All About English Creative Writing
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What is creative writing?
The term ‘creative writing’ is a broad concept encompassing imaginary and self-reflective writing. At the primary school level, it usually includes fiction (narrative based on realistic scenarios and fantasy stories), drama (such as script-writing for plays), poetry (most forms but especially alphabet poems, haiku and cinquain) and self-exploratory writing (such as autobiographical pieces); it normally excludes non-fiction such as technical report writing and journalism, although these may be covered as part of the English curriculum generally.
Hearing voices
Many children complain that they are not sufficiently heard by adults. Creative writing should be presented to children as a wonderful opportunity for them to be heard! In contrast to aspects of English involving developed bodies of knowledge, such as grammar or spelling rules, creative writing accords children a high level of control over the ‘product’. Indeed, right from the beginning children should be taught that the goal of creative writing is self-expression that displays an author’s voice: the distinct style and personality that every writer brings to his or her work.
Creative writing also presents an irresistible opportunity for children to be playful with language. English is peppered with figures of speech, idioms and proverbs so which child can resist creatively changing a word here or there: ‘Two is company, three is . . . The Musketeers!’?
It is important to distinguish between the creative process and the writing process. The writing process describes the phases of a writing project from prewriting through to presentation, and these can be formally taught. The creative process, however, is much more elusive: it describes the process whereby writers synthesise many resources, such as internal resources of personal memories and feelings, and external resources, such as interviewing people and library research, to produce something new and interesting, often with a marked personal interpretation or response. This synthesising process is not really taught but guided.
Natural born storytellers
Some children have difficulty brainstorming ideas for their writing. Children often feel that they have had relatively few actual experiences in life so they have a limited memory-bank to draw upon in stimulating the imagination; however, a skilful teacher/tutor/parent should readily encourage them to see the richness of their lives to date.
There are various techniques to encourage brainstorming. It is important for children to appreciate that a common notion in these techniques is simply to generate as many ideas as possible, even if the ideas seem far-fetched and likely to be discarded; a skilful teacher/tutor/parent will, however, prevent the exercise degenerating into silliness. Only later after the ideas have been generated should a hard-nosed look be taken to assess the pertinence and usefulness of various ideas:
1.\tWonderment in the mundane
Children often think that writing a good story requires some idea that is highly original and amazing. Such a high expectation precludes children from realising that many ordinary things may in fact prove treasure troves in stimulating the creative juices. These include visiting the zoo, tasting strawberry milkshake for the first time, making a snowman, making a sandman out of daddy on the beach, falling on top of their best friend’s birthday cake, accidentally sitting on a cockroach, wearing spectacles for the first time, and helping mummy find the misplaced front door keys [maybe the children hid the front door keys themselves to bask in the subsequent glory of finding the ‘lost’ items: now that’s a story...].
2.\tOral story
A useful technique is to develop an oral story. For instance, the class can form a circle and the teacher/tutor/parent will start by saying ‘Today I was walking in the park when I noticed a strange object fall from the sky.’ Then each child in turn should continue the story with one or two sentences, round the circle. The teacher/tutor/parent should write a summary on the whiteboard of the points and ask the children to utilise the various ideas to develop their own written version.
3.\tAnimal magic
Children are usually fascinated by animals. It is helpful to use that interest as a springboard to creative thinking. Either orally or in writing, can the children think of stories which explain how the various animals got their distinctive features, such as the elephant its trunk, the giraffe its long neck, the leopard its spots, the rabbit its long ears and the zebra its stripes?
4.\tComic strips
An invaluable approach to stimulate creative thinking and encourage children to develop their skill in writing dialogue is to ask them to complete speech bubbles in comic strips. If the comic strips feature cartoon characters well-known to the children then so much the better.
5.\tAlternative ending
Another approach is for children to compose an alternative ending for a story they are familiar with; younger children might write that the Gingerbread Man did not get eaten by the fox, but in fact became great friends with the fox community and lived happily ever after; older children might write that Frankenstein’s monster was not shunned by society but in fact became a talkshow host.
6.\tAlternative explanation / point of view
Related to the idea of an alternative ending is to retell a story from a different perspective: the ending may be the same, but the explanation may be radically changed. A good example of this is ‘The True Story of the Three Little Pigs’ by Jon Scieszka which retells the classic story from the point of view of Mr. A. Wolf.
Other fairy tales children might like to rewrite could be ‘Cinderella’ from the point of view of one of the ugly step-sisters, ‘The Three Billy Goats Gruff’ from the point of view of the troll, and ‘Goldilocks and the Three Bears’ from the point of view of Goldilocks herself.
