On Cub Scout Writing

My calling for the last six months has been to work with the Bear Cub Scouts in our ward (9-year-old boys). Yesterday I was in a bit of a panic because I realized I didn't have anything really planned for our 5:00 den meeting (I still feel like I'm learning how to do this). I flipped through the book and saw that one of their achievements was about writing, with one of the specific requirements being to write a story. Perfect. I just had to take pencils and paper and my years of teaching and editing savvy. All set.

Four out of the five boys in the group showed up, and we gathered around a table. We started out talking about writing in general, and I asked them what kind of writing they did. Their response was "answers for history," "just for math" (?) and "cursive." I told them we were going to write stories. A couple looked pretty dubious, while one piped up, "Oh, I already know what I'm going to write about." I assured the more hesitant scouts that I would help them and that first we would just talk about how to write a story to get them warmed up. To my surprise, each of the four took notes on our conversation--without me telling them to, which beats a lot of my college students. They really got into it. My first (and really only) question was, "What makes a good story?" I expected a list of answers to include anything from superheroes to huge explosions. Instead, here is a bit of our conversation:

Scout1: Time and place! Uh . . . setting!

Me: (a bit surprised) That's right. You need to decide where you want your story to happen and when, like in the future or maybe a hundred years ago.

Scout 2: Well, mine's just going to be about aliens, where this guy has to fight them and stuff, but some of them end up being good, but on level three he gets turned into a zombie . . . [apparently his story is based on a video game he and scout 1 play a lot], so I don't think mine really has a setting.

Me: Okay, I think it does--even if it's not on our planet, but we can talk more about it when you start your story if you get stuck. What else does a story need?

Scout 3: Like a problem?

Scout 1: Yeah! Action!!

Me: Yes. You mean plot.

Scout 4: (disappointed) Ohhh . . . I'm not going to do plot in my story.

Me: Well, the plot is what happens in your story. Is something going to happen?

Scout 4: Oh, I guess. Yeah, I'll do plot.

Me: So if something is going to happen in our stories, who will it happen to?

Scout 3: Characters.

Me: That's right. You will have characters, or the people in your story.

Scout 4: (worried) But what if our story doesn't have any characters?

Me: Sorry. They don't have to be people. They could be animals too. Maybe animals who talk.

Scout 4 looks relieved, Scout 2 is getting ready to protest.

Me: They can be aliens too.

Everyone is satisfied.

Scout 1: And you have to have first person and third person.

Me: (again, surprised by the literary vocabulary of the group) You mean a narrator.

Scout 4: Ughh.

Scout 3: I don't think my story will really have one of those.

Scout 2: Yeah, do we have to have a narrator? I hate narrators.

Me: (a bit stymied, trying to think under what circumstances and what literary theory that might just work) Yes, you do. I mean, someone is going to tell the story, whether it's one of the characters saying, "I did this" or someone outside the story saying, "He did this." Just decide which way you want to tell the story and you will have a narrator. . . . What else? What if your characters talk to each other? What's that?

Blank stares.

Scout 2: Do they have to talk to each other?

Me: Well, no. But sometimes dialogue can make a story more interesting. Instead of just saying characters got into an argument or told a bunch of funny jokes, you could actually write out what they said.

I then show them how to make quotation marks around words and sentences in case they wanted to use any dialogue.

Me: Is there anything else you can think of that we might want for a good story?

Scout 1: . . . nouns . . . ?

Me: Those are pretty important too. I was thinking about details. If you just said, "Christopher Columbus got in a boat and crossed the ocean," that's not a very interesting story. What makes it interesting is the details.

Scout 4: Yeah. You have to say, "He got in a big, big boat and crossed the Pacific Ocean," and stuff like that.

Me: Yeah . . . that helps. [mental note: plan an activity involving geography or at least the distinction between Atlantic and Pacific Oceans . . .] What if you want to describe something as cold? You could just say, "it was cold outside," but that could mean anything from kind of chilly to 40 degrees below zero. What if you said, "It was so cold his spit froze before it hit the ground"?

They all laughed, and then started a new conversation about whether or not such an act were really feasible. Which brings me to my last, but probably most important element of story-writing that we never got around to discussing: know your audience. At any rate, I think I am starting to learn their language.

In the end, the first two scouts wrote stories about their video game, with themselves as protagonists. Scout 4 wrote a story about a misunderstood dragon who was nice but everyone was afraid of him because he was so big and breathed fire. Scout 3 was a bit miffed that the paper I brought wasn't lined, so spent some of the time making lines on his paper, and then the rest writing a story really about himself and his brother, thinly veiled as a story about two guinea pigs with the same names. Most of my editorial function was serving as human dictionary and spell checker when asked, and video game consultant (they explained the whole thing to me in great detail so I could help them decide which ship one of them should be flying to start his story). At one point, though, Scout 1 did ask if it would be better to just say "they got on the ship," or if he should have one of the characters say, "let's go get on the ship." Clearly, my professorial days are not behind me.