Your Turn, My Turn: Writing Stories Together

We’ve all played this game: take turns writing (or telling) a story, one sentence at a time:

Player 1: Once upon a time, there was an ogre who lived in a castle.

Player 2: He had fifteen trunks of gold in the dungeon.

Player 1: One day, a sixteenth trunk fell out of the sky, but it did not contain gold.

Player 2: It contained a dinosaur!

etc.

It makes the blank page a little less threatening, makes room for (and even rewards) non-linear thinking, pumps up fluency.

Here are some ways to fiddle with it to make it more (or less) academic, more (or less) linear, and more (or less) predictable: 

1) Leave off the last couple of words of each sentence: 

Player 1: Once upon a time, there was an ogre who lived in a--

Player 2: --coffeeshop, because he LOVED coffee. One day--

Player 1: --he got a little out of control and ate up all the coffee beans. All that caffeine made him crazy, and the next thing he knew--

2) Make a standard requirement for every sentence.  This can be a good way to practice a specific grammatical or writing principle. Take conjunctions:

End each sentence with a conjunction: 

Player 1: Harry charged down the street, waving his hat and shouting because…

Player 2: ...he was trying to catch the bus. He had almost caught it when…

For these games, it helps to have a list (of conjunctions, prepositions, adverb phrases, whatever) handy.*

3) For a little more variety, make “requirement” cards beforehand labeled with parts of speech, number of words, vocabulary, silly requirements, whatever you want to focus on. Each player draws a card before his/her turn and must include whatever is on the card in their sentence. For example, if I draw a card labeled “adjective”, I must include an adjective (or more) in my sentence: He was rich, but lonely. Or I draw a card labeled “avid/Beyonce” and write: “The ogre was an avid Beyonce fan.” Maybe you’re working on sentence variety. A card labeled “two-word sentence” might yield: “Oh, no.”

4) Or use more global parameters and make it a cooperative game. For example, the story must include a setting, a protagonist, a problem, and a solution; all characters and places must have names (Frank the ogre lives in Tinkerbell Castle); the story must include a ninja, a hurricane, and a broken refrigerator; and it must be only twenty sentences long. That’s a little advanced. Maybe just start with one or two parameters. If your story fulfills all the requirements, you both win.

5) Make it rhyme. Or in rhymed couplets. Or do it in iambic pentameter. The possibilities are endless.

Note:

Sometimes even taking turns is difficult. I've found that dipping into my store of photos and paintings helps supply subject matter. We tell the story of someone or something in the picture.

*Conjunctions were tricky. Tai had a hard time ending sentences with conjunctions--we had to start off orally--just telling the story. He would say a sentence, and then pick a conjunction from the list. Then he'd say the sentence again with the conjunction at the end:

Tai: Once upon a time, there was an ogre who lived in a castle...(picks unless from the list, starts over:) Once upon a time, there was an ogre who lived in a castle, unless

Me: it was a Tuesday, when he went to stay at his mother's house in the city. On Tuesdays, he travelled 100 miles(pick a conjunction: if)

On Tuesdays, he walked 100 miles to the city if...

Tai: ...he was feeling good. 

Journal Prompt: Alphabet Stories

Background

I got this idea over a decade ago from a Japanese friend of mine. I'm sure it's been done before in the U.S., but I haven't seen it in my (admittedly limited) personal library of books about writing with kids.

My friend told me about a story she'd written when she was a little girl, and it went through the alphabet, starting with a king (Aiue-Oosama, or King Aiue. The first five letters of the Japanese alphabet are A, I, U, E, and O). It was very clever, and I've always wanted to try something like it.

The prompt

This is probably better for upper elementary kids and older. It can be a quick writing prompt or it could become a more finished piece, like a book:

Write a story or a paragraph about anything, in which every sentence starts with a letter of the alphabet, starting with A and working your way through to Z.

I gave Tai the prompt and said I'd do it too. Tai sat and happily wrote twenty-six sentences—more than he's ever done in one sitting in his life. I could hardly believe it. It might be the longest thing he's ever written.

Why it works

I think this worked because it helped him to focus on just one sentence at a time (bird by bird, as it were), instead of a whole idea. The letter challenge gave him an excuse to be less than perfect, and move on. That is, he didn't get bogged down trying to convey his very abstract thinking or create a complex narrative; all he had to do to meet the challenge was think of a sentence that started with the appropriate letter and that sort of worked with his theme.