7.\tImaging being someone or something else
The children should imagine being in someone else’s shoes: parent, the prime minister, a doctor, a teacher, a candlestick maker, a baker, a shoemaker, a circus clown and so on.
An even more imaginative approach is to visualise what it must be like to be something else that is animate, such as a hamster or a tree, or inanimate, such as a flagpole or mountain.
8.\tFish out of water
The children should imagine putting a character in a completely new situation: an adult is turned into a child or vice versa, a zoo keeper becomes a teacher, a troll becomes a nurse, a doctor becomes a florist and so on.
9.\tImagine future self
How do the children imagine life will turn out when they grow up?
10.\tFree writing
Here the teacher/tutor/parent sets a topic such as birthday parties. Then the children write down freely everything that comes to mind about birthday parties for fifteen minutes as quickly as possible – flow like an erupting volcano! All ideas are acceptable. Later the children can shift through the ideas and determine which are sensible and useful.
11.\tFive senses
The children should be given a topic to explore using the five senses. For instance, the children can brainstorm how the five senses are engaged at an outdoor swimming competition: seeing the reflection of sunlight on the water, hearing the cheers of the crowd, smelling the chlorine in the water, tasting the water as one accidentally opens one’s mouth diving in, and feeling the coldness of the water.
12.\tQuestion words
It is useful for the children to question themselves about a topic with the aid of the question words ‘what’, ‘when’, ‘who’, ‘why’, ‘where’ and ‘how’.
13.\tPot luck
The teacher/tutor/parent makes three piles of cards for characters, plots and settings. The cards are then placed face-down and the children randomly pick from each pile and have to compose a story accordingly. A variant on this approach is for the children to simply cut out three different and seemingly unrelated pictures from a magazine and have to compose a story connecting the pictures.
14.\tIdeas notebook
Children should be encouraged to have a notebook in which they can jot down thoughts, interesting events, clever expressions and people-watching observations so that they have a cornucopia of ideas to draw upon.
15.\tConcept maps (also known as spider diagrams and mind maps)
These are a pictorial representation of thinking through various aspects of a topic in a non-linear manner. In the centre of the diagram will be a bubble with the name of the topic, for example ‘Birthday Party’. This topic will then have various ideas branching off like a spider’s web.
There are other visual representation methods such as charts, matrices, trees, chains, flow diagrams, Venn diagrams and sketches. Venn diagrams are particularly useful for encouraging children to analyse similarities and differences.
16.\tOutlining
In primary school, older children are often taught word processing. They can be introduced to the outlining functions of the software to organise their thoughts for a writing project. -
What are stories made of?
There are many aspects of writing that children should be made aware of. In particular, there are four principal components that go into making a story:
1.\tCharacters
These are the actors in the story. These actors are usually people, but can be creatures (think of the movie ‘Shark Tale’ by DreamWorks Animation), imaginary beings (think of brownies, trolls, fairies, unicorns), non-sentient living things (think of the whomping willow tree in ‘Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets’ by J. K. Rowling) or even non-living things (think of dancing kitchen cutlery or musical instruments in Walt Disney movies).
One of the things that makes an interesting and highly readable story is the description of characters. Which story would you prefer to read?:
'Once upon a time, there was a witch. She liked to eat children.'
or
'Once upon a time, there was a wicked witch with piercing eyes and a cruel mouth concealing a venomous tongue, who laughed crazily when munching on children. Her favourite dish was fried children with red chillies.'
Children should practise writing descriptions of characters extensively. A suitable exercise is for children to write a short paragraph for each character describing their best friend, worst enemy, favourite teacher, worst teacher (assuming ‘worst enemy’ and ‘worst teacher’ do not coincide), favourite pet etc.
Some tips for making up characters are:
a.\tChoose a suitable name for the character
Younger children often enjoy imitating the Mr. Men way. In the Mr. Men and Little Misses books, the characters are named after the quality they represent: for example, Mr. Strong is strong, Mr. Brave is brave and Miss Sunshine is optimistic. The author of these books, Roger Hargreaves, extends this concept to the humans in his books by naming them after their occupations: Dr. Makeyouwell the physician, Mr. Stamp the postman and Mrs. Crumbs the baker.
Older children may want to be less blatant in naming characters to represent their quality. In the Harry Potter series, J. K. Rowling named the main sinister character ‘Lord Voldemort’. This sounds scarier than ‘John Smith’.
