Build a Book Workshop Chapter 5 by Gill James

 

The Creative Writing Exercises

There is not a lot of time in the school curriculum for creative writing, particularly as students move into and through Key Stages 3 and 4. When there is some time, there is rarely enough time to allow the students to complete work. Therefore, students will be a little nervous. It is good, therefore, to start off with a warm up exercise, as described here.

A great strength of the Build a Book Workshop is that it allows students to complete a piece of creative work – or even several pieces of creative work – and to a good standard. It emphasizes for them that reading and writing are really useful skills.

If your students speak another language, you might consider doing some of the start-up exercises in that language. If this is simply because they are studying another language at school, invite the Modern Foreign Language teacher into the workshop. If it is because they are bilingual or speak another language at home, invite them to produce some of their work in that language. You might, however, have to think of a strategy for making the text understandable to the readers of the book.   

Students will not all work at the same pace. Consider spending a few minutes setting up each exercise, allowing students to work on the shorter ones for twenty minutes or so and on the longer ones for thirty minutes, and then stopping them all and moving them on. However, do allow them to backtrack and finish a favourite piece of work.

Alternatively, you could have a written set of instructions about each type of exercise and ask students to work through them either form the beginning to the end, or in an order they choose. Or you can set up tables for different activities, and either let the students choose or direct them to what you know they will do best.

This is where having your writer in the classroom, or even some student / recent graduate help – perhaps from a creative writing student / graduate – is really useful. You have another pair of eyes and ears to encourage and troubleshoot.  

Do remember to draw the students’ attention to common mistakes and, even more importantly, texts that are working well.         

A warm-up exercise.

This works best generally if students use lined paper.

First you discuss their theme with the students and decide on two words to do with their theme that are opposites or diametrically opposed in meaning. For example, you may have the theme “The Environment”. Your two words may be “Winter” and “Summer”.

Ask them to fold the paper into four vertically, to produce four columns. At the top of the column on the left they write the word “Winter”. See figure 1. They then work for about five minutes on writing down everything they can think of to do with winter. They may use odd words, phrases or whole sentences. They never cross the vertical line, but go down to the next line. See figure 2.

Stop them and ask them to fold back the column they have been working on so that they can no longer see their words. See figure 3.

Ask them to write the word “Summer” at the top of the right hand column. See figure 4. They then work for about five minutes on writing down everything they can think of to do with summer. They may use odd words, phrases or whole sentences. They never cross the vertical line, but go down to the next line.

Now ask them to fold back the column as they did the first one. See figure 5. If they now turn over the paper, the two columns will be lined up. See figure 6.  

They can refer to the collection of words throughout the rest of the workshop. It’s also worth looking at some of the lines that go across. They may have created some extraordinary language.

See these examples taken form figure 6. Here are some interesting direct phrases:

Wearing ice cream

Hose-pipes frozen

I have no socks

Can’t sleep on my (fingers?)

Swimming lights

Everyday day

Aunt Lily’s people

No leaves in the car

New puppy…  mince pies

Windy breath

Waves like a cloud

 

Here are some diagonal connections:

No school, dark days

No food for hay fever

Shops full of brown legs

 

And here are some connections that work with some extra manipulation:

My Christmas bike

Baskets of birds

 

 

   Figure 1

Winter

Figure 2

Winter
Cold
Snow
Frost
Christmas
Dark days
Wearing
gloves
No food for
Birds
Frozen
Lake
I have
Chilblains
On my
Fingers
Lights
Shortest
Day
Shops full
Angry
People
No leaves
No flowers
Mince pies
Seeing your
Breath
Like a cloud
Icicles from
roof

 

             Figure 3

 

Figure 4

		Summer
		No school
		Sunshine
		Holidays
		My bike
		Seaside
		Ice cream
		Sunburn
		Flower
		Baskets
		Hose-pipe
		Ban
		No socks
		Brown legs
		Can’t sleep
		Picnics
		Swimming
		Pool
		Every day
		Hayfever
		Going to
		Aunt Lily’s
		In the car
		Carsick
		New puppy
		Cricket club
		Windy
		Waves
		Hitting
		Promenade

 

Figure 5

 

