The popularity of fantasy adventure novels hasn’t dwindled since Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. Teachers capitalizing on this popularity can inspire student writing, without marking more pages than Lord of the Rings. Today, I’m going to talk about shared-world ‘novel’ writing. This is something I did with a class of gifted grade four students, but the format easily adapts to older students, all the way up to high school.
Design the architecture of the story a bit like a video game or a treasure hunt. The protagonists are searching for a special item, or group of special items that are keys to solve a puzzle, or which give magical powers to defeat an opponent. Each chapter depicts the protagonists’ search through a different world.
In the case of our student novel, World Pool, it began when a magic rock and a runaway science experiment tumbled our heroes into a series of water portals. The protagonists, a boy and a girl invented by the class in a chalkboard brainstorming session, moved from world to world having adventures. Don’t ask me how it worked scientifically. It was magic, and as long as the rules of magic are consistent in the story, your students can do just about anything.
Our intrepid heroes visited the soccer world, the stone age, the bronze age, the land of hockey, Formula 1 racing world, the magical jungle, a planet with heart-shaped people, and finished off by visiting the Wonderful Lizard of Paws…
When the chapters were edited, we collated them, photocopied, added a student-designed cover, and bound and distributed the finished product. If I were to do it again today, I would produce an ebook on Smashwords, and give the families a coupon code for unlimited free copies. That way there could be a colour cover, and the young authors’ families and friends could access their book worldwide, at no cost to the school.
If this idea inspires you, try holding a few shared-writing brainstorm sessions with your students. This is a fruitful process but it can’t be rushed. Every student needs to feel implicated in the planning, writing, and peer-editing. The process is as important as the final product, and helps create team spirit.
Suggested procedure:
- Set aside a daily time for work on this intense project
- Set behaviour guidelines which allow only constructive criticism, and limit brainstorming to positive comments
- Discuss the format, story genre, and types of characters students want for their story
- Collaborate on a story architecture that will allow each chapter to be written by a pair of writers, inspired by a topic of personal interest to them
- Dividing into pairs also keeps the number of chapters down to 15 or so
- set chapter length limits (word count or page limits)
- The class will need to collectively map out the book's outline, including how it ends before writing begins (I like to use chart paper to keep and display our decisions)
- One pair will write the first chapter, in which the protagonists are drawn into the first portal
- One pair will write the final chapter where the protagonists return, victorious!
- Make it fun! Creativity can 'turn turtle' under pressure
- You may want to discuss writing characters of the opposite sex in a realistic way, and use mixed writing pairs, to avoid sexist clichés
- Have groups 'sign up' for topics to avoid repeats (ex. there shouldn't be two candy world or vampire world chapters in the same book)
- Pairs should be given plenty of class time to write, peer-edit, and revise their chapters before the teacher edits them
- Good copies need to be typed by each pair and submitted to the teacher as a digital file (for printing or ebook conversion)