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PART 1
Creativity and fiction: An overview
The most valuable attitude we can help children adopt – the one that, among other things, helps them to read and write with most fluency and effectiveness and enjoyment – is one I can best categorise by the word playful.
(Philip Pullman, The Guardian, 22 January 2005)
At the start of the 21st century, much in our lives is ordered, framed and regulated by mass information and technology. The emphasis on the scientific, the provable, the measurable has not, however, dimmed our passion for reading stories and telling stories. Indeed the growth in technology has enabled us to expand our experience of, and interaction with, fiction through an ever-increasing range of media. We can now watch DVDs of feature films on a laptop on the train, in a cafe or indeed almost anywhere; text messages can be sent to our mobile phones giving us daily updates on our favourite soap operas; short films and radio plays can be downloaded from the internet as podcasts and played on our MP3s again and again; digital cameras record stories from our daily lives; publishing that first novel has never been easier or more instant than on the World Wide Web and Richard and Judy’s Book Club has caused a publishing phenomenon. Our insatiable appetite for fiction seems to be boundless.
What is fiction?
Fiction is shared through a variety of media and permeates all aspects of our lives. We tell stories all the time. ‘Did you watch EastEnders last night?’; ‘Did you hear the one about the …?’; ‘You’ll never guess what happened to me on the way to work this morning …’. We tell stories to define who we are, how we feel and to make sense of the world around us. These stories allow us to share experiences with others and in doing so, they help to frame our community, our culture, race and gender and identity. Fiction is essentially the embellishment of these stories, designed and spoken or written or read to entertain an audience, the reader.
Fact or fiction?
The stories we tell and write and show are rarely total fabrication. The characters are familiar, the places well known, the problems and resolutions often commonplace. Similarly we rarely provide a completely factual account when relating events. In the telling we embellish our stories with details to capture and sustain the interest of the audience and to make our lives more fascinating. This process sometimes takes us away from the mundane truth. The distinction between fact and fiction is thus not easy to define and this is particularly evident in the classroom where fictional stories are frequently a mixture of the familiar and the fantastic.
Story elements and structure
Vladimir Propp’s research into Russian folk tales at the beginning of the last century demonstrates the similarities in structural elements and themes or ‘morphemes’ between stories (Propp 1928). In other words, there are only so many stories that can be told.
Understanding the common elements that most stories have is helpful in supporting children’s response to fictional texts as well as supporting their attempts to construct their own. In order to foster creativity and innovation in telling stories, it is vital to first understand how basic stories work. Common elements of a simple story will include:
• structure – including a beginning, middle and end
• characters – usually with human characteristics and emotions
• setting – real or imaginary places where the story happens
• events – exposition, problem, resolution.
These elements form a basic pattern which can be copied, adapted, extended and subverted enabling creative interpretation and interaction with the telling, reading or writing of fictional texts. The most common or basic pattern consists of:
Opening > something happens > dilemma > something goes wrong > climax > events to sort it out > resolution > end (DfES 2001)
Genre: Different types of fictional stories
The basic structure of narrative stories outlined above is of course adapted, subverted, inverted and fine-tuned according to the type of story to be told. The ‘author’ or teller of the tales adapts their language and syntactic choices to tell a certain type of story – the genre. Experienced tellers, readers and writers recognise the differences between broad text types.
Lizzie French jumped involuntarily as the church door clanged noisily behind a latecomer. Had he come? She had almost given up hope, but now, heart-in-mouth, she turned.
(www.lizfielding.com/tips.html)
It is probably quite evident to you which genre is suggested by this opening sentence taken from Liz Fielding’s website offering helpful hints to the budding romantic authors of the world. Although the Primary Strategy offers a very straightforward view of genre in Grammar for Writing (DfEE 2000a) and the importance of text types, it is important to consider that most texts present a range of features and elements from different types of stories.
The reader
Once the story leaves the teller, it will be interpreted in different ways by the audience who bring their own values and experiences with them. The story then becomes theirs to remember, to retell, to improve upon. This idea that there is no text unless there is a reader is an important tenet in ‘reader response theory’ which has gained in popularity since the 1970s. In ‘Unity Identity Text Self’, Norman Holland opens his article by stressing the importance of the reader in creating meaning from text:
My title has big words but my essay aims into the white spaces between those big words.Those spaces suggest to me the mysterious openness and receptivity of literature. Somehow, all kinds of people from different eras and cultures can achieve and re-achieve a single literary work, replenishing it by infinitely various additions of subjective to objective.
(Holland 1975)
We believe that this view of the power of the reader in making meaning is an important premise when considering a creative approach to teaching English, as children may be creative in their interpretation of the material that is presented to them as well as creative producers of texts.
Teaching fiction creatively
The creative elements of telling and responding to fictional stories are compelling and yet the teaching of reading stories and writing stories is sometimes consigned to closed comprehension questions on an uninspiring text or worse, a decontextualised excerpt from a text. The Standard Assessment Tests (SATs) a...