Figure 6

Summer	Winter
No school	Cold
Sunshine	Snow
Holidays	Frost
My bike	Christmas
Seaside	Dark days
Ice cream	Wearing
Sunburn	gloves
Flower	No food for
Baskets	Birds
Hose-pipe	Frozen
Ban	Lake
No socks	I have
Brown legs	Chilblains
Can’t sleep	On my
Picnics	Fingers
Swimming	Lights
Pool	Shortest
Every day	Day
Hayfever	Shops full
Going to	Angry
Aunt Lily’s	People
In the car	No leaves
Carsick	No flowers
New puppy	Mince pies
Cricket club	Seeing your
Windy	Breath
Waves	Like a cloud
Hitting	Icicles from
Promenade	roof

 

Whatever the outcome of this exercise, it will at least have got the creative juices flowing. It doesn’t matter if the students don’t use what they’ve produced here at all. Neither does it matter if they rely on this work to help them with all of the other creative writing exercises. 

Easy poem 1 Opposites.

This type of poem comes straight out of the warm-up exercise described above.  It can be as long or as short as the student likes. Here is a very simple one based on my lists above:

    Hello cold                   Goodbye sunshine

    Hello Christmas          Goodbye summer holidays

    Hello mince pies          Goodbye ice cream    

These simple poems can be happy or as sad as the student cares to make them. The student can also make several choices about how to set the work out on the page. However, also read the chapter on word-processing.

Easy Poem 2 Acrostics

These poems are very easy also. The students simply think of a word to do with their theme. Perhaps the theme is joy and they decide to write about winter. They set the word “winter” out vertically so:

W

I

N

T

E

R

 

They then think of words or phrases beginning with each of the letters. The creative trick is to make sure that the words and phrases are in-keeping with the theme. So, we might get:

 

Waiting excitedly for Christmas

Ice like shining diamonds

No place for frowns

Tomorrow he’ll be here

Eating our minecpies

Reindeer loving their carrots 

 

Just as acceptable is:

Weak sunlight

Icy breath

Nuts for birds

Tinsel

Evergreens

Rays of life.

 

Students may like to refer to some of the words they thought of in the first exercise. 

 

Haikus

A haiku is a three line poem with five syllables in the first line, seven syllables in the second line, and five syllables in the third line. There should be a “turn” usually between second and third lines. We can interpret this as a change of tone or pace. Haikus should also contain a strong image of nature. Aren’t we all natural? They should be written near the objects they are about.

Students should be encouraged to: 

·         Collect words to do with topic. They may like to use the words they discovered in the earlier creative writing exercise.

·         Play with them: Which go together well? What do they sound like?

·         Write their haiku.

You will probably see a lot of counting on fingers as the students work on this. Some may not really understand exactly what a syllable is and may confuse them with words. Regional accents can make a difference also. None of this matters. The final sound and atmosphere of the poem are all that count.

Here is my summer haiku, made up from the words discovered earlier:

 

Summer pool, no school,

Ice cream sunburn hose-pipe ban

Hayfever picnics.      

 

A slightly less positive one, perhaps, but it makes a point.

If working with less able students, you or your helper can write the words they think of on cards, which the whole group can rearrange over the desk until they find some good combinations. This way, they can write a few group haikus.  

Quincains

These will cause similar counting on the fingers activities to those you may see as your students write haikus. Quincains are five lines long. The first one is just two syllables. The lines then get longer, increasing to four, six, then eight syllables. The last line is two syllables again.

Here is my effort:

 

Summer

Wearing sunshine

No ice frozen chilblains

Holidays   

Writing by numbers

You could ask students to make up their own rules for writing a poem. This may appeal to the more mathematical amongst them. They could base their rules on the number of lines, words or syllables perhaps relating to some familiar number – their date of birth for example.

Writing to a set of rules makes us more creative. We have to make our work interesting and engaging despite the constraints.  

If you would like more ideas to play with yourself, look at the work of the OULIPO poets. If you google OULIPO, you will get many links and many descriptions of their exercises – people are adding to them all the time. The snow-ball one is always good fun.

Writing for shape

Students may like to make poems into a shape that looks good on the page. A poem about a mouse might look a bit like a mouse. Or the words might fit into a geometric shape. Students might play around with different fonts and different sized letters. Just a little word of warning with the latter, though: they must limit themselves to Word fonts and even some of these may have to be changed slightly as the book goes to design. Alternatively, they might consider presenting their poem as a picture, saved as .jpg. More will be explained about this in the chapters on word-processing and illustration.       

 Writing with the senses

This exercise can lead to prose or poetry. It always produces good writing. If everybody did it all of the time, we’d all be brilliant writers. 

