Oxford Story Museum and the Bodleian go magical

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Bodleian Library, events, exhibitions, magical books exhibition, magical workshops, Oxford, Oxford Story Museum, workshops for children, workshops for schools

The Oxford Story Museum are running a series of workshops this summer which will tie in with the Bodleian Library’s current exhibition: ‘Magical Books – From the Middle Ages to Middle-Earth’ all about magical texts.

The exhibition is on now and runs until 27th October 2013.  It is free to get into, and the Bodleian are, as well as the Story Museum, running a series of lunch time lectures on the exhibition themselves.

You can find details of the exhibtion, and the lectures by clicking on this link.

The workshops at the story museum are with two fantastic children’s authors: Michael Rosen and Kevin Crossley-Holland.  They are holding a workshop each, and then one together.

Michael Rosen will be holding a ‘Learn to Spell with Michael Rosen’ workshop on 25th June. Children’s entry is £6 each, teachers go free.  It is tailored to years 3&4 and 5&6 primary.  There are sixty places available for this event.

Wednesday 10th July sees Kevin Crossley-Holland and Michael Rosen teaming up to host a discussion on exploring magical books.  Children’s tickets are £4 each, teachers go free. There are 90 places available for this event.

Finally, Kevin Crossley-Holland is running two poetry workshops on Thursday 11th June.  Children’s tickets are £8 each with teachers being free.  These workshop spaces are limited to 16 students per workshop.

You can find further details and how to book by clicking on this link.

Building Inference Skills – Foxly’s Feast by Owen Davey

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children writing dialogue, Foxly's Feast by Owen Davey, getting children to write, Slam by Adam Stower, teaching inference, Tuesday by David Wiesner

Our year two teacher is doing an inspired project with her class at the moment.

The class are learning about inference.

Inference is: ‘A conclusion reached on the basis of evidence and reading’.

It might sound rather dry, but what it basically means is that she is trying to teach the children to look at a written text or a picture, and infer from what they see, things which are not overtly stated or shown in that text or picture.

An example would be to show them a picture of a child shivering in the snow and to inspire them to come up with information about what the child feels like (cold, hungry, abandoned, silly for forgetting its coat, lonely, etc). It encourages the child to connect emotionally with the text or image, but also to connect logically text or images to create a feasible narrative. It allows teachers to then build on these foundations to explore empathy and sympathy, as well as pushing the children to use the texts/images as springboards into the world of their imagination.

All these skills are critical, both for literacy and for life.

Year two are currently doing a broader topic of nocturnal animals. Our teachers try to teach as holistically as possible, making the overarching topic relevant to other areas of study.  In this case, the teacher is working on inference using the book Foxly’s Feast by Owen Davey.

The book is a simple picture book with no accompanying text. It tells the story, in images, of Foxly’s hunt through the forest for things to eat. As he goes on his journey, all the animals he encounters are, understandably, nervous that he might want to eat them. Finally, Foxly turns out to be a vegetarian, and is actually preparing a delicious feast of fruit and vegetables which all the other animals are invited to share with him.

The images are bold and simple, but have enough character in the drawings to show the animals’ emotions and give the children clues to build inference skills and connect the disparate images to create a coherent narrative.

The children have been sharing the book with their teacher in class, building up the story and using the picture clues to enrich the world they encounter in the book.

The next step was that the teacher created booklets of the images in the story. The children were given Post It notes in the shape of speech bubbles and encouraged to storyboard the narrative, creating dialogue for the animals on each page.

The results have been brilliant. The children have been really caught up in the story, and their work, filling in the speech bubbles has been inspired. They have shown, through their writing that they understand nuance and character. They are displaying different voices for the different animals, and creating dialogue which is witty, and funny, sometimes poignant, and always relevant to pushing the narrative forward.

Their work has been hugely successful and demonstrates how powerful a text can be in aiding literacy, even when it has no words.

If you wanted to build on work like this, you could expand it, by allowing the children to storyboard their own texts, and even push this further by getting them to dramatise those storyboards and film them.  There are lots of different directions you could take work like this in, in both a classroom situation and at home.