Another possible reason: Of course, he wanted to see what I wrote right away, and compare. My own sentences weren't great, and they were silly. I'm sure he thought, “I can do better than that,” which always motivates him.

Variations

• Take turns. One person writes a sentence for one letter, the next person writes a sentence for the next letter, etc.
• Drop the idea of a narrative frame or a paragraph; just make a list of sentences.
• Or keep the frame and simply require one word somewhere in the sentence to start with the alphabet letter.
• Just make a list of words. Or if you're working with grammar, a list of verbs. Or adjectives. Or proper nouns. I did it with adjectives once, because Tai could not remember what they were and how they worked. Thinking of twenty-six helped him.  
• Revising and adding illustrations could make this into a fun book.
• I think there must be lots of other ways to play with this idea—elaborate or simplify as you please.

An Observation and Description Exercise

A Little Background

I've done this exercise with Tai a couple of times as a meditiation exercise (also see the end of this post) and as a thinking exercise (about which more in a later post), both orally, and a couple of times as a journal entry. The journal exercise went like this: Write down every thing you see. Note colors, numbers, etc. With some noodging, the results look like this:

I see a computer in front of me.

I see a brown table.

I see a crimson chair.

I see a bumpy red wall.

I see a white window sill.

I see a red plum tree.

I see a green tree with long leaves.

I see a chair to the left of me.

I see a 4 by 4 carpet.

I see a leather chair with cat scratch marks.

I see a placemat with the alphabet on it.

I see a door. A white door.

I see 4 tomato plants.

(9/6/2012)

What I Did

Today I tried again, this time calling it unimaginitively “description practice”. I was going to find a photograph for him to describe, but we've been doing so much with the photos. I wanted something “in real life,” as Kenzo likes to say. So I picked this vase of roses:

If at First You Don't Succeed, or Before Writing

Let's just practice, I said. We'll talk about it first. Tell me what you see—every detail. He was not happy about this, and heaving a grumpy sigh, he said, “They're white.”

“White? Just white?”

“Yes, of course. Duh.”

Not a good start.

He could not or would not do better than “white.” I bit my tongue and didn't push it (slowly getting better at this). “Okay. What else?”

On Teaching Grammar; Basic Sentence Structure and Specificity, To Be Specifc. And working on observation.

Early last month, even at age 10, Tai was still unclear about what constituted a grammatical sentence. Mostly he writes in complete sentences anyway, but he could not tell the difference between sentence and a not-sentence—in fact, when asked specifically to write a sentence, sometimes he would write things that weren't sentences: “The ball bouncing.” or “Running down the road.”

Unschooling advocates would say, well, he speaks in sentences, doesn't he? He writes intelligible sentences, doesn't he? As long as he has an intuitive grasp of the deep structure, he's fine. Don't mess him up with technicalities unless he asks for them.

And I get that. But he was (and still is) writing longer and longer sentences and not putting commas anywhere which made them difficult to follow even though the word order and everything made sense and apart from the lack of commas they were grammatically correct. And, when I asked him to put commas where the breaks were he didn't always find the right places because, sometimes, when you talk you do pause after the conjunction, and not between clauses.

He reads a lot; the books he reads are punctuated correctly. So maybe with enough reading, he will be able to figure it out for himself. But I have a feeling that it doesn't work this way for everyone. My husband reads a lot. A lot. And he still uses comma splices, he just can't help it. It drives me crazy. Clearly it hasn't held him back in his career, but I just feel like you get more respect, rightly or wrongly, if you can write good sentences. And for a verbal kid like Tai, I see a future that will rely heavily on using language. Maybe I'm wrong. But it can't hurt to see that he understands the basics of sentence structure. I decided to start with the very basic elements of a sentence: subject and verb (predicate for you grammar sticklers).

So without further ado:

Finding and Making Skeleton Sentences

This is based on a grammar workshop I attended many years ago at a CATE conference. I wish I could remember who taught it so I could give her credit here.

1. I prepared some cool photos with clear subjects—more than one subject worked best. National Geographic magazine is a great source for photos that inspire. (Remember cutting them out of old ones donated to the school for projects and stuff when you were in grade school? I do.) I actually cut them out and glued them to construction paper, just like in real school. I don't know why—it just seemed less...arbitrary.

