Reflections on Short Stories and Teaching Writing

Reflections on Short Stories and Teaching Writing

Rhiannon Walls (2020)

Did I ever read short stories when I was younger? No. Was I always asked to write short stories as a pupil? Yes. Do I read short stories to my pupils? No. Do I always ask them to write short stories? Yes.

Recently, in the gloomy closing days of October, as we looked forward to the month of lockdown 2.0, I set about reading English and Media Centre’s new collection of short stories: ‘Iridescent Adolescent’. It is a masterpiece showing the short story at its very best: we have (amongst others) Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Tomorrow is Too Far, with its rather proverbial message about the perils of adolescent jealousy, Sita Brahmachari’s haunting tale Amir and George, about giving voice to the voiceless, and Barbara Bleiman’s futuristic warning against technology’s replacement of human touch and interaction.

But as I shall explain, I grew to appreciate this anthology not just for its exposure of beautiful writing but for the path it has taken me on over the past two weeks as I reflect on my teaching of writing.

Firstly, I discovered a huge disconnect: we ask our pupils to write short stories from their entry into school education until their departure, but we very rarely read them. Whilst I’m really proud of the curricular I have taken part in creating, not one has featured short stories.

Yet my motto when teaching writing has always been to teach it through reading. I diligently expose students to extracts through which I teach various aspects of language and structure, before getting students to replicate the methods in their own way. Here are a few favourites:

• Jaja looking out of her window onto the garden in Chimamanda Ngoze Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus: to teach the art of movement in descriptive writing
• Bali Rae’s An (Un)arranged Marriage – using setting (Manny’s bedroom) to reflect characterisation
• F. S Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night – employing (minimal) dialogue to introduce conflict
• Dodie Smith’s I Capture the Castle – openings to establish character and subtle conflict
• Khalid Hosseini’s The Kite Runner – motifs
   

Whilst all of these ingredients are relevant in short story writing, which is what we are really asking pupils to curate (not full novels), on reflection, I, for several years now, have missed out on teaching the crux of short story writing: form. The art of short story writers is their ability to craft and develop characters in very few words; to create conflicts that are resolved tightly; to say in 3000 words what novelists write in 100000.

In none of the short stories I have read recently, do the authors explore the ‘emerald green eyes’ of the protagonist or the ‘soft brown curls that delicately cascade across her face’. Instead words are used sparingly: setting develops characterisation; a line of dialogue reveals setting; characters are minimal – two or three maximum. These are the strategies I can see working in the writing classroom. We need to show our pupils short stories, and identify what the authors do, before encouraging them to write their own.

And so, conclusion one: if we ask our pupils to write short stories, we must expose them to examples of the form first.

Secondly, following a year 9 writing co-planning session with other teachers at Harris Academy Peckham, I have been thinking about the stimuli we use and how we begin the planning process with our pupils for their creative writing.

I can’t count the number of times I have given my pupils a picture as a writing prompt and told them to plan and write a story in 45 minutes. Or, perhaps slightly better, a sentence such as: Write the opening to a story about two friends on an adventure.
But this is the GCSE specification trickling down into KS3, tricking us into thinking that this is the way to plan writing.

What to do instead?

Start with message, writer’s intention: ask pupils what they want to say to the world.

In most reading lessons, you’ll hear me call: “What is the writer’s message?” “What is the big idea of the passage?”; students know the refrain: “the moral of the story” from Primary too. If we, as literature teachers, expect students to see how: “Literature is the human mind at the very height of its ability to express and interpret the world around us”, then we, as teachers of writing, need to teach our pupils to express and interpret their world around them in their stories too.

First, pair an image of a group of teenagers near an elderly couple with the theme of ‘fear’ and ask pupils what they want to say about this topic. Pair an image of a litter-filled river with the theme of ‘nature’ and prompt pupils to respond with their opinion. These opinions become the centre of the story planning process.

Then help them with questions: How are you going to share that message? What characters do you need? What is the most appropriate setting?

Our pupils’ opinions matter; let’s ask our pupils what they want to say and then show them how to say it.

Conclusion two: put authorial intention at the heart of short story planning and suddenly the purpose isn’t: ‘how many marks can we pick up in 45 minutes?’, it’s ‘my interpretation of the world matters, and now watch me express it.’