There is a commonly held misconception that images, although more universally understood (we have become increasingly sophisticated at reading and understanding images, particularly since the birth of television. This can be seen in the complexity of the modern day advertisements, both on television and in magazines if you compare the  adverts of the fifties with those of today), are somehow inferior to text, and that children can only learn literacy skills from the written word. This, simple exercise proves that nothing can be further from the truth.

There is an increasingly wide range of non text based children’s picture books, which can be used for teaching inference, or just for enjoyment. Two others, apart from Foxly’s Feast which stand out, are: Tuesday by David Wiesner, and Slam by Adam Stower.

If you are interested in teaching, talking about a particular topic and there isn’t a picture  book available, you can always edit one that has text, by copying sections with the words blanked out.

National Flash Fiction Day – June 22nd 2013

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Flash Fiction, micro fiction, national flash fiction day 2013, postcard fiction, short short fiction

Flash fiction is the term we use for short stories that are really, really short. Stories of a thousand words are usually in the upper limits of flash fiction, but it is often much, much shorter. There are anthologies of stories of fifty words or less, for example.

Other terms for flash fiction include: postcard fiction; micro fiction; sudden fiction and short short fiction.

2012 saw the inauguration of the first National Flash Fiction day.  This year it will be held on June 22nd.  You can access the Flash Fiction website by clicking on the link here.

As well as various U.K. based events, there is a Flash Fiction competition, entries for which have now closed for this year, but you might be interested in celebrating in school by running your own Flash Fiction competition.  In the Arts Council sponsored competition the upper word limit was 100 words.

Writing stories as short as this can really help children learn to focus on what is important about a story. There are key elements a story has to have to work, so that readers understand it.  When there is no word limit for a story it is possible to get side tracked and leave out vital information.  When you have a word limit of fifty or a hundred words you have to work out very early on what you need to keep and what is extraneous information.

There are various examples of Flash Fiction you can access, both in anthologies and on the web if you are looking for ideas. You can set a theme that ties in with a topic you are currently teaching, or you can give your children free rein and see where their imagination takes them.

Esio Trot by Roald Dahl – And Why Roald Dahl is so Popular

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Esio Trot, Roald Dahl, The Magic Finger, The Witches, Why Roald Dahl is so popular

Esio Trot by Roald Dahl was the book picked by our school book club for discussion last week.

A different child picks their favourite book every week, and prepares something to share with the group, after which we discuss different aspects of the book together.

Each week the children are invited to come only if they are interested in the book we are discussing.

The times that children have picked a work by Roald Dahl are the times the classroom has been the most full.  His books remain perennially popular with children, no matter how many years it has been since they were published, or indeed how old or young the readers are.  We have four year groups in our reading club, and children from all four years came to talk about the book, and there were children in every year who had read it. In fact, some of the children could quote sections of the text, something which has never happened before with any book we have talked about.

Esio Trot is about Mr. Hoppy, a man who is hopelessly in love with his downstairs neighbour, Mrs. Silver.  Mr. Hoppy doesn’t know how to tell her about his love, until one day he hears her worrying about the fact that her tortoise, Esio Trot, is not growing any bigger, and how upsetting it is.  He hatches an ingenious plan to make Esio Trot double in size, and by doing so, win the woman of his dreams.

As ever, it is beautifully illustrated by Quentin Blake, whose name has now become synonymous with all of Dahl’s work.

