"straight" narration vs. expanded retelling

[Donna Freidenfeld]

Thanks, Lene, for answering my earlier question about what to do in the "off" weeks. Now one more, then maybe I'll be ready to dive in! I was just really noticing the phrase on the website "They will learn to retell...and to amplify it by adding dialog and descriptive details". Is the student, then, encouraged to add their own creative elements to their retelling, rather than just giving back a simple narration of the model? Either could be fine, but I'm curious because I'm also looking at Writing With Ease (the new writing program for grades 1-4 by the WTM people.) What has struck me about that program is that they emphasize the skill of telling a "concise" narration (even limiting the child to 3-4 sentences), as a way to help the child focus and narrow their thoughts to the main points (obviously a great skill to have in the future with other kinds of writing). My children tend to tell narrations that are not focused enough, in my opinion, so I feel that do need to work on that skill. I'm not sure what I think about encouraging them to add dialogue and descriptive details...would that confuse them by encouraging them to not distinguish between their own creative writing and summarizing the real story another author actually told? Sort of like telling them to retell the story, but then encouraging them to make up part of it? Can you tell me more about this aspect of the writing? Thank you so much! Donna

[Lene Mahler Jaqua]

A narration is essentially a paraphrase of the model story.

We teach three types of paraphrase

1. retell with new words about the same length as the original
2. retell and condense to the bare minimum (this includes both summary and then finally a precis)
3. retell and amplify by adding description and dialogue

Each type has its merits and we teach all of them. We also teach the occasion for which each may be used.

In the early Aesop weeks, the student retells short fables. We ask the student to write a short outline, sentence-by-sentence, to get an idea of the structure of the passage, and also to learn to choose two or three important words for each point in the outline, which represents a sentence in the passage.

Later we expand the outlining skill to include larger passages and the student will summarize each paragraph with one short sentence.

At the same time we do that, we also teach "addition" as a skill to add description, vivacity, and life to a passage, both Aesop's fables but also other narratives. The student may also write and embellish his own narrative, in which case gettting the skeleton structure of his story should be laid down before he gets caught up in descriptive details.

There are passages where one should 'add description' and passages where one should not. The line is a fine line, and only good judgment would decide where and how to do it.

For example, with a bare-bones tale like The Hare and the Tortoise, your student can 'dress it up' a little, which does NO harm to a story that is in the public domain, and may actually make it fun for a certain audience to read.

The way he may choose to dress it up could be

1. change the characters completely (search on these boards and I think you will find a tale by a student several years ago called "The Cheetah and the Slug") and write a new story, in a new setting with the same story structure as the original and the same moral, but everything else changed.

2. Go to your local library... search Hare and Tortoise or Three Little Pigs, or Little Red Hen... then go to the picture book section and note how many versions there are. Each author kept the story line and the characters, but each has his own illustrations, his own lines, his own sentence complexity and details for the story. This is perfectly acceptable. [Note, you cannot do this and sell it when you deal with works under copyright, like Laura Ingalls Wilder's books or Tolkien's works or characters, but folk tales and historical narratives have no such limits on them. Nor is it a problem for your student to write three extra chapters about Frodo the Hobbit in private and share it with his friends, but he cannot put it in the public domain, nor can he sell it.]

3. If I were to write the story of Napoleon conquering (or rather NOT conquering) Russia, like Tolstoy did in War and Peace, I would research the events on record carefully, and then add my details, and YES, Tolstoy must have invented some of them. For example, in one chapter Napoleon receives a gift, a large portrait, when he steps out of his tent while camped outside Moscow. He thinks to himself, "Now, how should an emperor look when he gets a gift? How elated should he be? How composed...?" ... etc. THIS I am sure no historian recorded, nor do I think it was in Napoleon's diary. It was a figment of Tolstoy's imagination coupled with the historicity of the person Napoleon and the sort of nature he was known to have. [Tolstoy could be wrong, could be right, and I don't know how much of it he made up, but with many of those famous characters in that novel, clearly he took license to invent, as do all writers of historical fiction. It is fine to invent minor details. What is not fine, in my opinion, is if Tolstoy had the French win the battle of Borodino, which in fact the Russians won, but I have seen historical ficiton that takes the liberty to do that too. I would only, personally name that historical fiction, which remains historical while adding details to bring the story to life for a reader who wants to read a semi-fictional and entertaining account. The world differs on this opinion, mine is of the more conservative stripe.]

