why not? Stories are entertainment and for little children, lots of action is entertaining – so they make up stories which go ‘and then...and then...and then...’ and that’s fine. When they get a bit older, they start noticing that things have got a bit ridiculous and so there are a lot of ‘I woke up and it was all a dream’ endings. To me, all this is a natural part of the process of absorbing a norm of our culture.
So why on earth are younger and younger children having ‘story structure’ drilled into them? I am part of the process because I am frequently asked to talk about story planning and I co-operate because I am always happy to share my experience of my craft and to try to meet the needs of those employing me. I can do a good, fun and memorable workshop on story planning and story structure and I think it’s perfectly appropriate for children who have had a rich and lengthy experience of story. But for younger children? No – surely it is better to let their idea run riot, their imaginations roam freely, for them to enjoy the glories of ‘and then... and then...and then...’. My 5-7s youth theatre group is devising a delightful little play this term in which Monkey meets the Emperor Master in the jungle and is taught Kung Fu because he is being sent on a quest to save the moon which is being eaten by the Astro Rat. On the way he encounters the Crocodile King, Howler Monkey and his friend Marmaduke, a mad Scientist and some helpful Stars. As you do. My adult brain has been much challenged by encouraging them to bring this amazing quest to a satisfactory conclusion which makes sense! I don’t think they would mind at all if it didn’t! They are simply enjoying the journey, adding in more and more adventures for Monkey.
So that’s what I think I’ll be doing with the Year 1s and 2s tomorrow – enjoying a story journey and not worrying about structure. How much does a story need it anyway? Do I only enjoy the satisfaction of a story that sticks to the traditional structure because that’s what I’m used to in my small corner of Western civilisation? I wonder. What do you think? Anybody out there an expert on the theory of narrative?
9 comments:
This is a fascinating post, Meg - thank you. I thoroughly agree, that children should be allowed to wander towards the discovery of narrative structure. If it is just foisted on them before they are ready they won't have any deep understanding of it and won't enjoy the satisfaction it brings. And they will then reject texts like Joyce's Ulysses because it breaks rules without touching their earlier experiences of creating narratives of their own which follow the unstructured chaos of real life.
I'm hardly an expert on narrative structure, but I did a bit on it when doing my PhD and the type of structures we enjoy are pretty universal through time and geography. There are many examples of incident-rich narratives which don't follow a standard story arc, but they tend to fall into either a pattern of a journey (as your kids have made it) or a collection of tales (like 1001 nights), and often both together.
The journey narrative has its own resolution in the journey's end - unless the journey is deliberately thwarted, of course, and I'm happy to argue with anyone about the Canterbury Tales in that regard. The story collection has little narrative arcs in each story and although it is often built into something with its own narrative structure, that structure may again be thwarted (CT again, Decameron, Odyssey to an extent). Deliberate subversion of narrative structure is something we applaud in modern writers but rarely acknowledge in older texts. Yet the complex narrative structure in which the sequence of episodes is integral to continual plot/thematic development is a construct of the novel and so relatively recent. What your kids are doing has a long and venerable history.
Sorry, end of lecture on narrative structure. You can delete this comment if you like :-)
Interesting post AND comment. I'm minded of the exercise where each person adds the next sentence of a story following a pattern of And, But, So as the first words of each consecutive contribution. The next step after And, And, And, I guess.
(Why are these writing games so much harder to explain than to actually do?!)
This is really interesting, Meg, especially as I've just been asked to do a session with some year twos - who seem very, very small to me! I must admit I've only fairly recently got the idea of story structure myself, which probably explains a lot!
One of my favourite things to do with young children is to tell a simple story and then retell it with their elaborations; then retell it with further embellishments, then tell it again. One example - the Hare and the Tortoise, in which, by version six, the tortoise is a biker, and the hare is having nightmares about windmills. The 'beginning middle end' nonsense is a hangover from the necessity for year six children to write a story in an hour as part of the SATs testing. But the education system exists to create bureaucrats, not story tellers, so what do you expect?
Thankyou, thankyou, Meg! SO good to hear someone making sense about getting children to write/make up stories. OF COURSE their stories are going to be picaresque and segue from one thing to another. Endings are difficult enough for the professionals, let alone little children. Let them have fun, for goodness' sake!
Great post. I find kids are a font of creativity and can build stories from their unique perspective in the world. They pass easily between fantasy and reality. Have fun and let us know how it goes.
Great post and interesting comments!
Aha, the ease of CP initiatives! Still wrangling with artspeak documentation on the project here, as the IT systems didn't quite link up . . . Hope your sessions today have been fun, Meg!
I think this is so true. I have felt the same myself, in schools. I think the trouble is teachers think that they have to TEACH story writing just like they teach anything else - whereas we all learned to write not through having story structure taight to us but through reading and playing and being allowed to use our imagination, and being taught reading and writing in such a way we didn't end up terrified of them.
I am so sorry I couldn't join in with this on the day I wrote it!! A couple of manic days out of the house! I'm thrilled this has been so well received and I'm going to read again properly tomorrow. For now, let me just say thank you and that we had huge fun. Lots of story games. I particularly like one called 'No, you didn't' which I'll explain asap - love the idea shared here for others. Thank you!
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