There are some key points about this book, which I think explains the popularity of the story, and indeed, hold true for most of Dahl’s work:

• The story is short. It is more of a novella than a novel. It would take a confident reader about an hour to finish it.  His other books, although longer, still have short, manageable chapters which make them easy to speed through.
• The story is funny.  Dahl’s work is not always happy, The Magic Finger, for example, is quite a dark book, and there are sections in all his work that point to the sadness of life. He does not always choose a traditionally happy ending. You only have to read The Witches to see that, but the darkness is always balanced by a tremendous sense of mischief and humour.
• The story is silly. Dahl is never afraid to be silly. He positively revels in silliness and eccentricity.
• The story includes material which is not always thought of as suitable for children. Dahl is quite happy to write about the more unsavoury, yet always fascinating aspects of childhood. In Esio Trot there is a lot of play on the word ‘pooh’ for example.  He champions outbreaks of naughtiness, and doesn’t always expect his characters, particularly his children to behave nicely or fairly.  Children love this.
• Dahl is happy to point out the flaws in grown ups. Grown ups are not always the heroes of his works, or the voice of reason or wisdom. Quite often grown ups are not what they seem.  Mr. Hoppy is quite silly, because he cannot pluck up the courage to talk properly to Mrs. Silver. Mr. Hoppy is also quite devious, because he tricks Mrs. Silver into loving him, and never divulges what he has done.
• Dahl writes with an eye for what a child sees and hears and thinks and cuts out extraneous information. His work speaks to children because he seemed to have the ability to retain an understanding of how a child operates.
• Quite often it is as though Dahl is speaking directly to the reader. Sometimes he does do this. He will stop his narrative and ask something of the reader or explain something to the reader.  His work is quite intimate. You feel as if he is talking to you.  This is less obvious in Esio Trot, but is strongly developed in his other, longer books.
• Dahl delights in language. His poems, his spells, as in Esio Trot, his use of nonsense words, his freedom with language, encourages children to really use their imagination in their own reading and writing.

Esio Trot is a fantastic book to teach in schools because of its length, but also because of the richness of material in even such a short book.  You can create some wonderful lesson plans inventing tortoise grabbing machines and trying them out, making up your own spells to make things grow and shrink etc.  There is lots to talk about and do and plenty of material for some fantastic sparkly writing for your class.

Esio Trot is ideal for children aged about six and upwards. Because Dahl is so popular, it would even stand the test of time for older, year six readers without any problems.  It is suitable for boys and girls.  It would also be great to give to a newly confident child reader who wanted to tackle their first book, but who may not yet be quite ready for a full sized novel.

Pixar’s Twenty Two Rules of Story Telling

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22 rules of story telling, Emma Coates, Films for children, Pixar, Pixar's rules for story telling, Story telling

Pixar is one of the most successful animation studios in the world, currently giving Disney a run for its money in the animated film stakes. Its film output includes:

• Finding Nemo
• Toy Story
• Wall-E
• Up

to name but a few.

To say that the writers are master story tellers would be an understatement.  The quality of the animation is superb, but it is the structure of the stories, with their universal truths and ability to hook the imagination and the heart, that hold everything together.

Click on this link to discover Pixar’s Twenty Two Rules of Story Telling, by Emma Coates, Pixar’s Story Artist.

For teachers, this would be a wonderful tool to use in a classroom setting, using one of the films, or sections from a few of the films to illustrate some of the points that Coates makes.

For parents it would also be a great way of introducing story telling in a wider context to your children.  Time spent watching the television is often criticised for dumbing children down, but there is a lot to learn and talk about from what Coates has written, and using her points with a favourite film as illustration might be just the kick start your child needs to bring on their literacy in leaps in and bounds.

Story Writing Tips – Characters

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Character

It is rather difficult to write a story without any characters at all, and often, characters are the most important part of your story.  Creating a good character will give your story a focal point (a part of the story from which the reader understands what is happening, and which they can constantly refer to), and drive your story forward. Making your character do things, or writing about how your character reacts to things you put in your story is one of the main ways you propel your narrative forward.

Creating a good character is also one of the best and quickest ways to create empathy (a feeling of understanding and connection with another person or situation) in your reader.  This is really important, because the most successful stories are the ones in which your reader feels that they are emotionally connected to what is happening.  The reader needs to care about the people you are writing about.  The best characters are the ones your readers think about even when they are not reading the story, the ones they are emotionally connected to, either in a good or bad way.

Sometimes it can be hard to create a character.  We might start our story with an idea for a place we want to write about, or a situation we want to describe. Then we have to put people in it.

