Is Planning the Best Plan?

I’m not saying I hate being a teacher, but there are some things I really, really hate teaching. And one of them is The Writing Lesson. Yes, that’s right: I’m a literary writer, and I dread teaching children to do writing.

When I’m teaching, I like to know I’m encouraging learners, not disheartening them. And the way we administer The Writing Task in key stage 2 (ages 7-12) in Scotland is, in my experience, disheartening to many of them.

We give children a “stimulus” to begin with—a question of personal significance, a fascinating object, an interesting scenario to get them interested. So far, so good. I’m all in favour of writing in response to a sensory or emotional experience. It’s great seeing children catching the inspiration, eager or at least willing to begin.
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Then we require that before they start the writing, they must produce a Story Plan. Using the template provided. Maybe it’s a series of six drawings or an Introduction/Development/Conclusion format. 

One way or another, children must hold in abeyance their impulse to begin, try to consciously outline what idea just began to awaken in their heads, predict where that idea will proceed and decide ahead of time how it will end. 

Then, having produced a skeleton representation of whatever they can remember of their idea, they must begin again at the beginning, following their plan step by step, fleshing it out with description, detail and maybe dialogue.

I’m sure this method works, for someone, somewhere. Probably the writers of school curricula; I don’t know. But I do know it wouldn’t work for me. I don’t outline. My plan for a story is a half-formed thought in my head. I won’t know where it wants to go until I start writing and the characters begin to decide. I can’t decide my “story arc” beforehand, nor predict where it will go when I do catch it. My plan for a poem or a piece of poetic prose is nearly always a single phrase that hangs in my head, catching a connection with something that will drive its own course. Of course I will draft and redraft, but if there’s a plan, it’s deep below my consciousness; and if I had to drag it out and sort it into boxes before I began writing my piece, I’d probably lose the mood and essence of whatever it was going to be. Even now, I have only the vaguest notion of where I’m going, except that I need to see where my argument takes me. I can’t diagram that argument ahead of time. It organises itself like crystals, not like something from Ikea.

When you ask a group of authors whether they consider themselves “plotters” or “pantsers”, a good proportion will admit that they write without a detailed plan. They trust their instincts to recognise the best flow of the narrative; they trust their second draft to provide opportunities for revision. 

Why do we expect so much more than this from children? For the majority of key stage 2 children, NOTHING KILLS A STORY SO DEAD as having to produce an Outline Page before you’re allowed to write it. Time after time, I’ve seen a child cheerfully chatting about what’s happening in their preliminary sequence of drawings… only to find they have nothing left to say when the “plan” is completed, and nothing to write. They can’t, or won’t, go back and produce the story again. The creative process is completed, and the story is over. I can try to push the point without invalidating this, but inwardly I’m not so sure it’s productive.

If and when I’m allowed the freedom to deliver a writing lesson my own way, I find it works best to look first at examples of good writing. Book review, poem, descriptive piece, personal story… I want to let children discuss which words/phrases/structures are pleasurable to read, and why. Appreciation comes before emulation.

Only after that will I introduce the jumping-off point for the specific task. I want to move from stimulus to execution without placing obstacles in between. A single drawing, not a full sequence. A scribbled idea or two, not a required Planning Grid. Children who have read/listened to enough stories will have some sense of narrative, some inner awareness of the organics of storytelling. As the first sentences begin to take shape, I move around, pick out and read aloud successful openings or nice turns of phrase, and this helps the slower starters to find their way into the task.

This will depend on the level of neediness among the class—how many individuals require 1:1 attention; how many interpersonal dramas I’m trying to de-escalate. But, ideally, I will do the writing task alongside the class, and share mine (maybe anonymously) along with others at the end of the session. I will invite, and validate, criticisms of my work. If the lesson proceeds smoothly, children will go away with some sense of what’s within their own reach next time they meet a similar task. 

For non-fiction writing, a book review for instance, I will make sure the class have seen examples before they are asked to write one. I don’t care how many compulsory Learning Intentions and Success Criteria I’ve listed on the board: If children can’t see success by example, they won’t achieve it. I once made a class of nine-year-olds sit and watch me writing three paragraphs on why I don’t enjoy Roald Dahl’s books. “It’s OK if you don’t praise the book,” I told them, “but you need to give your reasoning.” Of course, they all loved James and the Giant Peach, so nobody was going to copy my review. However, nobody was stuck on what to say in their own reviews.
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In a sense, I’m doing a sort of planning for everyone’s writing: giving them an example, providing questions to expand their work as they go. Individual planning templates, even on a non-fiction task, feel like a duplication of effort. Like it or not, by the time the average child has completed a compulsory planning page, their enthusiasm is long gone. They would have done better to start writing the piece before it became a chore. 

I promise I will never stop a child of any age from planning out a piece of writing if that is how they want to work. I will happily model any given planning process for children who are ready to experience different methods and to choose which one works for them. I agree that knowing how to outline a piece of writing before producing it may become a necessary skill in later life. If you’re going to take a PhD, for instance, of if you’re going to follow a career in writing school textbooks. But I think we are forcing it too young, demanding full-scale planning pages before children are ready. And we’re working against the grain, and sucking the joy out of writing.
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I’d like to see children given lots more experience in comparing and appreciating different written forms. I’d like to have a skills-related resource pack that contains not recommended planning formats but short, amusing writing samples. Formal letters, book reviews, sequences of instructions, character sketches, descriptive passages. Children are, nearly always, pantsers, not plotters. In all my years of teaching, I cannot remember a single child who would create a full-scale Writing Plan by preference. They need an end-product example, a what-does-success-look-like to focus on, not a painfully elongated construction process.