Ask your students to close their eyes and imagine a scene to do with your theme. For example, they could be asked to think of a warm, sunny day when they feel happy. It can be an imagined scene or they can think back to a scene from their own lives.

Ask them:

·         What do you see?

·         What do you hear?

·         What can you smell?

·         Can you taste anything?

·         What can you feel?

·         How do you feel?

Now get them to open their eyes and write. One word of warning: some will write, “I saw a lake and I smelt some flowers.” You can get them away from this by asking them to tell you what the lake looked like and what the flowers smelt like. 

The students write freely to start with.  A structure may emerge spontaneously. If not, you might ask them to see if they can put a bit of a story into it.

And even without a structure, there is every possibility that you will have some usable and very engaging prose or poetry.     

Flash Fiction

This is a very short story, with just one plot point. However, you can reduce a more complicated story to flash fiction.

Here are some examples taken from stories students know well:

 

The clock struck twelve.

“I have to go,” she said pushing him away.

She ran down the stairs.

Who was she? Why the hurry? The ball would not end until two.  

Then he saw the gleaming shoe. Something of her. He smiled to himself. He would find her.   

 

 

 Her grandmother seemed very hairy. 

“All the better to eat you with.”

The girl recognised the wolf.  The red cape might stop the blood showing.

The wolf’s sharp teeth would rip into her soon. 

“No you don’t,” shouted a voice. The woodcutter with his strong axe stood in the doorway.  

 

 

The fairy had been right. Those brambles were like trees. 

Now, all of them here, fast asleep. A hundred years! All because of some girl pricking her finger on a needle.  

Then he saw her. The kiss was the easy part.

She looked even more beautiful when she was awake.

 

 

How to do it:

 

Students should think of their story. Then they go to the most important point. They then write the story in as a few words as possible. They should count their words until they have exactly 50. They should be careful, though, not to lose their meaning.  

It’s actually quite effective to do this one straight on to the computer.

Let your students try this out on well-known stories to start with. With a little imagination they can choose ones that fit their theme. Later, when they work on their own fiction, they might choose to present it this way rather than write a longer story, especially if your time is limited on the workshop. 

  

Stories

It’s useful to ask your students to think of their stories in terms of their being some conflict and tension between four basic characters:

·         Hero (Harry Potter, Cinderella)

·         Enemy (Voldemort, Ugly sisters)

·         Friend(s?) (Ron, Hermione, Hagrid, others, Buttons, mice)

·         Mentor (Dumbledore, fairy godmother)

The enemy may be a set of circumstances instead of a person. The mentor often has supernatural powers and always gets out of the way towards the end to allow the hero to be in charge of their own adventure. The mentor is sometimes not a person – it may be a computer programme, a pet or a favourite book. If a person, they are generally wiser and sometimes older than the hero.

The friends are powerless to help, other than offering the odd bit of advice now and then, but they are always absolutely on the hero’s side.

Your students must really know their character well. They should know what they look like, how they think, what they like and dislike, what their personality is like, what they most desire, what they are most afraid of and what is the big deal in this particular story. They should be able to answer a set of questions such as these about each of the four key characters.          

1.      How old is your character?

2.      What is their name?

3.      What do they look like?

4.      What do they like?

5.      What don’t they like? 

6.      Which books do they like?

7.      Which TV programmes do they like watching?

8.      What sort of school do they / did they go to?

9.      What do they like doing at school?

10.  What are their hobbies?

11.  What do they fear most?

12.  What do they want most?

13.  What type of personality do they have?

14.  If their fairy godmother gave them three wishes, what would be the first?  

15.  What is most important to them in this story?

 

Note that even if students are inventing fantasy characters they can imagine which TV programmes their characters would like watching if they came to our world.

It may be a little tedious for your students to write answers to all of these questions. Consider allowing them to jot down notes as you read the questions out, write notes on question sheets or allow them to work in pairs and discuss their characters. They can keep these questions near to them as they write.  

Once students are confident about their characters, they can start designing their stories. They can work out plot. 

This is a good shape for a story:

Opening

Complexity 1

Complexity 2

Complexity 3

Crisis (life will NEVER be the same)

Climax=gap between crisis and resolution

Resolution n.b. one other nasty thing happens just as hero is about to solve the problem 

 

 So, for Cinderella we might have:

Opening - Cinders sweeping the floor 

Complexity 1 – sisters invited to ball but she can’t go.

