El planteamiento ateo en la antiguedad y en la época medieval

Even if you do not want to do a full plan of the piece you are going to write – be it a story, drama or whatever – it is always useful if you can jot down a few initial ideas. As a result, you will have something to refer back to when you have begun writing. You can often have many ideas in your head at one time, so putting ideas down on to paper will prevent you from forgetting them. It is always a good idea to do some planning before you write a story, even if you don’t stick to your plan. These two authors very much encourage pre-planning:

ALAN DURANT: I advise children to do some preparation. I do think this is useful – just spending a few minutes to think about where your story is going to go. So many children start and they’ll be writing away and then get stuck. I don’t encourage anything as formal as a detailed plan, but I’ll get them to think how the story will start, roughly what will happen and how it will end. Endings are often where children get stuck. Too often you get, ‘I woke up and it was a dream’, because there hasn’t been enough planning beforehand. I don’t tell them to stick rigidly to their initial ideas – all I’ll say is that they should know roughly where they’re going with the story. You can know what the ending is going to be, but it can be left open as to how you will get there and how it will be presented.

MALORIE BLACKMAN: If it’s a novel, I plan a chapter breakdown so that I know what will happen at each stage of the book. This gives me a framework for my story, therefore when I start a novel I know where it’s going! That’s not to say that I always stick to the chapter breakdowns. Sometimes, midway through the book, the characters may take me in another direction, but by then I trust them to know where they’re going.

Morris Gleitzman will not begin writing a novel until his plan is ready:

MORRIS GLEITZMAN: I plan my books out on the computer and I write notes about each chapter of the novel. I do many drafts of that chapter plan. When I start writing the book, I’ll have what might be draft six, seven or eight next to me printed out, but then as I’m working on the text I’ll add to that plan as I go along.

Philip Pullman believes in not doing too much preparation:

PHILIP PULLMAN: I find that when I do plan a story it goes dead on me, so I have to keep some of it unknown. Otherwise I lose the curiosity that pulls me through.

David Almond’s method of brainstorming ideas takes the form of story mapping (see p. 74):

DAVID ALMOND: If I’m working on a new book or a new story I’ll do some story mapping. When I do a story map I might have just one idea to start off with. That idea might be that there is someone on a train going over a bridge. So I might write down ‘train’. Then I’ll give him a name. Frank. And I’ll write ‘Frank’ down. And I’ll ask myself questions about him, such as ‘What’s he wearing?’ A t-shirt. A Nike t-shirt. I’ll write that down. And Frank has got a bike with him. What kind of bike is it? A Raleigh. Where’s he going? He’s going to see his aunty – his Aunty Doreen. Where does she live? 17, Clacton Gardens. What’s he got in his pocket? A letter.

Stories come from details like these. I find it very hard to look for plotlines. I explore these different details and these will give me my plot. You have to look hard and question everything you put down in your story map. And the more you look, the more you find. Every detail you find allows your story to grow in richness. So the story takes on a body organically. And rather than seek out a plot with a beginning, middle and end – you have a scenario from which you can work. You will eventually have a linear plot, but you achieve it in a very different way.

The ‘Brainstorming’ worksheet will help you to give shape and structure to your ideas. There is no reason why this sheet cannot be modified for non-fiction and poetry too. You could even change or adapt it to suit your own way of working. The ‘Story mapping’ worksheet on p. 74 adopts David Almond’s story mapping idea and can be used for finding an outline for a story.

When doing story mapping of your own, consider the questions: Who? How? Where? Why? What? When? See if a story or scenario emerges. You might also want to write out aspects of your story in boxes, like a flow chart. Alternatively, you could try Philip Pullman’s method, which is to write out various scenes for a story on to small yellow Post-it notes and to move them around on a big sheet of paper to find the best sequence for those scenes. But what is important is that you discover a system that works best for you.

Brainstorming

It is always a good idea to do some planning before you start writing a story, even if it is only a rough outline – for example, the characters’ names and how the story will start. This sheet will give you a chance to plan more fully if you choose to do so.

73 Creating Writers, Routledge © James Carter 2009

Brainstorming

Write down your first ideas around this spider diagram:

Now develop your ideas further:

• Character(s): Name, age, likes, dislikes, personality traits and background.

______________________________________________________________________ ______________________________________________________________________ ______________________________________________________________________ ______________________________________________________________________ ______________________________________________________________________

• Setting(s): Where will the story take place?

______________________________________________________________________ ______________________________________________________________________ ______________________________________________________________________ ______________________________________________________________________ ______________________________________________________________________ • Now try to write out a structure for your story. You don’t have to keep to

your plan as you write.

– Beginning: _______________________________________________________ __________________________________________________________________ – Middle: __________________________________________________________ __________________________________________________________________ – End: _____________________________________________________________ __________________________________________________________________