“Too many cooks spoil the broth”, “A bird in hand is worth two in the bushes”. To this day, I still have vivid memories of primary school English exams: Staying up till the wee morning hours of my English exam, trying to cram these idioms and metaphors in. Even in creative writing classes, I remember my teachers frequently handing out lists of such “useful” phrases to pepper our stories with.
Certainly, the use of figurative language can spice up essays by helping readers to picture a scene. Having these figurative language will give a composition a legs up, but these are perhaps mere icing on the cake.
In fact, there is much more to creative writing than just the use of figurative language. In this article, I am going to dissect the anatomy of a good story. First we will explore the macrostructure elements before we move on to the microstructure elements. A good story will need to have everything in place.
MACROSTRUCTURE
Macrostructure is the overall framework upon which a story is built. You can liken it to the blueprint of a house. For a house to be constructed, you first need to come up with a blueprint. How many rooms will there be? Where should each room be? You can vary the number of rooms, and play around with different layouts.
And if you think about it, isn’t this like writing too? Like an architect, a writer can also come up with different scenes (i.e. the rooms) and adjust where he would like each part of the story to be (i.e. the layout). So let’s dive into macrostructure and take a look at its three components: story idea, sequence, and story structure.
Story Idea
For creative snowflakes, coming up with a story idea is a walk in the park. For them (and most people for the part), story ideas come from the stories they have read or heard, the movies they have watched, and from their own personal experience.
If you think about it, you can change almost any story you know by simply substituting even one of its story grammar elements with something else. If you change out the names of the character, you have a different story. If you change the ending of a story, voila, another new story!
Yet on the other hand, the generation of story ideas appear to be a colossal task for some children. They have difficulty transforming these stories that they already know into a brand new story. As you can see, there is nothing to write if you do not have a story idea to begin with!
Sequence
Have you ever listened to a story and found yourself all confused about the order of events? Let’s take a look at an example.
“Mummy scolded me. We went to restaurant. Then ice cream drop.” In the example given above, it sounded like Mummy had scolded the child before they went to have ice cream. However, the actual story was that the child went to the restaurant, dropped the ice cream and had Mummy scolded her.
Stories without proper sequence sounds contradictory as the results are sometimes presented before the cause. Therefore, presenting the events in a logical manner is important so that your listener can understand what happened first, next and last.
Story Structure
“I went to the park”. If someone were to tell you this story, you might ask “With whom?”, “When did you go”, “What did you do there?” And even, “So what?” As you can see, an incomplete story presents too little information to the reader.
As research has shown, most stories follow a predictable pattern. The most basic stories would at least talk about the setting (time and place), character, problem, action to solve the problem and resolution of the problem (e.g. Yesterday I played at the play ground. I fell down. Mummy put plaster). Even though it is bare-bone, it would at least allow the listener to get a gist of what had happened. Missing any of these grammar elements makes the story boring and difficult to follow. According to research, children should be able to produce such simple stories by 4-5 years old.
As children get older, their stories increase in complexity. At higher level, characters’ motives and intentions take on a bigger role in the course of the story. This is in tandem with the child’s development of perspective-taking and theory of mind. They start to realise that a character’s thoughts can drive him to do something; and that different thoughts can drive different actions. The addition of these thoughts and motives make a story more complex and interesting as a result.
More advanced stories may even have the story structures intentionally jumbled up to create suspense; pretty much like how some Hollywood movies present their endings first. As you can see, story structure plays a big part in the quality of the story presented and is a fundamental skill in composition.
Read also: Steps to Teaching Narratives
MICROSTRUCTURE
If the macrostructure is the blueprint of the house, the microstructure is actual process of building a house. You are now really translating the idea that you have in your head into something tangible.
Just like how there are different rules for building a structurally-sound building, there are also rules to follow when putting your thoughts onto paper in creative writing. These rules are the grammar and syntax. It tells you how a sentence should be constructed without compromising your message. Sentence by sentence, your story is becoming a reality.
And finally! Once your house is built, you can start decorating it and making it beautiful. In creative writing, this last part will be the vocabulary and the use of figurative language. You can embellish your story with all these words and phrases that will truly make your story pop.
So now you have a bit more idea about the microstructure, let’s take a closer look at each of these components.
Grammar
Grammar has a purpose. They are little units of meaning that adds more information to what we say or write. Let’s take tenses for example. Why is it important to use the different tenses? Well, tenses let the reader know if an event is something that had happened, is happening or will happen in the future.
