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Inventing Stories

The document discusses supporting children's story invention by teaching them simple story plots and structures. It recommends exposing children to common story plots like warning tales, tales of fear, and finding tales. These generic plot patterns can provide a framework to help children control the structure of their stories. The document also suggests letting children experiment by blending plot elements and using non-linear storytelling as their skills develop. Regular practice with simple story plots can help children eventually choose plots and characters that match while resolving problems within a given structure.

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Eddie Zhou
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29 views

Inventing Stories

The document discusses supporting children's story invention by teaching them simple story plots and structures. It recommends exposing children to common story plots like warning tales, tales of fear, and finding tales. These generic plot patterns can provide a framework to help children control the structure of their stories. The document also suggests letting children experiment by blending plot elements and using non-linear storytelling as their skills develop. Regular practice with simple story plots can help children eventually choose plots and characters that match while resolving problems within a given structure.

Uploaded by

Eddie Zhou
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Inventing Stories

In an ideal world, children would have been orally inventing stories from Nursery and
throughout the EYFS to build the foundations of storytelling and story-making. This
would be further supported by learning stories off by heart to build their narrative
storehouses – thus giving them the components of stories to draw upon when
having to invent a new one.

The key to supporting invention, however, is an understanding of story plots. Pick a


simple story design and stick to it. With a simple plot to follow, the act of story-
making is made easier, as the writer knows exactly where the story is going. All they
have to do then is focus on the quality of what they are putting into the story to
make it come alive.

Christopher Booker writes about the seven basic story plots, from which all stories
have seemingly evolved (Overcoming the Monster, Rags to Riches, The Quest,
Voyage and Return, Comedy, Tragedy and Rebirth). But for children inventing
stories, they need simple story patterns that they are likely to have experienced in
their reading or storytelling.

Pie Corbett has named many simple plots so that they are easy to use and support
the inventing process. He talks about the Warning Tale, the Tale of Fear, the Wishing
Tale and Finding Tales, to name a few. After discovering the explanation of these
story types in Pie’s book, How to Teach Fiction Writing KS2, I have adapted some of
the more common plots to fit Pie’s five-part story structure of: Opening, Build up,
Problem, Resolution and Ending.

These generic patterns offer simple plots for children to build their stories around,
encompassed in the five story sections that they should be familiar with. They can
act as paragraph planners for developing writers, helping them to control the plots
of their stories, but can also become flexible patterns for more confident writers.
Here, each section might well be several paragraphs, forming a much richer,
descriptive story – these plots should not limit writing to only five paragraphs! The
patterns can be used boxed-up as presented here, or mapped onto Story Mountains
for younger writers, to support the planning process.

In order to familiarise the children further with story plots and patterns, it is worth
getting them to look for the patterns in reading. What they will no doubt find, is that
it is actually quite difficult to identify clear story ‘types’ in most plots. This is because
many stories are a mixture of several plot types. As children become more familiar
with plot patterns they should be encouraged to experiment with them and begin to
write blended stories. For example, a ‘Warning Tale’ may contain ‘Conquering the
Monster’ as part of the plot and a ‘Finding Tale’ may also include a ‘Rags to Riches’
element. They should also be encouraged to box-up plots from model texts
themselves, uncovering new patterns and using them to invent new stories. Also, as
the children become more confident writers, they do not need to use the story plots
in a linear fashion. For instance, they might start writing at the moment of dilemma
and then use a flashback. It is, therefore, important that there is progression in the
use of these patterns to meet the needs of the writers as they grow. These plot
patterns can be used flexibly to match the level of the writers, the purpose of the
writing and stage of development that the writers need to focus on.

By regularly revisiting and using these simple plots and building on their content year
on year, children should reach a point when they are able to make clear decisions
about their inventing. They will be able to choose a plot, match the characters and
settings to it and find a suitable problem to be resolved, all underpinned by the
generic structure of that plot. Many schools now choose around six clear story types
and teach these to the children each year, so that they develop a bank of patterns to
draw upon when they are inventing. Once children have mastered these plots in
their simplest form, they can begin to use them to write more challenging texts.

Warning tales, Finding tales and Conquering the Monster stories seem to be very
popular invented stories with young writers but, with all these simple plots for
guidance, anything is possible!
Maria Richards, Talk for Writing Primary Expert
April 2013

Below are four story map examples:

1. Year 1 Fear Story Text Map


2. Year 2 Warning story text map
3. Year 6 Quest Story Text map
4. Boxed up planning for an adventure story

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