In September, I went with friends to the Leiston Book Festival. It is just one day and beautifully conceived and organised with a procession of writers and their accompanying books. Each one lured us into the world that lies at the heart of their writing: landfill and gulls that inhabit it; the earth beneath our feet; pilgrimage; every kind of weather and the pleasures of walking beneath the full moon; walks through Suffolk, thinking of the many writers who have lived and walked here, and an introduction to Louis de Berniere’s memoir, Smelling of Rooks.
In the course of talking about his memoir, Louis de Bernieres spoke about the ways in which ideas and characters have come to him over the course of a writing career. He described how a character from Captain Corelli’s Mandolin took shape for him when he saw an ‘attractive waitress’ in a neighbouring café. He saw her at a distance, didn’t speak to her, probably didn’t hear her speak, but saw also that here was how he could imagine a character that was already taking shape.
In that case, the writing was already underway. The seed for his novel, Birds Without Wings, comes from a time when he was travelling in Anatolia. It was the custom in that part of the country to bury the dead and then after some time to dig up the bones, carefully clean them and place them in an ossuary. In one village he visited, the ossuaries were empty. When he asked how this came to be, he learned that the villagers had been forced to leave their homes at a time of war, and that they had taken the bones of their ancestors with them. The image of men and women, forced to flee and taking very little with them, carrying with them the bones of their family was something that stayed with him and was the impetus for the novel. Research followed and I don’t know how much time before the novel took shape. I am relying on memory, so I apologise if I have misrepresented what Louis de Bernieres said.
I am recounting it here because it made me think how planning for writing in the classroom, depends so much on what the writers there have experienced. We cannot know the breadth and depth of each writer’s experiences, and we should never make assumptions about them.
One thing we can do is provide the space and opportunity for young writers to draw on what they know, or are curious about, or have noticed. This does not mean a direct call to their experience, but it does mean that we demonstrate the value we place on what they have to say. It means not pinning them down so tightly that there is no room for what they know – and for letting it be known that following a different path is welcomed.
The other thing we can do, especially in primary schools, is to plan across the year for opportunities for children to have a whole range of experiences that do not have to be directly linked to writing (‘we’ve been to the zoo, now write about it’, can be a heart-sinking request and often yields an account of their lunch and the coach journey).
Almost any experience is grist to the writer’s mill.
Sometimes the experience will be explicitly linked to a writing task, but across the year, children may do all kinds of things that will fill their store of ideas and of their sense of the world. So think about the day of water sports, the visit to local shops or the trip to a supermarket, the visit from an artist and their own exhibition of drawings, going for a walk, even in familiar surroundings, taking the bus to the library, planting bulbs in autumn and seeing them flower in spring, building robots from scrap material, making pita bread and eating it. All these things can sow the seeds for something written or contribute a detail that makes the writing sing.
Come at it slant. The directly related writing task often seems like a chore. Many activities seem to have nothing to do with writing but they may become its raw material. One thing that does link experiences more securely to writing is the habit of noticing. We can encourage young writers to look, and look again, to find ways of describing what they are seeing, to point out to others the details they have noticed. We can encourage young writers to value their own experience.