Copyright
© Ticking Mind Educational Publishing 2013
First published 2013 as part of the How To Teach Series
For information email [email protected]
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Section 1
Narrative fiction:
developing ideas
• Narrative element brainstormer:
This activity is a way for students to become familiar with the basics of narrative (character, problem, event and resolution), and
is also a technique for brainstorming lots of ideas and selecting
the ones which are best.
1. Divide students into groups of four.
Creative writing can be one of the most rewarding types of writing to engage in in the English classroom. However, anyone
who has spent any time in the English classroom knows the difficulty involved in teaching ‘creativity‘ and getting students to tell
a story well.
One of the hardest things for students to be able to do is to
come up with good ideas to write about. Often there can be limited time or strategies provided to students for brainstorming
story ideas in the classroom. Published authors develop many
ideas to write about - selecting only the best to finally pursue.
The opposite can be true of the English classroom. Students
routinely come up with one idea to write about and, in the absence of any other ideas, write about that idea regardless of
whether it is a quality idea or not. The following strategies aim
to give students stimulus for developing many story ideas. With
a pool of ideas to draw from, they can be critical about evaluating which idea will be best to write about.
2. In each group, the student who lives closest to the school
needs to pick four random numbers between 1-10 and write
these down somewhere.
3. Using individual scrap pieces of paper, each student in the
group needs to then create a list of ten things (one thing per
scrap piece of paper): one student needs to write a list of ten
jobs (i.e policeperson, doctor etc...); one student needs to write
a list of ten problems, fears or anxieties someone can have (i.e
fear of heights, low self esteem); one student needs to write a
list of ten things that can go wrong (i.e fire, car crash, break up);
another student needs to write a list of ten ways to solve problems (i.e make a plan, communicate, work together).
4. Students should carefully place the scrap pieces of paper in
the order they write them.
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5. Once students have made these lists, the random numbers
that were picked at the start of the activity are used to select
one item from each list. If the student who picked the numbers
selected 3, 6, 2 and 7 - these equate to things in that place on
each list: the third thing from the list of ten jobs; the sixth thing
from the list of fears; the second thing from the list of problems
etc...
6. Using these randomly selected things, the group needs to
work out and summarise a storyline - what happens when you
combine these elements?
7. After this, students can then match up items from the different lists that combine together to make an interesting basis for
a story. Students shouldn’t necessarily look for logical combinations of elements - but dramatic combinations of elements.
From the different combinations they come up with, students
should pick the best ideas to write about.
Below is an example of a story generator grid for a unit on fairytales. Student would use the same procedure outline in the Narrative Element Brainstormer activity to combine elements in this
grid as the basis of a story.
• Picture inspiration #1:
A picture tells a thousand words and a whole lot more stories.
This strategy is about giving students visual stimulus to develop
plots and story ideas.
1. Select a range of pictures (such as the ones shown on page
3) that can be loosely connected. Don’t over think the connection - we want to provide plenty of space for students to be creative in how they associate the pictures.
2. Working in groups, students need to annotate the picture
with at least three of the following story elements:
• Setting (which picture sets the scene),
• Narrative element story generator:
All the ideas in the above activity are student generated. However, where we want students to focus more on thinking about
the combination of ideas, rather than generating ideas, we can
generate a grid of narrative elements ourselves. This works particular well in units where students are producing genre pieces such as a horror, fantasy or science fiction story. Genres such
as these typically draw from a ‘stock’ set of narrative elements.
• Character (who or what is the protagonist, hero or subject of
this story)
• Problem (what is the main thing that goes wrong)
• Further Problem (what is a second thing that goes wrong)
• Process (what happens to sort the problem out)
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An axeman is hired to...
The villain tries to eat...
No one realises that the villain
is trying to...
The villain locks...in
The villain poisons...
The villain turns...into
No one believes that the main
character is...
The villain hates...
The main characters is curious
about...
The main character doesn’t
follow advice that...
The villain is angry because he/
she hasn’t been invited to...
The villain wants to marry...
To break a spell the main
character must...
A curse comes true...
A kingdom with a beautiful
princess and a wicked fairy.
A place with a forest where
there lives an evil...
A kingdom of happy pigs and
an evil wolf.
