How children can write better stories

Most story plots produced by young writers are clichéd, predictable or illogical because their authors go about thinking them up the wrong way around, says Colin Macfarlane...

If you ask youngsters to make up a spontaneous story they inevitably begin the plot with one of the first things that comes into their minds. Due to a cognitive bias known as the Availability Effect, this starter idea is usually a situation that is everyday and mundane (such as ‘a man was walking down a road…’) or a concept that has become strongly lodged in their minds because it has been encountered recently or regularly (i.e. an idea from a story they’ve just read or a happening or setting common in TV, computer games or animation).

This is clearly not an original or creative place to start the process of plot creation. Even worse, however, is that thinking onwards from such a starting point leads young writers into clichéd and predictable plot routes. This is turn can lead to a loss of interest in writing. To rectify this we need to teach children certain thinking skills that accomplished fiction writers have acquired through experience.

Why children use clichés

But let’s start from the beginning. If children are asked to write fiction in the classroom without having been given such training they are in a similar creative vacuum to those asked to make up a story spontaneously. They will try to think of anything that helps get their minds rolling and it’s usually one of those types of settings or situations described above. Let’s call that Idea A.

They will then attempt to think of an idea to follow this, such as that the man who is walking down the road sees a dog, which we’ll call Idea B. This may be followed by: the dog has a bone in its mouth (Idea C), the man tries to pet the dog (Idea D) but the dog runs away (Idea E). By this point, some may sense the story’s lack of interest or direction and, in desperation, introduce something exciting or funny, but possibly relatively illogical, in order to make the plot less boring. This might be an idea such as a branch falls on the man’s head, aliens appear in a spaceship or the man chases the dog and falls into a puddle.

There are two serious problems with this everyday approach. The first is that the starting point of the story is dull or clichéd and the second is that the writer’s thinking moves forwards in a predictable sequential way (A – B – C – D …) until he or she may become frustrated and introduce a random (possibly animation-based) occurrence, which often makes the plot more clichéd and silly.

How you can change this

We can cure the first problem through the use of a starting idea called an x-point. Instead of beginning with some mundane ‘A’ idea and thinking forwards, the writer first invents a fascinating moment that may later appear anywhere in the story.

This ‘x-point’ idea is simply a curious occurrence or setting that forces the writer to ask questions about how or why it came about. It often contains an intriguing juxtaposition. Here are some examples:

A woman is leading a pig along a railway line by a rope around its neck.
An object burrows up through the floor of a forest and surrounding trees glow with soft pink light.
A tiny girl is crying on a slow-spinning park roundabout in the middle of the night.

You will see that these all throw up lots of questions about how the situations came about (Why was the woman leading a pig? Why on the railway line? Who is she? What happened to cause this?).

Through answering such questions, that second problem of predictable, sequential and uninspired thinking can begin to be solved. Possible first answers for the pig story might be that the creature had escaped onto the line/ the woman is hypnotised/ trains have stopped running for some reason, etc. I call these answers ‘story excuses’ because they attempt to explain the x-point.

Story excuses are also used to explain other story excuses. For instance, a next round of story excuses might speculate that perhaps the woman is taking a shortcut/ is making her escape after stealing the pig from a farm or testing laboratory/ is so poor she feeds the animal on the railway’s un-grazed grass. Or perhaps it’s a performing pig which has escaped from a circus near a bridge/ normal roads are flooded/ trains are not running, and so on.

Tertiary story excuses might, for instance, relate to why trains have stopped running. Perhaps because the woman has been seen on the line / a train has crashed and the pig escaped from a wrecked railway wagon/ the pig has eaten through signal cables / she is a war refugee and is also dragging a sledge along the snowy line, etc.

You will notice that, through the creation of a curious x-point and the invention of possible story excuses to explain it, as well as further story excuses to explain these story excuses, the story writer has now begun thinking out most of the plot backwards instead of forwards. Figuring out causes, reasons and back-story like this releases the writer from sequential thinking and leads to stunningly original yet logical plots. Because these are thought out in the opposite direction from that in which the reader follows the story they are also delightfully unpredictable.

Much effort goes into teaching children to use good grammar and strong description but surprisingly little goes into explaining how to create a dazzling plot. The plot is, after all, the fundamental bone structure of any story. Using x-points and story excuses helps novices to excel at this essential part of becoming accomplished writers.

Colin Macfarlane’s latest book, Write Out of the Classroom (Routledge 2014), explains how to teach x-points effectively and shows how to use them in conjunction with descriptive brainstorming in interesting locations. It also gives comprehensive advice on guiding inspirational out-of-classroom poetry and factual writing sessions, and supplies detailed information about forms and techniques best suited to these activities.

X-points in historical sites

X-points can be designed to trigger and develop stories in any genre and are superbly effective when worked on in interesting outdoor locations

Children guided to create x-points based on what they can see, hear or imagine in locations such as stately homes, battlefields, castles and hill forts, and old town centres produce much richer and more original plots. By brainstorming language, description and knowledge in the same locations, these stories can then be greatly enriched with well-observed and relevant authenticating details, settings, metaphors and moods that bolster the reader’s sense of reality and believability.

A literary feast

One Year 6 pupil who brainstormed x-points and language with me at a stately home invented an x-point about a bear smashing through a window. This evolved into an hysterically funny story about an gluttonous and selfish king who kept bears on his estate for hunting. In the plot’s denouement, a starving mother bear smelled the king’s massive personal banquet, smashed through his feasting hall’s impressive stained glass window and chased the monarch into his gilded bedchamber. The bear reappeared shortly afterwards with the greedy king’s XXXL underpants on her head before disappearing to feed her hungry cubs with most of his sumptuous feast.

Authentic settings

Through creating x-points at a castle damaged during the civil war another KS2 pupil crafted a complex and evocative story about a serving girl given an honour for bravely helping to defend her master’s castle. Not only was the storyline excellent, but the settings were richly described; a reader could even smell fumes of burning cooking fat drifting along dank stone corridors. The writer wove in many relevant facts related to the site (and her school history project) so she’d been learning history effectively while writing a superb story.

About the author

Colin Macfarlane is an educational consultant, writer and performing poet, creative writing tutor and ex-journalist. He is available for conferences, teacher training and schools visits (email .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)).