There are various ways you can do this.

Firstly you can think about names.  A name might be an excellent place to start. Names do affect how we understand character. If you think about women who are having babies, they often pick a name out before the baby is born, and then change the name they have picked once the baby has been born because they say things like: ‘Well, she did not look like an Emily’ or ‘He looked more like a David.’

Names are important.  Think about changing the name of someone you know who is famous, for example.  What if Jesus was called Frank? What if a florist was called Jesus? What if a wrestler were called Cynthia?

So you could start with a name and then build your character from there.

You could start with a picture.  You can draw a picture, if you are feeling artistic.  Draw them, and add all the things that make them into your unique character.  Then you can write about your drawing.

If drawing is not your thing, you could make a collage by cutting images from a magazine and sticking them onto a piece of paper to make your character.  Or you could simply take a picture of an existing person from a magazine advert or newspaper article and use that as a springboard for your imagination.

You could start with a character type.  Lots of stories use character types.  By this I mean things like writing about a hero, or a villain, or an anti hero (a villain who actually turns out to be a hero, or a villain who you like despite yourself).  You could write about a wise person or sage, or a maternal (motherly) type of person.  By writing about a character type you need to make sure that this quality they embody is what is at the heart of your description so that your character is congruent (the inside of your character matches the outside). It is no good inventing a maternal type of character but then making one of their key character traits the fact they hate babies, for example.

When you are writing about character types it can be easy to make them seem unreal. You need to balance out the type of character they are with enough detail to make them seem real, and not like a cardboard cut out.

Another type of character is one that can be called a ‘vehicle’. A ‘vehicle’ is the type of character that is only there to make a particular scenario work.  You might be writing about a bank robbery, for example. Your main characters have already been drawn in and you are happy with them, but then you realise that to make your story work you will also need characters like a bank guard and a getaway driver.  These are minor characters.  They might only appear in one or two parts of your story, but they are still very important. Without them the scene you are describing won’t seem real.  These characters are vehicles or devices which will drive your plot forward.

The key to getting these minor characters right is to give them enough personality to make them real, but not enough that they start to take over your story and you find yourself having to write more about them than you want.  You do not want them to dominate (take over) a scene you are writing, but they must feel as if they belong there.

When you are writing these sort of characters you could start with the job you want them to do in the story, and build them from there.

You could start writing about an emotion.  You might want to explore the idea of jealousy for example.  Jacqueline Wilson’s book ‘Vicky Angel’ is one where jealousy is a main emotional theme, and it is an important part of how the two main characters work individually and together.  Mind mapping could be a good way of building a character this way.  Start with the feeling you want to write about in the middle of the page and then add the other elements of their personality from there.

The fuller you can make your character description the better, because the more you add flesh to their bones, the more real they become.

I have noticed in some children’s work on character development they focus on talking about what the character physically looks like, their hair colour, eye colour, height, clothes etc, but do not write about their personality; whether they are kind or cruel, happy or sad etc.  Other children do the opposite.  Remember it is important to write about everything.  How someone looks affects how we think about them.  How someone behaves affects how we see them.  If someone is kind, we are more willing to forget something physical about them that makes them ugly, for example.  If someone is cruel it can make their beauty seem less attractive.

Remember that you might want to also think about things like smell, or texture.  Does someone have smooth skin or wrinkled skin? Do they smell of perfume or do they smell sweaty? Perhaps their hair feels silky to touch.  Maybe they have sharp fingernails like talons.  All these things can add richness and depth to your character.

It is important to remember though that you do not have to use all the details you write about.  Writers often develop a character separately to their story.  Once they are happy with the character, they pop them into the story, adding the things about the character that the reader needs to know to make the story work, and leaving out the rest.

What you leave out is as important was what you put in, but developing your character fully first allows you to pick and choose. It gives you freedom to alter things as you write. It also gives you, the writer, a sense of your character, which will help you to write them more realistically, even if 90% of what you develop for your character doesn’t make the final story.

