• Story planning styles

    I became an author in a haphazard way. I was an illustrator first, but was encouraged to write by my editors. It was a hit or miss process. I never wanted to question it incase I broke whatever it was that I’d got working.

    Then came the National Literacy Strategy and people started to ask me awkward questions. “What does your story plan look like?” was the hardest one. I asked other authors what theirs looked like. They smiled and stared back at me with blank expressions. None of us knew what a story plan was or what it was supposed to look like!

    Of course we all planned in our own ways. I don’t suppose any of us had been given formal story planning training, so we had developed our own systems. Mine was to keep writing and rewriting until the finished thing looked a bit like my original idea. Initially I poo-poohed the whole idea of planning, but as time went on, I discovered I was being asked to address myself to the issue, particularly for dyslexics and boys who were struggling with their writing.

    It began to dawn on me that this group might be like me, more visually-minded, more right-brained. I started to looked into it a bit deeper. It was Anne Marley, the wonderful Head of Hampshire’s Children’s, Youth and Schools Library Service, who put me onto a book about mind-mapping by Tony Buzan. It quite blew me away. I realised I’d been doing something similar anyway, so I adapted Tony Buzans’ ideas for my needs. Then I became a bit right-brainist for a while!

    Then, with more reading about discoveries in neuroscience, I realised the secret is to use both sides of the brain. The right is great for seeking patterns and creating plots. The left is best at sequencing the plots and turning it into language.

    My story plans now come in two distinct phases, right-brain, radial thinking plans and left-brain, sequenced, linear plans with a beginning, middle and end. My sketchbooks are full of these plans.

    Last week I was showing all my plans and plots and character sketches to the year five children at Whitchurch School. I’m currently working on a project with them.

    Afterwards, Mrs Stevens, their teacher, said to me, “We do plans, and do you know what we do with them when they are finished?” I waited for the answer. “We put them in the bin!” Loud intake of breath from me! What does this say? It says that plans and plots are rubbish – so why bother in the first place.

    This was a real eye-opening moment for both of us. We’ve got some lovely sketchbooks for the children to do their projects in now. I’ll be getting them started tomorrow. It will be fascinating to see how we get on now that all their planning, research and early drafts will all be in one book, a handy reference for the finished pieces of work we will be aiming towards. Oh yes? Did I mention, I’m not expecting them to write masterpieces in forty five minutes?

  • Ross TomlinsonMy Godson, Ross Tomlinson, has just been on the telly. I spotted him in a trailer and watched Doctors on BBC1 to make sure it was really him. The photo is from his website and shows Ross as I remember him last, a dear, sweet boy.

    But now I think about it, when I saw him last he had just acquired a passion for Stephen King novels. And he has grown quite a bit too. Maybe time for a new photo? I just looked through my photos, but he was way auditioning when I last took photos of the family.

    All that horror has paid off as he was playing against type in Doctors today, as the school bully, and pretty nasty he got. The nice Doctor made his character see sense and he and the target, a weedy violinist, became friends. But you could see it in Ross’s eyes, he didn’t believe in the wimpy plot – Ross is ready for far more sinister roles.

    Oh where is that sweet, young boy I remember?

  • We didn’t have photocopies to colour-in when I was a lad. The teacher would draw diagrams on the blackboard and we would copy them or we would trace maps from books and draw them in or exercise books. Some smart kids had plastic templates in the shape of Great Britain and several other useful countries. I remember drawing around them when they lent them to me and I remember tracing the shape of the UK on hard toilet paper and rubbing it down onto the alternate blank pages of my geography exercise book – alternate lined and blank, that is.

    Miss Sherbourne used to make amazing multicolour chalk drawings on the blackboard that we would copy. We would try and keep the drawing un-erased for as long as possible – maths lessons would be written around the drawings of red squirrels.

    The act of drawing the outline so many times has built neural pathways in my brain such that I can do a pretty good map from memory, freehand. If you have only ever coloured-in worksheets and have never drawn the map from scratch, you will never be able to do this.

    The act of drawing creates neural pathways along which extra data about the subject is scattered, so, as you draw the map, you recall where the towns are and the names of the rivers. The act of drawing reinforces the lesson learned and helps to recall the information later. Remember – a picture tells a thousand words. Then why do we not teach drawing and include it as a major part of literacy? Why spend so much time analysing a piece of text that can be explained in a simple drawing? Why, when literacy has been top of the list of education, has the major language of literacy, i.e. drawing, been downgraded or even abandoned?

    Photocopiers and worksheets are at the root of the problem. If you don’t like drawing or, have been told you are rubbish at drawing at Education College, it is so much easier to find a worksheet, photocopy it out and get the kids to colour it in. Colouring in makes it pretty. It does not create neural pathways.

    Now the blackboard has gone – replaced with the smart board. The board may be smart, but is is smart to use it? There should still be a white or blackboard alongside – as large and as prominent.

    Colouring-in is a past time. If you want to learn – don’t color-in anything you have not drawn yourself.