Narrative
Narrative Writing Unit
As students begin the school year, we will embark together on a narrative writing unit. This is the first unit of the Lucy Calkins Writer's Workshop program that students will participate in during their fourth grade year.
What is Narrative Writing?
Narrative writing is another way of saying "fictional writing," as narrative means "story." The goal is for students to learn to draw inspiration (through brainstorming) from their lives to create realistic fiction stories about a character that they have created. The character may resemble someone from their real lives, a character from a book... even themselves!
Part 1:
Getting to Know Your Characters
&
Understanding How Your Characters Will React in Scenes
Developing Characters
Students will take their ideas about real life to create realistic characters to put into a realistic fiction story. Students are taught that authors and fiction writers must "live with" our characters before we begin to write about them. This makes our stories more realistic, as the characters will more likely behave in a way that is true to themselves. First, students create a list of external and internal features, making sure that the features all act cohesively to form a character who could believably contain all of those characteristics. Then, students begin to delve a little deeper into their character by determining what their character struggles with, yearns for (or wants), and what gets in the character's way of achieving what they want. Only when we know our character so well, that we "know how much change is in their pocket (or purse)," can we take the steps toward creating a plot.
Small Moments
Just as we used small moments to brainstorm, students should be making effort to create stories that encapsulate small moments in time. It is difficult and time consuming to write well about everything that happened on our family vacation. I may write a summary that includes all that we did, but a summary is not a story! We want our drafts to read like realistic fiction stories, something we might pluck off the shelf at the library or bookstore in the fiction section.
In order to do this, students must break their events down into bit-by-bit segments and let the reader see the story, like a movie in their head. How do authors do this? Why they create a movie in their heads, and then paint that movie onto the page... with words!
Let me show you an example: I could write,
Hope wrote a note to her teacher.
This is a summary. There is nothing wrong with a summary, but chances are, you weren't jumping at the opportunity to read more, right? If I instead wrote,
Hope curled up on her bed, snuggling into the covers. "Why can't I just think of what to ask Mrs. Banhoff in class?" she asked herself, puffing out a pent-up breath. "Why can't I just talk to her like everyone else?"
Hope thought for a moment. "I know!" she exclaimed, reaching for the sticky notes in a neat pile atop her desk. "I can write her a note instead!"
Chances are this portion was more interesting to read. It painted a picture of our character, showing us her thoughts, feelings, and actions that contribute to her traits - without telling what those traits were!
The purpose of writing small moments, then, is to get students to develop characters through their thoughts, actions, emotions, reactions, and the ways in which other characters react to them. When we understand characters, we can place them in situations and understand how they would react to them.
Then we can take this information and create a basis for a story that also follows in line with a small moment, as students often want to write about their whole vacation, not just the time Uncle Bill chased Pat into the lake. I think that most would agree, we'd rather hear what Pat did to provoke Uncle Bill than the entire vacation in summary form.
Developing Characters & Story Arc:
Teacher & Class Examples
Plotting with a Story Arc
Over the years, I have heard the same item referred to as so very many things. In the Lucy Calkins' Writer's Workshop program, it is referred to as a "story arc," but I traditionally knew of it as a "plot diagram;" more recently, though, I've heard it called a "story mountain" or "story coaster."
The name doesn't matter as much as the purpose. For the purpose of 4th grade students, a story arc must: 1) help remind students that the character's problem must get worse and worse, and 2) serve as a means to plan a story. Why? Well, 1) students tend to write in a linear, sequential fashion, but one where no drama or problem builds; it tends to be a this, then-that, after-that type of story if students are not instructed to create a problem that builds. Stories must have a problem. 2) Students get so excited about the stories they've been mulling over in their heads that they often forget to plan out what their characters will do, forgetting to plan ahead to make things worse and worse for their character; sometimes this leads to story arcs where their characters end up in wild, unrealistic situations. Additionally, it is much more difficult to plan and write simultaneously, making the already difficult task of composing a story seem daunting, or formidable, to some students. Planning helps them focus on just the part they wish to write in the moment, making it somewhat easier.
The following document explains a bit about developing characters and story arcs as the students would have had to in class. The following examples were used in class discussions, in which the four cores participated in helping me create character traits and the story arcs.
DevelopingCharactersAndStoryArc.pdfPart 2:
Drafting -
Stretching Scenes from Summaries
Drafting & Revising
After students have completed all of the above tasks, they are all set to begin the drafting and revising phase of their stories! One way that fiction writers can approach drafting is to take each event from the plot diagram and put that event on a separate piece of paper. This serves as a summary of the scene students should be writing.
After students write their summaries, each on a blank sheet of paper, they then need to use that summary, to stretch the information out bit by bit to create a scene with dialogue, action, and details like they would see in a movie or on television.
Students will be using these scenes to create their final drafts.
The below document shows the beginning of this process, with an example I created from our class character, Hope. It starts out with the part of the process where we left off, creating story arcs (or story mountains), and shows how students were to copy each individual event (a summary) from their story mountain onto a separate sheet of paper. Students will then take this summary (the event from their plot diagram) and change it so that it is a scene (like a movie in their head with characters talking, thinking, acting, and reacting). The example below only shows two of the events from our Hope story written out, but each scene, although it started with a brief, almost uninteresting summary, has lots of drama and action, problems, and reaction. We want our characters to come to life as we write them!
So what's the difference between a summary and a scene? Well, summaries don't give much detail. We can't clearly picture the entire part of the story. If we watched a movie, we'd see and experience a lot more than what we can read in a summary. Scenes are written like stories instead of summaries. We can hear the characters (maybe even give them their own voice), and we might even feel as though we're standing next to them! In fact, if we get so lost in our writing that we feel as though we're walking in our character's shoes - like we do when we read novels - then we're doing great! Look at the summaries (at the tops of the pages) and the scenes that I wrote to go with them in the document below for examples.
StoryArcToSummariesPerPage.pdfSummariesStretchedIntoScenes.pdf