Story Writing Is Critical Thinking

One of the first exercises I learned to use in elementary school classes was what I called “The Character on the Board.” This is a class exercise in which we invent an original character together. I ask the class a series of questions, writing the answers on the marker board and then asking the kids to individually create (in writing) a story about the character we‘ve imagined.

Kids love the exercise. In fact, they get so excited that I have to set firm ground rules to prevent a riot. First, I only take answers from students who raise their hands. They can bounce in their seats as much as they like, and I do understand the desire to outshine each other in the imagination department. The blurting-out factor can get out of hand pretty quickly, though, so I put a lid on it right away. This also helps me to fend off the silly factor. Thousand-eyed, five-legged, purple-with-pink-striped elephant-mouse mixes may be fun to create, but they generally leave kids in tears when they realize there’s no place to go with a character who makes no sense. The second ground rule is that, once you start writing your story, you may change anything at all about the character. Anything and everything.

We have lots of fun and generally come out with decent stories. I use it to model what they each will do on their own the next day, create an original character and put that character in a dramatic situation. From the start, though, I ask that the character make sense. That doesn’t mean that he or she (or it!) must be realistic, but that the character’s conflict as well as its attributes need to relate to each other in a reasonable manner. I do not accept off-the-wall answers calculated to get a laugh from the class. The class has to be thinking as well as imagining.

After all, creativity isn’t purely about imagining. We can imagine all we want, but can we make something out of everything and anything we imagine? To create is to make, and making requires a certain level of discipline. To toss the magic of the unconscious out the window would be foolish, but--from coming up with a conflict that actually is related to the imagined character, to resolving that conflict--story writing is an opportunity for critical thinking. Given this, for third, fourth, and fifth graders in their concrete-operational cognitive stage, story writing is best approached through a staged, step-by-step process that allows for the free play of imagination balanced by conscious analysis of where the characters are in the story and where they will go next.

In the next couple of blogs, I’ll be looking more closely at this process. I hope these ideas will be helpful to classroom teachers.