A lot of students seem to believe that creativity is something you’ve either got or you haven’t.
This belief means that during English lessons they can suffer the constipation of writer’s block, giving up before they even start.
But that needn’t be the case.
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Here are some approaches that you might like to experiment with to liven up the soggy middle of your marking pile:
Improve plotting with Post-its
Diana Kimpton, author of the Princess Ellie series, swears by plotting. I spent a sunny Saturday a few years ago in her garden, playing with Post-it notes to construct a narrative from scratch.
It’s a bit expensive on stationery but a great way to take the anxiety out of planning.
Taking a Post-it at a time, you start from the original problem: for example, Jason has to deliver a letter to his uncle, who is in hiding. The next Post-it note might be something about Jason having to go to school because it’s Monday; the next that his mum always drops him off at the school gates.
The next could be a possible dividing of ways: if his teacher is at the gate he has to go into school - or if she isn’t and his mum drives off in a hurry, he can quickly turn away and begin his journey...
The approach is well-suited to logical thinkers because it takes the writer through the problem step by step. In the halcyon days of A-level creative writing, my students would sit on the classroom floor with piles of multi-coloured Post-its, working out cohesive, coherent plots.
The beauty is the flexibility. If you decide on a different path at any stage in the story, you can pick up a chain of Post-its and re-site it, change the order of events or play with new possibilities.
Change the perspective
My favourite film sequences come from Lawrence of Arabia, when the audience looks up from the bottom of the well into the opening - and the moment when Lawrence encounters Sherif Ali galloping towards him out of the mirage of the desert.
I can spend hours trawling the internet for perspectives on high-rise blocks, stations, roads, railways stations.
It’s a bit self-indulgent but the end result’s worth some of the time at least, when students get more experimental with the angles they take on even the most mundane of settings.
Adopt a different persona for the narrator
Who could be the most unlikely teller of the tale? I apologise for the spoiler here, but the award has to go to Julian Barnes for his choice of the woodworm in his retelling of Noah’s ark in A History of the World in 10½ Chapters. What ingenious irony.
Play with the genre
I always start Year 9’s investigation into detective fiction with a retelling of fairy stories and fables as forensic crime fiction. Scene-of-the-crime pieces work really well to get them thinking about motive, use of setting and the type of story being told.
Using newspaper reports to tell this part of the story means that non-fiction genres are being covered as well.
Mash it up
The best mash-up of fable and fairytale is James Thurber’s The Little Girl and the Wolf. It brings the story bang up to date (or at least to Thurber’s date) with the shocking insertion of a gun into the hand of Red Riding Hood, who shoots the wolf dead.
The moral, that “it is not so easy to fool little girls nowadays as it used to be”, goes down very well with female students. To make it more inclusive you could discuss male and female roles in traditional fairy stories and then play with class and gender roles.
Reconfigure the moral
The other part of James Thurber’s mash-up is the totally inappropriate moral.
It’s always a good exercise to play with morals that don’t fit fairy stories and make us all think about the ethics and values.
Redirect the reader’s sympathies
For too long stepmothers have had a bad press in fairy stories. Given the changing dynamic of family life, shouldn’t they now be rehabilitated, cut free from their enchanted mirrors and given manuals about how to reunify their families?
Perhaps it wasn’t that easy looking after even the most saintly adolescent stepdaughters.
Get vivid with voice
In the recent run-up to our school’s cross-key stage 3 event, our department got creative, looking for different versions of fairy stories. As my creative writing teacher told me: it’s the way that you tell ’em…
Politically Correct Bedtime Stories by James Finn-Garner always go down very well with anyone from Year 7 to Year 13. Who can resist: “The Emperor who was not naked but was endorsing a clothing-optional lifestyle”?
Technologise
All too often, anachronisms creep into class discussion. It’s no use sidelining televisions, computers and smartphones any longer.
Maybe a class discussion about how a mobile communications device could change the outcomes in well-known stories could lead to some serious updating of well-worn texts.
What would have happened if Tess of the D’Urbervilles had texted her confession to Angel instead of leaving so much to chance by posting a note under his door and - tragic irony here - under the carpet?
Consumerise
The trouble with most stories is that they ignore the consumerist society that we live in. Many of the products that we take for granted could have transformed the plots of well-known legends and classics.
Hercules’s Labours could have been over in a flash if only he’d been able to lay his hands on modern cleansers to clear the Augean stables.
And the Earnshaw family would have been so much more comfortable with double glazing at Wuthering Heights - especially when each departure raised such horrendous storms.
Yvonne Williams is head of English and drama at a school in the South of England