Complexity 2 – she does get an invite but she still can’t go because she has nothing to wear.

Complexity 3 – the fairy godmother makes it all right

Crisis – she loses the shoe and prince has not arranged to see her again

Climax – will the prince find the owner of the shoe or not

Extra nasty thing – either: sisters hide her when the prince calls or they cut off their toes so that the shoe fits.

Resolution – the prince finds Cinderella and they marry.

 

Once your students are ready to write, give them a few tips that will make their writing stronger. If not checked, many students will write wonderful openings and then squash everything else into the last 200 words of a 1000 word story. Here are a few suggestions:

·         Give them a word limit. They should then try to write a certain number of words for each section e.g. 150-200 words for each part will produce a story that is about 1000 words long.

·         Start the story mid-action.  A conversation is often a good starting point.

·         Make sure that every sentence, very single one, either pushes the story forward or shows us character. Even better if it does both at once. 

·         Keep description to a minimum. Most of the text should be dialogue and action. Where there is description, students should write with the senses.

·         Don’t tell us, show us. Don’t tell us the ugly sisters were cruel to Cinderella. Show us them bossing her about.

It’s a good idea to have a few stories to hand so that students can look now and then at how other writers have managed all of this.        

 It is also possible to work with less able students on a story. You or your helper can talk them through this story- writing exercise and then write down their ideas.  Get them to decide on the four characters and what they’re like. They can also decide on the main plot points. Depending on their ability, you could get them to work in pairs on the various sections, and then reconvene the group to go over what has been produced. It will probably be your job or your helper’s to make sure that the text runs smoothly.

        Writing non-fiction

Consider giving your students an article-writing template. Start off by giving them a word limit. This should probably be no more than one thousand words, depending on how many students you have involved and how much time you have.

Their opening paragraph should say what the article is about, perhaps redefining the title.

The rest of the article should be divided into five to seven chunks. The last but one chunk should say the most important thing.

The final paragraph is reserved for the conclusion, with which they should aim to finish the article neatly.

If the article is serious, there should be something funny in the paragraph second from the end and if the article is funny, there should be something serious here.

Most of the time, non-fiction is cloned. We all recycle our own knowledge or somebody else’s, or we just regroup some already quite well-known information. It would be great if your students had time to do some original research but this may not be possible.

There are, however, a few tricks that can make new articles more interesting.

Ask your students to:

·         Write the article as if it were a story e.g. they could follow the cocoa bean on its whole journey instead of just telling us how it gets made into chocolate.

·          Write with their senses – like they did earlier. Get them to really take us into a different place and / or time. 

·         Invent a character who is reporting the facts and give that character a voice. Get one of the palace maids to tell us the story of how Victoria was crowned.    

Less able students might like to collect facts about a certain topic e.g. animals with nasty habits. They could write these onto pieces of coloured paper. This can either be word-processed later and presented as an interesting list or the actual work can be scanned and inserted into the book. 

Trouble-shooting

As the students work and you and perhaps a visiting writer or guest graduate in creative writing wander around the classroom, you may be able to offer some advice on what the students are producing. Your guest can be invaluable in this and offer even more expertise. Here are some of the issues you might deal with:

Pace

Is there enough pace in the story? Does every sentence bring the story forward? Is there variety in the pacing? You actually need very active times followed by quieter ones. Pace is faster when you describe lots of actions and often scenes like this have short sentences. It slows when you have some description and character’s inner thoughts, or scenes including dialogue. The trick is to get the balance right.  

Dialogue

Do make sure your students know how to set out dialogue. Give them a tip-sheet on this, photocopy a page or two from a book that has plenty of conversation and / or have a few books handy for them to refer to.

Dialogue should not be too natural. If we write down conversations exactly as they sound they are very boring. There are lots of words that don’t give much information and lots of extra ers and ums. Dialect should be kept to a minimum as should special quirks of a particular speaker.

On the other hand, characters should sound like themselves. They should only say what that character would say and what they say should be convincing.  

Take care that every word of dialogue carries the plot forward, shows character or creates an atmosphere. Ideally it should do all three at once.

It’s all right to write “said” frequently. The reader needs to know who is saying what. “Said” is better than “demand”, “exclaimed” or “cried” and even “whispered” or “shouted” should only be used if the character whispers or shouts.  

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