Story Writing Tips – Narrative Journey

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Frank Cottrell Boyce, narrative journeys

As we have discussed previously, all stories need a beginning, a middle and an end, even if they don’t appear in the story in quite this order.

All stories also have a narrative thread or journey that they take.  This journey will shape how you create and write your beginning, middle and end of your story.

The narrative thread or journey is where you as the writer take the reader on a particular journey through your writing. It does not have to be an ‘actual’ journey. Not all stories tell us about your day at the zoo, or the time you climbed the Himalayas with your Gurkha guides.  It might be a journey into your imagination.  You could be thinking, for example, about how toothpaste gets its different coloured stripes.  You might know how this happens for real, or you might prefer to take your reader on an imaginative journey into a fantastic tale of invented machines, or strange lands or magical spells to explain how this happens.

You might want to take your reader onto a journey into the past.  You could be fascinated by the idea of what it was like to be a Victorian street urchin, or a drummer boy following the army in the war, or a Roman gladiator waiting to go into battle in front of a crowd baying for your blood.  Your imaginative journey will take the reader under the skin and into the life of one of these characters so that, by the end of the story, we as the reader feel that we know something new and satisfying about the character or characters you have let us inhabit.  These characters may have had an adventure, or you may just have taken us on a journey through their daily life.  It does not matter. You as the author set the terms of the narrative journey we take.

It might be a description of a physical journey across the desert wastes, or a deep sea exploration or about the time you were stranded on a desert island.  It might be a description of a journey to an alien planet, or through the jungles of a mythical country you have made up.

It might be a story about a particular experience which has changed your life forever, something like the birth of a baby brother or sister, the death of a beloved pet, a major birthday, or even changing schools.

It could chart the history of a friendship between you and your best friend, or you and someone you thought was your best friend and how they turned out not to be.

It could be about how your memories of the past have made you who you are today, or how something that happened to you will affect your future and what you think might happen.

It really doesn’t matter what your journey is, internal or external, real or imagined, as long as you write about it in a way that takes us, the reader with you every step of the way. As we have talked about before, it is important that the details of your narrative make your story ‘real’ to the reader.  It is also important that the individual ‘steps’ or ‘plot points’ in your journey make sense.

When you are planning the journey that makes up your story, you could use your beginning, middle and end points to anchor the story, and then fill in whatever steps you need to include to get from the beginning to the middle and the middle to the end.  Then use these like stepping stones to guide your descriptions to fill out the spaces in between.

You can do this by making notes, or holding the information in your head, or creating mind maps, whatever works for you.

I like to write what I have and then go and rewrite and rewrite, filling in all the gaps and refining my story as I go. This is a very time consuming way to work, but it works for me.

One famous children’s writer, Frank Cottrell Boyce, who wrote Millions and Framed amongst other books, and who also wrote the opening ceremony for the Olympics, talked in a short film about creating this narrative journey.  He mentions a brilliant technique, which could help you if you are looking for a way to plan your narrative journey.

He suggests pinning up a washing line in the space where you are working (string would do just as well. It just has to stretch like a washing line).  You then get some pegs, and pin all the information you have about your story, and all the pieces of information you want to put in your story, onto the washing line, using the pegs.  You pin the information in the rough order you think it needs to go, and then as you add information you can move the pegs about until your story makes sense.  Remember that you can take pegs off the line if you find that a bit of story no longer works because of changes you have made.

What you take out of a story is almost as important as what you keep in.

When your stories become more complex, you may find that you want to tell two different stories and weave them into each other. You can keep track of them using the same techniques. The washing line trick will be particularly helpful here, as you can use it to test how the two stories you are telling connect, and think about where might work better, or if they need to connect at several different points.  If you are using pen and paper to map your narrative journey you may want to use different colours for different journeys characters and narratives take.

When you have finished your journey plan test it by reading it to yourself or someone else. If it makes sense, and there are no gaps in the narrative you will know it is finished.  If someone starts the story in Venezuala and ends up in Swindon and you have forgotten to show how they get there, the map or washing line will show you, and you can fill the holes in accordingly.

