The best writing occurs when it is based on personal experiences. Children have a wealth of experiences from their own lives to write about - it's just a matter of tapping into these ideas and developing them. That's the hard part!

Patricia Grace talks about using her own experiences as motivation for stories - they are ideas that set the theme and plot, but they are not used autobiographically. From the personal writing of their own experiences, students can develop and craft wonderful narrative writing.

This activity focuses on getting started and will suggest ways of helping students to use their personal experiences. As teachers, you will have a good understanding of the writing process and, in your own class, will naturally implement this in the way that suits you and your pupils best.

Setting Up
Explain to your class that, over the next few weeks, each person is going to create their own storybook for other children to read. This will involve all aspects of the writing process, from brainstorming to publishing. Writers generally have a purpose or an audience in mind when they begin writing. To develop the notion that they are writers with valuable things to write about, your students need a purpose. Before you begin, determine this purpose with them. Their book may be for the school library or local library, for another class, or even for another school.
Patricia Grace says:

Feedback is a really good way to develop your writing skills. Showing your work to a teacher, friend, or family member and finding out if they like it and understand it will help you to learn what "works" for you.

Set up publishing companies in your classroom. Each company could have its own name, and everyone within it will have a role. At various points throughout the process of writing, publishing meetings will be held, where students meet in groups of four or five and share their writing, ask questions of each other, and generally help each other to clarify, extend, and develop their ideas. These skills will need to be taught and modelled.

The role of the publishing companies will be to ensure that the books are the very best they can produce. They will need to make decisions about improving quality and content, about conventions of print, about editing, and about illustrating and marketing the books. Be careful that these companies do not get competitive but see their functions as being co-operative; they all have the same purpose.

Motivation

I think every experience is valid, whether it's good or bad. Everything that surrounds you and all the ordinary things - they're the material to base writing on.
Patricia Grace

The next step is to get students writing. Teacher modelling is a vital part of the learning process for young writers. To free up your students' ideas and for them to value their own experiences as being worthwhile foundations for writing, you need to demonstrate that you also have valuable experiences to write about. Talk about and describe an incident that stands out in your memory - take a "snapshot" of that event or situation. Describe the scene, your feelings, the people involved, and what happened. Discuss how you could use this experience as inspiration for a story. For example:

As a young child, I had an uncle who visited New Zealand regularly from England on the ocean liner the Domain Monarch. He was a violinist in the ship's orchestra (in the days before rock bands!) It was a warm blustery summer's evening in Wellington, and I was with my family on the wharf seeing my uncle off back to the other side of the world. The decks of the ship were crowded with people, and there was shouting and singing from the throng of people on the wharf. Being small, I had to push my way forward to see what was going on. The ship was huge and towered over the wharf, and it seemed as if thousands of toilet rolls and streamers were linking the decks of the ship with the crowd on the wharf. Suddenly, there was a large hooting as the ship sounded its foghorn, and slowly the ship started to pull away. Then, to my horror, as the gap between ship and wharf grew bigger, a man frantically burst his way through the crowds with a suitcase in each hand, and ran up and down the wharf as though he expected the ship to stop and pick him up. The expression on his face was one of absolute panic and desperation.

This snapshot in time could be used as the stimulus for an exciting story. Further analysis could clarify ideas and could help develop the plot. This incident may be the beginning, the middle, or even the end of a story. Why was the man late? Where was he going? Why was it so important? Who was he meeting at the other end of his journey, and why?

Encourage your students to focus on incidents in their lives, no matter how small, that stand out in their memories. They could look through old photo albums and find pictures of themselves or members of their families in particular situations or on different occasions. Ask them to choose one photo that is special to them. Tell them they are going to put that occasion or incident under the microscope; they are going to focus in on a narrow band of time but expand on and describe in detail the sights, sounds, feelings, and senses associated with that frozen period of time. Brainstorming can be done in pairs, groups, or a whole-class situation. If students do not have photos, they may prefer to develop timelines, including any memorable events in their lives. As with the snapshots, get the students to focus in detail, and to put under the microscope particular events or occasions that stand out for them.

Oral language underpins written language although the two forms are very different. Getting the students to talk about their experiences and responding by sharing back orally are fundamental to clarifying and developing their ideas for writing. Be patient and allow time for this important process. Again, model this yourself, encouraging questions and discussion. Allow the students to talk about experiences similar to yours that have been brought to mind. By hearing other people's experiences, students can be reminded of memorable situations in their own lives.

Beginning with a character could be another entry point for students to their writing. Students could make a semantic web or mind map of different characters in their lives - important family members, friends, teachers, people they meet on a daily or weekly basis, or maybe people they only ever met or saw once but who had a powerful effect on them for one reason or another. Choose one of these people and then develop his or her personality, appearance, characteristics, and so on. Maybe they could be made larger than life. Taking these characters one step further and putting them into a particular setting or within a particular theme could be enough for the student to get started.

About characters, Patricia Grace says:

You get involved with the characters - it's like knowing a real person. I know that I'm making them up, and I'm trying to make them as real as possible and keep true to who they are.

On the CD-ROM, we are told that: "Patricia's stories come from the characters. A story happens because of a character developing around that person. It is their story. She looks at each character and thinks about what would happen to that person and how they would behave, and the story unfolds from there."

When the students have ideas to begin their writing, you can, through close reading, writing, and modelling, focus on the features of narrative texts - setting, plot, theme, and characters. Of course, how much of this material to include will depend on the needs, skills, and understandings of the students. For some it may be reinforcement, whereas for others it will be new.

Some questions that may help in the development of their writing are:

• Who will this story be about?
• What will they do?
• Why will they do the things they do?
• What will happen to them?
• What will they be like and look like?
• How would they react in different situations?
• What things would be important to them?
• What is the theme of this story?
• Where and when is this story set?
• What will the problem or conflict be?
• How will it be resolved?

Finally, within the process and guidelines, it's important that the students are still able to write freely. Aim to create a balance between structure and creativity. Be sure that students do not lose sight of the importance of going with the flow of writing, clearly expressed by Patricia when she says, "I just let one idea develop after another."

Curriculum Links
Creative Explorer offers teachers the opportunity to meet many of the achievement objectives at levels three and four in English in the New Zealand Curriculum (Learning Media, Wellington, 1994) particularly those in the Written Language and Visual Language strands. For example, at level four of poetic writing in the Written Language strand, English in the New Zealand Curriculum states that students should:

• write on a variety of topics, shaping, editing, and reworking texts in a range of genres, expressing ideas and experiences imaginatively and using appropriate vocabulary and conventions, such as spelling and sentence structure.

And at level four of expressive writing, students should:

• write regularly and with ease to express personal responses to a range of experiences and texts, explore ideas, and record observations.