4. Journalists take the same sort of liberties when they attend an event and describe how President Obama looked, how he must have felt, whether his smile was secure, hopeful, sorrowful, or troubled. It is at best a guess when we say that the reason Obama looked serious at his inauguration was that he wanted to project this or that image of himself to the American public. Guess work is what writers ultimately engage in when they interpret an event, even one so small as a public figure stumbling (was he tired, clumsy, sick, or was this on purpose to evoke sympathy??)

5. I have a deep respect for Scripture and particularly try to avoid 'adding to' Bible passages by telling why God did this, or how Samson or Abraham or St. Peter felt when such and such happened (which is why I am very critical of some Bible Story books because they pretend to know). Scripture, you may have noticed, rarely tell us how people feel. Its economy of words mostly record what happened and how it ties in with God and His plan for mankind. It is, as you say, dangerous to embellish that which establishes doctrine, dogma, or law. We hold it in high respect and try to simply understand what it says (including a paraphrase to assure ourselves that we understand it); adding to it is dubious.

6. But stories, from George Washington crossing the Delaware, to Arthur pulling the sword out of the stone, to Theseus slaying the Minotaur... those we can embellish, so long as we observe the following.

a. credit the source (ever see a movie that says "based on Novel X"?) so folks know where the original came from. (of course it doesn't matter for a private essay, but it matters at the point where we begin to put things out for public consumption, whether we get paid or not).

b. if it is a historical event or even a legend with a known chronology of events or outcome, be faithful to the 'facts' as human tradition knows them, or IF NOT, make it clear in a prologue or footnote where you choose to deviate from what is normally known as Odysseus on the Island of the Cyclops.

c. Indicate point of view... f.ex. I have seen at the library "The Three Little Pigs told from the Wolf's Perspective". It's hillarious... he has an excuse for everything. A creative kid can write a story from a different character's point of view and do it very well, humorous or not. I have one on these message boards where the Hare speaks of his defeat to the tortoise.

d. Some stories have more than one version. For example the traditional British version of Guy Fawkes shows him a traitor who conspired to blow up the British Parliament, but was stopped at the last minute. But... guess what, there is a Catholic/European Continental version. Guy Fawkes was framed in that version, and innocent. Ditto for the American Revolution. Have you ever read a British textbook on that topic? It's the same story, but the emphases are different, the interpretations of wins and losses differ, and the outcome is interpreted differently as far as its initial significance.

Any writer, and perhaps no more so than persons writing about history, choose which events to include, which to leave out, where to put the emphasis, and we're "victims" of that writer's selections and interpretation of what is important, UNLESS we have many accounts from many writers (and then we're 'victims' of perhaps a conglomeration of conflicting accounts). It is PARAMOUNT, especially today that kids learn that when something is in print and has been so for a while, its accuracy or balance or lack of bias are by no means guaranteed.

This is first accomplished by letting the kids work with texts, let them find the essence, let them select what they see as important sentences and events in a narrative, but ALSO by letting them embellish narratives so they know, next time they pick a picture book up from the library on a well known folk tale, that like as not, its author made choices and made interpretations to write this up.

That is true for historical fiction, for legendary accounts, and for out and out fiction.

My kids and I are currently reading Paradise Lost aloud. (Kids ages 15 and 14) and Milton took much liberty with some of his assertions as to who the angels were, where they came from, what they did. In fact, C. S. Lewis in his "The Discarded Image" laments that post-Milton literature had a different view of angels as they slowly devolved into those ephereal whispy effeminate characters we see in 19th century paintings and literature. YES, we have an impact when we embellish, and as you rightfully queston, what is the benefit. [Shakespeare likewise took liberties with his historical plays, MANY MANY liberties, and some of them highly unfair, but he was writing for and under Tudor Elizabeth.]

The benefit is that each era is shaped by its art and philosophy. We are contributors to that when we write, and as such, we need to be schooled in truth as well as goodness and beauty, the ability to see, really see, and judge wisely. Some of our students will be those writers, and perhaps one of them, a future Milton or Shakespeare, who knows? My job in writing curriculum is to train them to write well for each occasion, to help them be devoted to truth and goodness, so that when they do write, and when the occasion calls for vividness, embellishment, or decor, that they can consciously and with integrity stay within the realms of Truth with a captial "T".

Now, I know this was a long song and dance, and I apologize, but this is very important. If WE don't educate the next generation of historical fiction writers and fiction writers, someone else will, and perhaps then you're stuck with those terrible movies that Hollywood puts out, like Hercules, where so much falsehood is purported (just in terms of the legend itself) and such gross misunderstandings of the Greek Pantheon and ancient thought is perverted that those of us who know the story cringe and wish it had never been made. (And that's just one movie example.)

Lene