Writing Together 2003/4

A Whole Day Writing

Writer: Mandy Coe
School: Walkden High School,
Co-ordinating teacher: Rob Chisnell

This residency enabled a writer to work for a whole day with each of three small groups of Year 8 students from a single school. It aimed for a simple structure that would be very easy for other schools to adopt. The focus was to be on narrative.

There was one deliberate ‘complication’. The total release from the day’s usual curriculum suggested the idea of working in a venue outside the school and the writer, Mandy Coe, chose to work in Manchester City Art Gallery.

The whole thrust of the residency was to encourage students to develop their writing beyond the stage at which they might ordinarily be satisfied. Mandy had used visual art as a stimulus for writing many times before, but not from this Gallery. She enjoyed the opportunity to spend her own planning time perusing the various collections on display and devising new writing workshops based on what she found.

Rob Chisnell was the teacher responsible for the project within the school. His clear enthusiasm and commitment to the project was evident from the start. The brief allowed him and Mandy to meet and plan everything in detail, after which Rob had a good idea of the writer he would be working with and how to introduce the students to what they would be doing. The students were chosen from the Gifted and Talented cohort. They were told they had been ‘picked’ and had an evident pride in this alone. There were 12 in each group.

Mandy found it particularly helpful that contact with Rob was so easy: text messages to his mobile phone were invariably answered straight away. There was little scope for anything going unattended or building up as a potential problem.

To start with, the students were encouraged to write in whatever form they liked, so there were narrative poems produced as well as prose fiction. The emphasis was on the imagination, followed by an attention to editing the work.

“I’m keen for the students to experience the disciplines of editing or re-drafting as something other than red-pen slog,” says Mandy Coe. “It’s the manipulation of the core material of your craft, peeling away excess to reveal the shape of what’s there.”

In one session, she asked the students to look at the paintings as if they were videos on ‘pause’. Their job was then to press ‘play’, thereby imagining the further life in the pictures beyond the details apparent in the one available frozen frame. This worked a treat in enabling the students both to look closely at the detail in front of them and to see and think beyond what they saw. This extended to all the senses. The students’ notes were full of sense impressions gleaned from their adventurous exploration of the worlds glimpsed through the pictures’ single shots.

The sound removers came in the night in a long tall removal van. They got out, slammed the doors, rattled up the sliding shutter. They begin to load up – and catch the roaring of the sea in the tyrannical storm, the crying of seagulls as the dawn approaches, the rushing of waves...

– Jordan Mathias and Michael Walne

The students did their initial editing in groups, which proved very successful. They were clearly used to the business of peer editing and readily took to the further demands which Mandy was making, the new perspective on the purpose and potential of re-drafting which a professional writer can explain with such eloquence.

Reading the students’ own comments, one of the main worries they had about the day was perhaps derived from the title. They were literally worried about having to write all day. The focus on compressing their writing, getting rid of unnecessary bulk and concentrating instead on matters of perspective and detail, came as a welcome surprise. What they found themselves doing for the whole day was thinking in a sustained and highly productive way.

In contrast to the morning workshop, the afternoon session took place in studio rooms with tables and chairs. The visual stimuli were now present only in the students’ heads. The students were really thoughtful about the set of questions which Mandy posed. It was an excellent list and well presented, sufficient for the students to build a three-dimensional narrative in a remarkably short space of time, with no-one seeming to be short of ideas or direction in dealing with their chosen material. The work produced within this afternoon session was of remarkable quality, with characters particularly well voiced.

Every day she would go to the same spot and watch. She would watch people with their friends or family, having fun with their children, old couples sitting together eating chocolates. She wished she could do all those things but she couldn’t.

– Vanessa Peterson

He dies. Murderer. That’s my story. That’s what I did when I was nine. But it wasn’t all my fault. This is what happened...

– Michael Walne

This piece shows the attention to narrative perspective that Mandy so successfully encouraged, together with an economical approach and the ability to capture character through prose style itself.

In her own evaluation, Mandy says: “Three days with young people in a public place with no students (or adults) lost, cross, sad or told off! The children seemed to feel safe and motivated. They also felt brave enough to read out their work. Lots of laughs, lots of work and many new techniques tackled.”

The choice of location and stimulus was clearly effective. Beyond its practical merits, it also provided what Mandy calls “a reinforcement that culture is not simply to be consumed; it is to be created and responded to. The students also took on board that writing is prompted by everything around us; its process does not always start or finish with the page.”

After the residency, Mandy wrote to the Headteacher congratulating the school on its success. Detail such as this is invaluable in ensuring that those with senior decision-making roles are fully informed about the benefits that a visiting writer has brought to their school. The letter was shown to the students too and clearly reinforced their own sense of achievement. It’s a solid basis on which Rob is even now planning to set up a regular creative writing group within the school.