Remember that not all journeys have to start and end neatly though. And not every journey is entirely explicable. You may want to leave certain things out on purpose to create an air of mystery or tension. You might want to deliberately confuse the reader so that they are left at the end of the story with questions that will make them think again and again about your story and keep them coming back to it.  If you want to do something like this though, you will have to be very careful that you are doing this because you want to, and because it works, and not because you can’t be bothered to fill the gaps in.

If in doubt, when you think you have finished, imagine that you are the reader, not the writer of your story. Read the narrative journey to yourself and think about whether you are satisfied with the story. If you aren’t then you need to think what you need to do as the writer to change that and make the narrative journey as good as possible for your reader.

Story Writing Tips – Finding Your Voice

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finding your writer's voice

One of the things that will help you enormously when you are writing stories is finding your writing ‘voice’.  Every successful writer has one of these, regardless of what they write or how.

Your writer’s voice is what makes you unique as a writer.  It is as unique to you as your signature.

It is hard to describe what your writer’s voice is, because it is something that you will develop yourself. The more you practice writing, the clearer and more like ‘you’, your writing voice will become.

The best way to describe it is when you listen to a song on the radio, and even though the song has just started you will already recognise the band or the singer because their voice or sound is so distinctive.

Or you read a piece of writing by your favourite writer, and even though you might not have read it before, or might not even have even seen who it was written by before you read it, you will know that it is by your favourite author because it reads like they have written it.

What you want is for people to read your writing and hear your author’s voice through the words on the page.  The only time that this is not so helpful is when you are writing a book as if you were someone else.  Take something like Diary of a Wimpy Kid for example. It works so well because we hear Greg’s voice as we read, not the author Jeff Kinney’s voice.

Even so, we recognise Jeff Kinney’s voice as a writer, even though he is pretending to be Greg. Only Jeff Kinney can write Greg’s voice like that, because Greg is created and written by him.  If someone else wrote another Diary of a Wimpy Kid book, and it had all the same characters as the original books, we would probably be able to tell it was written by someone else because it is very hard to copy an author’s voice, even though we might copy some of their style and ideas.

Lots of people start writing stories because they are inspired by a particular story or a particular author that they love. They want to write stories like the author that they love.

There is nothing wrong with this, but if you are a serious writer then it is very important to find your own voice rather than copy someone else. Someone like Jacqueline Wilson for instance, is an author many children admire, and lots of children are inspired to write by her, and write stories like hers.

The problem with this is that Jacqueline Wilson already does what she does brilliantly. If you are serious about becoming a writer you will find it much harder to find an audience if you are someone ‘like Jacqueline Wilson’ or ‘not quite as good as Jacqueline Wilson’. What you are looking to do is to find a way to write entirely like yourself.

One way of doing this is to write every day. It doesn’t matter what you write. You can keep a diary, or a blog, or write poems, or stories, or write a few pages of a book every day.  Writing is like exercising a muscle. The more you do it, the stronger you get.

The other important thing is to read what you have written. Learn to recognise what words you use the most, what types of sentences and descriptions you use the most. Learn to hear the voice of your own writing by reading it. You can read it in your head or you can read it out loud. Lots of people write but don’t read back what they have written. Reading as if you were the audience you are writing for is very important indeed.

Sometimes people get the author’s voice mixed up with style.

The two things do go together.  You will have a certain style as a writer that marks you out.  Some people write in short, clipped sentences. Some people write long, flowery sentences.  Some people prefer to write like reporters, others have a more poetic style.  Your style will develop as you learn more about language and grammar, but your voice is different.  It is something that you add to your style, something that you develop with time, and something which makes the difference between a good writer and a great writer.

Story Writing Tips – Write What You Know

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big write, sparkly writing, Story Writing Tips, wow words

I have read lots of interviews with famous writers where they are asked to give advice to those people who are interested in writing their own stories.

One of the most common pieces of advice you hear them give is: ‘Write about what you know.’