A powerful technique is to give your characters nicknames. If you are reading a pirates’ story, which sounds better: ‘Cut-throat Johnny’ or ‘Johnny B. Good’?
b.\tSpecial Features / Details
Children should try to make their characters interesting with a special feature such as a large purple mole on the end of their nose, shockingly-dyed green hair, unnaturally long and creepy fingers, scary and piercing eyes, a lob-sided walk (like Frankenstein’s monster) etc.
Characters can also be notable by the way they dress. How about a girl who wears yellow leggings with embroidered pictures of green unicorns along with skunk earrings?
c.\tIdentifying Expression
Homer Simpson, from the television series The Simpsons, always says ‘D’oh!’ to express his frustration. Giving characters an identifying expression is a useful technique.
Related to this is having your characters converse in a suitable and identifying manner. For instance, a teenager and a granny might have the following dialogue:
Teenager: Get real, gran! That headgear’s so uncool...
Granny: I think the pink ribbons and purple motifs are rather fetching.
d.\tPersonality-type
Children should try to get inside the mind of their characters. Are the characters nasty, friendly, bullying, helpful, serious, happy-go-lucky, lazy, studious, spiteful, kind?
e.\tBased on someone you know
A useful technique is for children to describe a character based on someone they know, such as a friend or a neighbour. In using this approach, children should not simply think of whether they like or dislike the person, but of the total picture including age, gender, ethnicity, background and social class.
2.\tPlot
A plot is the plan of events in a story. It provides the why’s for the things that happen in the story. Most plots will involve some sort of problem or dilemma the characters face, and will trace the process of change in which the characters eventually resolve, or indeed do not resolve, the conflict. The plot draws the reader into the characters’ lives and helps the reader understand the choices that the characters make.
There are four aspects of plot development:
a. Exposition
This is the information needed to understand a story, for example background information that a character is an orphan;
b. Complication
This is the catalyst that begins the major conflict, for example the character going for a blood test and discovering that his or her blood group could not have been passed down from present ‘parents’;
c. Climax
This is the turning point in the story that occurs when characters try to resolve the complication, for example searching for biological parents;
d. Resolution
This is the set of events that brings the story to a close, for example realising that the adoptive parents are truly devoted to the character.
The notion of plot involving a problem to be resolved is appealing to many children. Children intuitively appreciate that saintly characters who lead perfect lives are dull; it is much more exciting to have flawed characters dealing with the nitty-gritty of life. In teaching creative writing to children, the teacher/tutor/parent should help the children to identify real life problems that the children might very well face, such as bullying at school; sibling rivalry; difficulties in studying and homework; growing too tall, short, fat or thin; wearing braces; an uncaring teacher; death of a pet; moving to a new area etc.
3.\tTheme
A good story often does more than merely tell a story: it makes the reader think about the ideas that lie behind it. For instance, a story about a pupil being bullied at school might have as its theme an exploration of the reasons and circumstances behind why bullying occurs and how to overcome it. Older children especially should be encouraged to think not only of the plot of a story but also the theme.
4.\tSetting
This is when and where the story takes place, for example in a nineteenth-century French chateau or on a twenty-second century moonbase. -
That’s very helpful. My girl loves creative writing and she write all sorts of stories in her journals. (I asked her to write a journal whenever she feels like to). But sometimes her stories are quite disorganised…
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Alicia_Q:
That's very helpful. My girl loves creative writing and she write all sorts of stories in her journals. (I asked her to write a journal whenever she feels like to). But sometimes her stories are quite disorganised..
Thank you.
Wonderful to read that your girl loves creative writing. That's half the battle won. I am sure she will go on to develop her personal voice and write stimulating coherent stories. -
Blogging is a good way to encourage students to improve in creative writing. Reading news from the various news outlets and getting them to write a short paragraph is a good start too.
You can also visit http://www.thedigitalstorytellers.com.sg/blog/ to read the inspiring articles. A new blog article is posted almost everyday.
Thank you... -
Joy of Learning 111:
Thank you! I hope so. I am getting her to attend some creative writing classes now, hopefully she can learn to better organise her thoughts and become a young and talented writerAlicia_Q:
That's very helpful. My girl loves creative writing and she write all sorts of stories in her journals. (I asked her to write a journal whenever she feels like to). But sometimes her stories are quite disorganised..
Thank you.
Wonderful to read that your girl loves creative writing. That's half the battle won. I am sure she will go on to develop her personal voice and write stimulating coherent stories. :love:
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Anyone heard of Writing Samurai online writing lesson by Jerry Lee? I kept receiving emails from them but not sure if what stated in the email claiming all the improvement and huge jump in the grade is real. Is their PSLE crashed course good?
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Hi i am interested to know, for creative writing enrichment, do they give a lot of homework? Usually what kind of homework does a student expected to do for the next lesson?
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