2. Together, we identified the subject(s) of the photos. No wrong answer here—any noun that appeared in the photo was okay, really. We wrote the word(s) on pieces of paper, including any articles (the, an, a). We talked about how the subject of a photo is what the photo is “about”—just like the subject of a sentence is what the sentence is about.

Seven Minute Journaling

All good writer say--and I also believe--that the only way to get better at writing is to write. There are lots of games you can play together to help a writer emerge, and to make writing a playful rather than painful process—but ultimately, fluency comes from practice. Lots of it. Putting words on the paper or screen on demand gets easier only if you do it often. And sometimes that's hard and painful. But there are ways to make it easier. And it's good practice.

The idea is to write without stopping, without correcting, without really even thinking twice about what gets put on the paper for seven minutes. It's important for this to be a regular practice—three or four times per week, no matter what. Because otherwise it's not a practice, amirite?

This is great practice for perfectionists like mine, who cannot get started for fear of making a mistake, or because they hate to see the purity of their vision ruined by their clumsy attempt to express it. (More on that another time.) It is also good practice for kids whose brains take a while to warm up. Heck, it's great practice for anyone. Which is not to say it's easy, because it's not. It's hard. And sometimes painful. So with that in mind:

Ways to Make it Easier so that you won't have a full-scale mutiny on your hands:

• Seven minutes can seem like an eternity if you're doing something you don't like or feel like you can't do, so for Tai, I started lower. Five minutes. (Two or three could even work, I guess) Then after a while, we made it a goal to write for six, and worked our way up. (What a great way to model goal setting!)
• But they have to try to write pretty constantly—it doesn't count if they sit and stare at the screen/paper for two minutes and then write a few words in the last 30 seconds. 
• Quite frankly, 

• Another way that sometimes makes things a little easier for Tai is to first draw something that represents what I've asked them to write--or choose something to draw and write about it. This will gave him something to write from. It's like brainstorming ideas. Tai used to like to draw spaceships and then write about each special feature. He created pages that looked sort of like those DK Encyclopedias. It wasn't paragraphs, or even full sentences sometimes, but it was writing. And great practice for writing informational text, actually.

• Sometimes I have Tai make lists: top ten movies; dream jobs; foods he loves; foods he wishes were as healthy as vegetables; things that are orange; words that start with the letter "L"; things that smell better than they taste; everything they can see/hear/smell/taste from their chair; tv shows, movies, or games that he wishes he could inhabit...
• Some lists have more potential than others: Tai's list of movies was three items long.
• More fluent writers can add details, or reasons for each item on their list.
• The great things about lists is that you can use them later for longer pieces—they can incorporate a list of details into a descriptive piece; they can choose one or two items from a list to serve as jumping-off points for a story or an opinion piece; they can just practice adding details to each list item.

• Sometimes Tai needs a sentence or two to get started. Provide your writer with one: “This morning I woke up in a strange bed. It was egg-shaped, with covers like cotton. I looked out the window and the sky was green.” 

• Sometimes the wording of the prompt makes a difference. “Tell about an exciting day you had this week” is so vague. “Make a list of everything you wish you could eat for each meal today”  is much easier to manage.
• Speaking of prompts, there are a lot of websites out there with long lists of prompts which, quite frankly, I think are not very effective. So another post later with effective prompts, and good resources for prompts.

• Try to have prompts prepared ahead of time. That way you're more likely to have an effective one. Don't be afraid to re-use a good one, and don't be offended if your writer doesn't like the one you've created/chosen. Maybe have a couple ready just in case.

Did I mention that this is good practice? And that it might be hard? Your writer may balk and whine and protest. Mine did. Let them (gently and kindly). Tell them (gently and kindly) to write their protests on the page. They will most likely not want to. But they might present you with a paragraph detailing just how miserable they are, and how monstrous you are. If they say that they cannot write a single thing, then let them write “I don't know what to write” or “blahblahblah” or “I hate this” over and over. It could be torture for you--I still end up resorting to naggery when I see that that resentful/catatonic stare, or a list of "blah" on the page--but maybe you can turn it into an experiment: how days will this happen before your writer can think of something to say?

I can hear people thinking, “But making a kid write will just make her hate writing even more.” Which, to be honest, I sometimes think myself. But I've been finding that it has not made my writer hate writing. In fact, it has been getting easier and easier over the months that we've done this. Tai isn't writing more, or better necessarily. (Whatever "better" means) But he is writing more fluently.