In the past I have been really frustrated by this piece of advice.

What does it really mean?

It has puzzled me for years, more particularly when I was a child, and I would think about what I knew, and realise that I did not know very much at all, and what I did know seemed quite boring.

Who would want to read a story about the things that go on in my daily life? ‘YAWN’.

I have been thinking about this again recently, after helping run some workshops for children who are interested in writing stories.

Now that I am grown up I realise that it is a good piece of advice, but that maybe it could be explained differently so that what it means becomes clearer.

Here is what I think, ‘Write about what you know’ really means:

It means that your story has to be believable.  Even if you are writing about giant flying elephants who live on Mars and only eat Cornflakes, you have to make your writing so ‘real’ that the person reading it really believes that these giant flying elephants could exist.  You have to write with enough conviction and detail that your reader can see them and hear them and smell them in their imagination.  It means that you have to make those images in your head first, and believe that they could exist too, so that they become real for you.  When this happens you can write about them with belief, and you are sharing that belief with your readers.  If it is real for you, it will be real for them.  This is writing about what you know.

It means that your story has to be three dimensional.  Narratives, as we have talked about before, have a structure.  They have a beginning, a middle and an end.  Quite often events happen in this structure in a linear fashion, i.e. in a straight line.  An example of this would be:  ‘Here are some flying elephants.  They are my pets. My flying elephants are hungry, they make themselves some Cornflakes, they eat the Cornflakes, they are full, they leave the table’.  This is a story, and all the things in it happen in a logical, linear order which make sense, but it is not very interesting to read.  It’s a bit like going to an art gallery expecting to see the Mona Lisa, and instead seeing a picture of a stick lady.  The story needs detail to make it interesting.

Three dimensional story writing involves bringing your story to life by adding flesh to the bones of the narrative.  What do your elephants look like, for example?  Even if they look like regular elephants you need to give details to make them real.

Compare:

‘Here are some flying elephants.’

To:

‘My elephants are beautiful creatures.  As they fly through the air on gossamer wings that shimmer in the shafts of sunlight that break through the clouds, I marvel that such fragile looking things could hold up such massive creatures.  The elephants’ bodies are as grey and solid as old churches, and about as graceful on the ground, but in the air they soar balletically. Their gnarled trunks loop and trumpet with delight as they ride the currents above me. They are just such whimsical, odd creatures, floating like giant dandelion clocks.  As I watch them I wonder how anyone could fail to love them like I do.’

The more detail you add, the more three dimensional and solid your story appears. The more it becomes real.  The detail is like the colour added to a photograph, the depth of perspective you put in a painting, the movement added to a film.  It is what brings your story to life.  Even if what you are writing about is completely alien and unknowable, by adding details that you do know; colour, sights, sounds, textures, tastes, smells, you are adding truth to fiction.  You are writing about what you know.

I was always told that the best lies are the ones that contain enough truth to make them believable.  If you tell an out and out lie: ‘A dinosaur ate my homework’, for example, nobody will believe you.  If you tell a lie with a little truth to it: ‘I couldn’t bring my homework in today. I did it, but my dad dropped me off and it is still on the back seat of his car,’ it becomes more real and believable, even if it isn’t.  Writing stories is the same. You need to add just enough truth to your stories, just enough reality to make the fantastic believable for the reader.  In this way, you are writing about what you know.

If you are writing about what you know in a literal (real) sense, then you have the other problem.  You are not making the fantastic real, you are making the real fantastic. You need to make what you are writing about interesting and entertaining for the reader. You can’t just write a dull ‘shopping list’ style narrative about the stuff you do every day. You have to look at what you have written and then find ways to make the same points, and tell the same story, but with extra details that make the story fun, or exciting, or sad. You need to add things that will make your reader want to read on instead of just thinking: ‘Well, yes. Everyone does that. Why should I read further.’

You can write:

‘I got up. I put my clothes on. I went downstairs for breakfast. I brushed my teeth. I got my bag from the hall. I walked to school.’

