Beginning, Middle and End

I didn't want to explicitly guide the construction of their stories. But I did anyway.

How could I not? With an eye toward research and the “others” who might evaluate what I was doing (these others included funders of my projects), I wanted to be able to say things about the emergence of written, narrative expression and its connection to identity. I took a minimalist approach:

Tonya (pseudonym): I want to write a story about my friend, India.
Me: Mkay…what do you want to say?
Tonya: Well, we’ve been friends for a year an’ sometimes she gets on my nerves but she’s good at keeping secrets.
Me: Okay…well…usually stories have a beginning, a middle, and an end. And in the middle, there’s something that happens that’s important and at the end you say something about why that was important, or weird, or funny, or something.

Stories have a beginning, a middle and an end. In terms of a small amount of explicit guidance, that seemed safe enough, right? But there’s always that twinge, that tiny bit of discomfort (it usually happened somewhere between the “okay…” and the “well…” as represented above). Anyway.

I’ve been reading Mishler’s (2006) chapter (Narrative and Identity: The Double Arrow of Time, in Discourse and Identity). He argues that “As Kermode and Doctorow point out, we must know how a “story” ends before we can understand how earlier events in the sequence function as beginnings and middles.” Later, in the same page, he writes “The ‘uncriticized temporal framework’ where time is represented as a ‘linear succession of instants’ is omnipresent, usually as a tacit assumption, in psychology and the other human sciences where CHANGE or DEVELOPMENT (my emphases) are primary topics for theory and research. “

…Hello. Now, the question is, if I/we took Ricoeur seriously, how might that shape how narratives (in digital storytelling with kids or otherwise)…develop? How might that shape how we help kids to tell their stories?

I’m probably just puzzling over things that have been hashed and rehashed in creative writing MFA programs. One more reason to bite the bullet and buy another book (when all else fails…), perhaps one like: The Magic Pencil: Teaching Children Creative Writing.