The Spark of a Story – A Year of Creative Writing with Students

As we move towards the end of the school year, Lyndon Riggall shares the wonderful writing talents of students at Cressy District High School who have engaged throughout the year with a literary program that has seen story writing skills and enthusiasm flourish. There are so many exciting ideas on show!

 

How do you make a story? That’s the first question that I have asked half a dozen rooms full of students this year. Typically, their answers have included everything from a title and an illustrator to paper, pens, and a really expensive laptop. Those things are helpful, of course, but luckily, they aren’t the most important. People have been telling stories for a very long time, and they haven’t always even had a title, let alone a MacBook Pro.

For me, there are three ingredients that form the basis of our recipe for story: a character, a setting, and a problem. I explain to the students that it doesn’t matter if your character is a person, a frog, or a piece of toast, as long as they have feelings, dreams, and a personality. Our setting can be anything: the house three doors down from yours, the bottom of the ocean, or even an imagined land where everything tastes like cake. Then, the problem of the story gives your character something to do: finding their missing shoe or building a tree house that reaches the moon. Whether the characters solve that problem or the problem solves them is the reason we keep reading.

At Cressy District High School, with the support of our principal Mark, our quality teaching coach Liz, and the team of wonderful teachers I have been working with this year, I have been fortunate enough to have the opportunity to implement a number of new programs with our students around the act of writing. The two that I have most enjoyed have been The Forge and Story Sparks. 

The Forge is a program for our senior cohort, with a number of students committing to spending a couple of lunchtimes each week taking on a creative writing challenge in their own time, such as describing a narrative backwards or writing about the world from the perspective of an object in their house. 

In Story Sparks, our primary school students work with me as a whole class to create a picture book from start to finish, developing and shaping shared ideas and then illustrating them to produce a complete book. Each story starts with those same three parts: a character, a setting, and a problem.

I adore the products of these collaborations with these students and their teachers, racing alongside them as each class pulls its own creation in an entirely different direction. Grade 1’s Simone Slipped! is about a girl who gets lost from her book and tries to find her way back again, while Wayward Sherrin, by one of our Grade 5/6 classes tells the story of a football that is sick of being kicked around and runs away to seek a new life. 

For a taste of exactly how these ideas come together, you can watch a video of Baarbara’s Bad Hair Day by Grade 3/4, which features them reading the story that they created alongside the amazing plasticine models that they made to help represent the different characters in our illustrations with the phenomenal support of their teacher Mrs Greig. 

I am so grateful that I have had the opportunity to embed these programs as part of the work that I have been doing this year. I have often described my own personal philosophy around literacy as the lighting of a fire: if you create the conditions by which students can learn to love stories and storytelling in their own right, I wager, the rest simply follows, and this idea is reflected in the names of each program: The Forge is a place where students use that fire to build and shape something new, while Story Sparks are the first glowing beginnings of realising that anyone can make a story for themselves.

And so we create, following each time those same beginnings to new horizons. A character, a setting, and a problem: it’s true of everything from Where is the Green Sheep? to Hamlet. I try to encourage our young people to see, through these exercises, how simple the act of creating a story is, and how joyful it can be. I am so excited by what they have made. 

Now, here’s hoping that we can keep the fires burning.

Lyndon Riggall is a writer, teacher and co-president of the Tamar Valley Writers Festival. You can find him at http://www.lyndonriggall.com or on social media @lyndonriggall.