How to teach: English - Chris Curtis 2019

Much ado about motifs
How to teach writing – Part 2

Teaching the structure of stories is problematic. Storytelling is a natural thing, yet when getting students to write stories we use simplistic terminology like opening, complication, crisis and resolution. When we tell stories, we inherently know what works and what doesn’t. We know we have to grab the reader’s interest from the start, and then we have to work at maintaining that interest to the end. Some rudimentary diagram is not going to make writing better. It hasn’t for years. Never have I written the following on a student’s story:

Great opening. The problem with your writing is that you haven’t included a complication or a crisis. To get better, you need to add a complication and a crisis.

It is meaningless. Each story is unique and you need to give advice based on what’s in front of you. What works for one will not work for another. When teaching creative writing, there’s the danger that we promote the idea that stories follow a beige standard format. I read avidly and no two stories are the same. No two have an identical structure. There are simply billions of ways to tell a story. If we use sweeping brushstrokes, we get writing that is general, boring and lacking originality. Perfect writing isn’t stereotypical — in fact, it is the opposite.

To help students to structure interesting stories I focus on motifs. I find it helps to use short animated films to convey the idea. YouTube and the Literacy Shed are great sources for short animated films. Literacy Shed even has the short films linked together thematically.³ Then we explore how we can tell the story though the motif. I have successfully used the idea of a motif for dystopian fiction and got students to write about a cracked world.

Let’s take a simple story, with mirrors as my motif.

What aspects of a mirror could I use?

✵ Reflection.

✵ Broken mirrors cause bad luck.

✵ Dirty/obscured.

✵ Something not right.

✵ Inverted.

Then I create a short plan, often visual, plotting a story around the mirror.

1 Woman gets dressed looking in a mirror.

2 Man gets dressed without looking in the mirror.

3 Oven in kitchen reflects image of the two eating, but neither is looking at or talking to the other person.

4 Man breaks the mirror when searching for something.

5 Woman decides to leave the man.

The mirror becomes something bigger in the structure of the story. It takes on a symbolic meaning. The fact that the man doesn’t look in the mirror suggests his lack of ability to see the situation the woman is able to see. It makes for interesting storytelling. Oh, and your complication and crisis is there, hidden behind the mirror.

If you want students to write stories about ’suddenly his head was chopped off’ or ’the room exploded’, then insist they include a crisis in a piece of writing. I find an emotional or spiritual crisis is far more powerful and wide-reaching than a CGI-worthy explosion.