A beautiful, but poor girl lives
with her wicked step mother
A family of beautiful girls live in
a kingdom where there is a
cruel king
A beautiful princess is bored...
A beautiful princess has been
cursed...
© Ticking Mind 2013 - www.tickingmind.com.au
A horrible spell is cast on the
main character...
Crisis
The villain is jealous because...
Complication
A father lives in the woods with
his three children. He remarries
after his wife dies.
Orientation
Fairytale Story Generator
The faithful companion fixes
the problem, is rewarded and
the kingdom is at peace
The main character kisses
the...and lives happily ever
after
The main character is rescued
by...
The villain is tricked somehow
and beaten.
The villain is chased over a cliff
by...
The villain is chased away
by...and never seen again.
The curse is lifted from the
main character by...
The main character
marries...and lives happily ever
after...
Resolution
• Resolution (what happens in the end)
3. Having identified the elements, students should then tease
out these parts into a story. What’s the narrative these pictures are telling? Go around the class and get groups to
share their ideas.
• Picture inspiration #2:
An alternative way students can use pictures as inspirations for
stories is to think about whether a picture tells the beginning or
end of a story. For example, at what end of the narrative spectrum does the picture overleaf come?
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The trick with story telling, then, is not to come up with a new
formula, but to take existing ideas and plots and modify them to
give them a twist or refreshed sense of drama. Here’s a few
ideas to do this:
• The worse film I’ve seen...
All students will have seen films they consider bad or ‘lame’.
Challenge students to identify exactly what it was that was ‘bad’
about the movie, and to write a ‘pitch’ or summary of a new version of the film that is better.
If students think the picture comes at the start of a story, then
they need to write about what happens next. If they think it
comes at the end, they need to write about what comes before.
There are lots of places on the web we can find fascinating pictures of events. Here’s some:
• http://www.buzzfeed.com/mjs538/the-most-powerful-photos-o
f-2011
• http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/picturegalleries/worldnews/
• Changing existing story ideas:
Creative writing ideas certainly don’t need to be original. How
many stories have you read or watched that are variations of a
formula? Is there really any such thing as an original romantic
comedy or teen film?
• BAR:
BAR is creative thinking tool that starts from an existing idea,
concept or thing. In this case, students pick an existing story
(such as a bad film) and:
*B = Make something bigger, better or badder - such as give a
character a bigger part, make a problem or obstacle in the story
bigger
*A = Add something completely new - such as a new setting,
character or complication
*R - Remove, Reverse, Re-order something - take away something such as a character or problem, reverse or re-order the
sequence of events
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This strategy works particularly well with fables and fairytales
and can be a good tool for students to use when creating their
own ‘fractured’ fairytales. In the handouts section, find an blank
BAR brainstorming page that students can use.
• SCAMPER
SCAMPER is a more sophisticated version of BAR.
*S: Substitute: Change one character with another character,
one event or plot element for another event or plot element.
*C: Combine: Combine two or more characters together or two
or more plot elements together
*A: Adapt: Change the genre of the story. Make the story more
like another story.
*M: Modify: Alter the ending, middle or beginning or the story
or the way characters act.
*P: Put to another use: Have characters perform different
roles in the story or respond to the plot events in a different
way.
*E: Eliminate: Take away a character, scene or plot element.
*R: Reverse: Reverse the way a story ends or the roles of characters.
Unlike BAR, where students need to change a text using each
of B, A and R, students do not need to apply each part of the
SCAMPER acronym to a story. Students can choose three elements from SCAMPER which they believe they can best apply
to an existing story or plot to make it interesting.
• How did it get to this?
One way of hooking the reader at the start of the story is to begin with the complication. This activity get kids thinking about
exciting complications, relatively innocuous orientations, and filling in the gaps between. In a way it’s similar to the Picture inspiration #1 activity - except this activity only involves words and
gives students both ends of the story - not just one.
To start this activity, we first need to give students some examples of exciting complication and innocuous orientations. Here’s
two:
*As the bell rang to finish the day, I rushed to the
door.....Everyone watched the wreckage of the plane sink into
the sea and then turned around and stared hard at me. How
had it gotten to this?
*Nothing was worse than detention after school with Mrs Scarrow - the meanest teacher on earth....I stared at all the money
in the bag - there must be hundreds of thousands of dollars in
cash. I didn’t know how it had got to this point.
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