I was asked to comment on a 'teacher model' for writing in a primary school. I did.

 

This is a tweet I received.

I replied like this:

1. It's a nonsense. It's no help for children to write interesting stories or non-fiction. It is overly, misleadingly and mistakenly focussed on sentences and not on themes, or characters' dilemmas/motives. And fails to talk of 'story' grammar eg reveal-conceal, story arcs, obstacles.

2. If you want to help children improve their stories, you have to deal with motive, which then leads to how do we know motives, often through flashback and 'interiority'. Again: nothing here on narration. Ominiscient or first person? Omniscient with p.o.v. of one character or more?

3.Another point: most modern fiction is about enabling the reader or taking the reader 'there', to the mindset or place or time of the story. How do you do that? Through the eyes of the protagonist or through narration or both? Help children to do that!

4.In sum, the advice coming from government about story, is ignorant and irrelevant. That's because they won't (and never do) talk to writers about writing. It's absurd.

5. When it comes to sentences, the advice we got in the 1950s is more helpful. Sentences are made up of phrases (groups of words with no verbs) and clauses (groups of words with verbs). That simple advice, helps you construct sentences.

6. As for 'fronted adverbials' and 'expanded noun phrases',. they are neither good or bad. They can be either. Telling children they are good is a nonsense. What matters is choosing when to use them and not use them. Same with similes (which are nothing to do with grammar).

7. I'm glad there's advice about the senses but this misses out other motors for writing: namely memory, imagination and knowledge of images, scenes and motifs from other 'texts' (stories, songs, films etc) that you can adopt, adapt and recycle in your 'text'.

How and why the Primary English 'Writing' curriculum has got it wrong

1/ Because the Primary English curriculum for writing has got distorted to focus on 'grammar', we overlook that writing can be developed by looking at 'ingredients': who narrates? can we deepen characters with flashbacks? can we create expectation/tension with 'reveal-conceal'? 

2/What is a 'story arc' of a character through a story? How do we create motive, develop motive, satisfy or 'punish' motive by the end of the story? Do all the 'cogs' of the story engage throughout? Who helps, who hinders the protagonist(s)?
3/ Are we clear at the beginning what is the 'problem'? Is it a dilemma? A lack of something? A yearning for something? How will the character(s) achieve or attain the objective? Will they do it through their own actions? How do they engage with others?
4/ Are you in the story? ie how can you use your own experience? How can you adapt it, twist it, play with it, in order to provide detail, motive, imagery, feeling? How do you bring a reader nearer to 'a moment' in a story? (ie using sensory detail - using any of the 5 senses)
5/ How do you create 'interiority' ie people's thoughts and feelings? Do you do it with 'direct tags' eg 'she thought...' indirect, 'she thought that...' or 'free indirect' ie no tag and eg 'what should I do next?' or even 'what should she do next?' as if in my mind of 'she'.
6/ The present curriculum has pulled writing away from these fundamentals and focussed on the sentence, and bogus ideas of how sentences are constructed ie 'grammar' of words, and very little (or misleading stuff) on phrases and clauses.
7/ I suspect that the reason why nearly all of the previous are overlooked or passed over briefly is because the people in charge of primary Writing, have never read or understood anything about 'narratology' or practical writing guides for eg film students etc.
8/ The whole primary English curriculum is dominated by a 1920s view of language, uninformed by descriptive linguistics, stylistics, narratology and intertextuality. It's as if Physics ignored Atomic Physics. How do they get away with this mix of ignorance and prescriptiveness?
9/ The authorities rely on the fact that primary teacher training doesn't expose teachers to modern linguistics/stylistics/narratology while they (the authorities) are wedded to atomised, prescriptive, measurable units in relation to story and narrative.
10/ Further, the authorities can rely on the ignorance of MPs and ministers, who will themselves rely on people speaking with seeming authority about 'writing standards' by which they mean the measurable atomised parts of writing at the sentence level.

Bear Hunt and how it became a legal matter

I posted a blog here and linked to it on X (formerly Twitter), the blog 'The True Story of the making of the book of 'We're Going on a Bear Hunt' ('Bear Hunt')'.

Since then, people have raised questions about me being sued for libel in relation to Bear Hunt. Some people have claimed that: 

a) I didn't write Bear Hunt and therefore 

b) I had no right to complain that it had something superimposed on it in a tweet in May 2021, and that, 

c) I had no right to complain that the words in the tweet were anything to do with me.

What follows is what the people (the 'Claimant' and the 'Claimant's solicitor') who sued me for libel wrote about this. You'll see that it's precisely the opposite of these points (a), b) and c) above when they sued me. As follows: 

(I'm the 'Defendant'.) 

1.

"The words Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion were superimposed on the book being held by Mr Corbyn. The book is a children’s book written by the Defendant, We’re Going on a Bear Hunt.'

2.

"The caption in the Claimant’s Tweet is a corruption of words taken from We’re going on a bear hunt."

(These two points are taken from the Particulars of Claim - ie the document sent to a Defendant (in this case me) if you're suing someone for libel.)

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If there's any doubt about what this means, then something similar was written by the Claimant when writing to his university: 

1.

"The words accompanying the image were a pastiche and parody of Michael Rosen’s book “We’re Going on a Bearhunt”."

2.

"In so doing, I echoed the use Mr Rosen has himself made of those words for political purposes."

(These two come from a Subject Access Request.) 

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To draw this together, I'll make the point that as the Claimant accepted that the words in 'We're Going on a Bear Hunt' are by me, and that the words on the tweet were a 'corruption' a 'parody' and a 'pastiche' of Bear Hunt and that these words 'echoed' what I had done with the words from Bear Hunt, there really is no point in people writing statements on 'X' or anywhere else to the effect that I didn't write Bear Hunt, or that the words in the tweet were nothing to do with me. In effect, it's not me contradicting such statements, it's the statements from the Claimant that I've quoted above that contradict such statements.  

Writing workshop - the 'how' of writing

Yesterday, I met up with several hundred teachers in Colchester to talk about writing.

I talked about how I had turned an episode from real life into a story for my book 'Barking for Bagels'. This meant thinking about 'who tells the story?' (ie who 'narrates'? Omniscient narrator? First person? Child? Or the dog?!

Then thinking of story as beginning with problem/dilemma/lack of something, and how to resolve it through 'helpers' and facing challenges/obstacles;

thinking of characters' motives and their 'story arcs' through a story.

If you want to give a character depth then you have the power of the flashback or 'back story'.

I talked of 'reveal-conceal' as the motor for making you want to know what comes next. (We experimented with different images or motifs for how to generate 'reveal-conceal' - one teacher came up with receiving a parcel with the right address but the wrong name on the address...)

Then I talked of prequels, sequels and spin-offs (eg movie of 'Where the Wild Things Are' which justifies or reveals why Max is angry, and last page of 'Bear Hunt' where children 'fill in' what the bear is thinking.)

How you can play with characters, settings and time-frames to alter stories that already exist. I talked of my book 'Macbeth United' which is an update of 'Macbeth' transposed into a children's football team!

And there was time to talk about the easiest way to start poems is to read a poem and say to oneself, 'I could write a poem like that' as triggered by the poem's shape, rhythm, rhyme scheme, an image or images, feelings, or indeed anything that comes to mind.