Let’s use an example to illustrate. “Jessie is at the park. She played on the swing. She had fun.” Reading this sentence, we might think the following: 1) Jessie is presently at the park; 2) She might be reminiscing on a previous visit where she played on the swing and had lots of fun. Yet, the real intention was to talk about what Jessie is doing on her current visit.
Therefore, a sentence filled with grammatical errors will at best annoy the readers (I am looking at you grammar Nazis) but at worse convey the wrong message. Tenses is but just one of the grammar that writers have to master. In order to become a good writer, one would need to be able to use different types of grammar with ease.
Sentence Structure
Try reading this story below.
“Max is muddy. He jumped in the mud. Naughty Max!”
Yes, it does get the message across, but the story sounds pretty boring to a reader (unless the reader is only 4 years old!)
Let’s look again at another one.
“Naughty Max is muddy because he jumped in the mud”. The meaning contained within one single sentence has been enhanced with the use of the connecting word “because” to form a compound sentence. As you can see, the word “because” helps to convey the causality between the first and second clauses.
Because there are other types of connecting words that helps to express other meanings like sequence, surprise, and contrast; a child would need to gain a mastery of connecting words in order to express his ideas more effectively.
In English, the action generally follows the “doer” of the action. However, there are also different types of sentence structures where the “doer” and the “person/object being acted upon” are reversed. We call these passive clauses. An example is “The dog bit the girl” vs “The girl is bitten by a dog”. As you can see, a child who has yet to master passive clauses may end up thinking that the girl bit the dog instead.
Of course, passive clauses, compound sentences are but some of the many different sentence structures out there. A child does not need to know everything, but having a good range of different sentence types in a child’s repertoire will definitely allow him to express his thoughts with laser-sharp focus and make his writing more interesting to read. As such, sentence structure is a critical skill in creative writing.
Vocabulary
“The girl went to the place with many books. She cannot find her books. She went to look for the lady. Then, she took some books home.” Does the story sound confusing and convoluted?
As you can see, unspecific words make the writing very hard to understand. We aren’t sure if the girl was at the library or a book shop. We have no idea if the lady was a passerby or the librarian. We don’t know if she stole the books or if she borrowed them.
Let’s compare it to: “The girl went to the library. She could not find her books. She went to ask the librarian. Then, she borrowed the books”.
In the second instance, the specific words of “library”, “librarian” and “borrowed” were used instead.
As you can see, using specific words in creative writing helps get the story across more effectively. Rather than having to go around in circles to explain oneself, a single word can convey the meaning of multiple words.
This, of course, is a very basic story and more advanced stories would require more than just nouns and actions. We can also boost our stories by using descriptive words, but these too would need to be in our vocabulary. Take for example, the word “annoyed” and “furious”. Both words connote anger, but the second one is able to convey a much stronger intensity. Thus, having a good range of vocabulary is essential to creative writing.
Figurative Language
Now we get to the final part: figurative language. The adage, “A great story shows, not tell” is a great way to sum it up. This means that a great writer helps create mental images in her readers’ head, not merely tell them what is happening.
This can be done through the use of word gradients, descriptives and metaphors. As explained in the example of “annoyed” and “furious”, words with similar meaning can vary in intensity. Selecting the correct word can thus help the reader to paint a more accurate picture of the scene.
In addition, the use of descriptive words in creative writing is important as well. For example, compare the sentences:
“The floor board creaked” ; and
”The creaky floorboard groaned under the weight of the rounded man, screaming out for release”.
The first sentence merely stated what happened. The second sentence on the other hand, is able to paint a more vivid scene through the use of personification, complete with sound effects of how heavy the man was.
Similarly, the use of similes can also make a story more interesting. “Her singing was like finger nails on a chalkboard”. Most people would know that running our finger nails across a chalk board produces a horrible high-pitch sound that is difficult to bear. This helps the reader to imagine how bad the singer’s voice must be.
As you can see, the use of figurative language can bring a good story up to another level.
Conclusion
To sum it up, there are many ingredients to a good story and a good writer needs to have all of them in place. Without the other key ingredients of sequence, story structure, vocabulary and syntax, there would be no pie for the cherries of figurative language to be added.
As you can see, understanding the key skills of creative writing is important because it allows us to provide targeted support for a child. Are there any areas which are difficult for you or your child? Share them below!