Or you can write:

‘I was dreaming that I was in the front row of a Moon Weasels’ concert. It was amazing. The lead singer had just bent down to take my hand and invite me up on stage to sing a duet with him. I couldn’t believe my luck. I was about to take his hand when I heard a bell ringing.  Someone had set off a fire alarm just as I was about to realise my life long dream. I prayed it wasn’t true, but the bell kept ringing and ringing. I woke up to find it was my alarm clock reminding me that it was Monday and I had to go to school. I got dressed in a filthy mood because my dream had been completely ruined, and then, when I got down for breakfast, mum shouted at me because I’d put my tie on back to front.  I chomped my Shreddies savagely, imagining that they were tiny models of mum, and that I was a giant, chomping them up one by one: ‘Mwahahahaha!’

I was getting quite carried away by this daydream until mum shouted at me again for making so much noise eating my breakfast.  To cheer myself up I used extra toothpaste while I was brushing my teeth so that I made an enormous, minty foam beard.  I looked like I had rabies. It was wicked. Things were looking up. Then, as I was picking up my bag to go to school I realised it was my new Moon Weasels one, and that everyone at school would be dead impressed by the coolness of my bag.  By the time I set out to walk to school I was feeling brilliant. To top it off, on the way to school I decided I would try to have the same dream again when I went to bed that night, but that this time I would finish it and find out what it was like to sing with Dirk Weasel, the most amazing singer in the world.’

Make sure that when you have written your story, you read it to yourself, and if you don’t believe what you have written, nobody else will, so you will need to go back and add or take things away until you have created something that is as real as you can get it. Don’t worry if you have to do this. No real writers ever write something perfectly the first time. Usually a story has to go through several rewrites or drafts until the author is happy with it.

Story Writing Tips – Titles and the Writing Journey

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how to write a story, story writing, the narrative journey, titles, writing stories

One of the hardest things to do when you are writing a story is to start it.

Sitting with a blank piece of paper and a pen, or staring at an empty screen at your computer can be very depressing, and can often stop us from writing a fantastic story which would otherwise be bursting to come out of us, and might be the best story we have ever written.

If only we could get it onto the page or screen.

In school, lots of the children spend time staring at an empty page simply because they cannot think of a title for their work.

In my experience, the title of the story is usually the least important part, unless you are specifically working on a title that has been given to you by a teacher.

Do not let the fact that you have not got a title for your story actually stop you from writing it.

It is very hard to start writing when you are thinking about what you don’t have.

It is much easier to start writing when you are thinking about what you do have.

You might have a brilliant idea for a character.

You might have a place that you want to write about.

You might have a great idea for a car chase.

You might have an idea for a conversation you want two characters to have.

You might have an idea for a brilliant ending.

It doesn’t really matter where you start, as long as you start.  You can always edit (fiddle with) what you have at the end and change it all around.

Lots of writers and poets start this way.  They start with an image or an idea, or a word, or an emotion that they want to write about.

Quite often they do not know where their story is going to end up, or even how their story is going to start.  They just know that this idea that they have, or this character that they are thinking about is too good not to write about.

They start writing where they feel most inspired, and then they fit everything else around this important idea or feeling.

Once they start writing, they often feel that the rest of the story just falls into place as soon as their pen starts making marks on the paper, or their fingers start tapping on the keyboard.

The British Library in London has an exhibition of famous books which anyone can go and see for free. As well as finished books they often show works in progress.  There is a case full of exhibits about Alice in Wonderland that show you how Lewis Carroll, the author got from a few ideas on a scrap of paper, to a finished book.

What you notice, when you see how a writer goes about writing is that it is not a linear (one thing after another in order) process.  Quite often an author starts in one place and finishes in another.  They cross things out, and doodle and write sideways and upside down. Eventually, out of all this mess, comes an amazing story.

If they can do it, you can do it too.

And sometimes, it is only after our whole story is written that we realise what our story is about, and find out that we have had a title in our heads all along, and it is a perfect title for the story we have written.