A Simple Game to Teach Effective Storytelling

Story is woven into the very fabric of human communication, and our students will spend the rest of their lives telling stories: In job interviews they will tell the stories of their professional lives, in their close relationships they will tell the stories of their character and values, and so on.

But because we all have an intuitive understanding of story by the time we reach high school, it can be hard to truly teach students about which kinds of stories will both grab someone’s attention with their structure and hold that attention long term with their relatable, human-centered themes of our universal struggle to grow, change, and adapt to the world around us.

While mentor texts are a powerful tool for teaching students about story, many students still come away from reading a great novel or short story believing that the text is magical in some way, that it is somehow vastly greater than the sum of its parts.

So in my high school English classroom, I’ve begun to help my students understand story more deeply by augmenting their study of mentor texts with a game that, by design, produces wonky, strange, and often hilarious stories so that students can practice the structure of story while also seeing how character serves as the foundation for a well-structured, truly memorable story.

THE EXQUISITE CORPSE GAME

The inspiration for my wonky story game is a game made famous by French surrealist painters in the 1920s: the Exquisite Corpse game. Trying to break themselves out of naturalist representation, the painters would take turns each painting or drawing one third of a picture of a human: One artist would imagine the head, another the torso, and yet another the legs. One artist would work, and then fold the paper so that most of their work was obscured, and then the subsequent artist would begin their task.

The results are often wildly imaginative: One iconic example from the 1920s features a figure whose head is an umbrella, torso is a storage chest, and legs are those of a 18th-century French nobleman.

CREATING A STORY IN PIECES

My Exquisite Corpse writing lessons begin like many story lessons, with an emphasis on the commonly accepted aspects of a story epitomized by Freytag’s pyramid. Once my students have internalized the elements of story—expositon, an inciting incident, rising tension, climax, the unwinding of the story’s tension, and finally, the resolution—I have them construct collaborative short stories.

In groups of three, just like in the original Exquisite Corpse game, students construct a story piecemeal. The first student writes two sentences: the exposition for the story and the inciting incident that gets the plot going. That first student writer then folds the paper so that only the inciting incident is visible and hands the paper off to the next student in the group.

When the first round of the game is done and each story has a beginning, middle, and end, we share the results with the class. The typical Exquisite Corpse stories are bizarre. They feel like complete stories, since they have all the structural elements, yet they also seem arbitrary and sometimes nonsensical. For instance, here’s an example that begins with the setup for the the film Barbie (2023) but slowly morphs into Cast Away, with Tom Hanks:

[Exposition] Barbie lives in Barbieland, where every day there is a dance party and the rivers flow with bubblegum.

[Inciting incident] Barbie starts having troubling thoughts in Barbieland and learns it may be because the person in the Real World who is playing with her is having troubling thoughts too.

[Rising action] Barbie journeys to the Real World to find the person playing with her, but that person is shipwrecked on a desert island.

[Climax] Barbie decides to steal a boat and brave a terrible storm to rescue the person playing with her.

[Falling action] Barbie finds the island using nautical skills she learned from her friend Sea Captain Barbie and rescues Chuck, the gaunt and bearded shipwreck survivor stranded on a desert island with only a Barbie doll to share his thoughts, including his fear for his own life.

[Resolution] Barbie reunites Chuck with his family. Chuck is happy again, so Barbie no longer has troubling thoughts. Barbie returns to Barbieland.

Once we’re finished laughing at the strange twists and turns of the Exquisite Corpse stories, we begin round two of the game, where we talk about how character makes a story relatable. Here we can distinguish between external conflicts in a story and internal conflicts within a protagonist.

UNDERSTANDING THE IMPORTANCE OF CHARACTER

Before we begin to rework our stories, we take time to look at a few common touchstone stories and see how some of the most beloved stories of our time combine external and internal conflicts. While the Harry Potter series is defined by Harry’s external conflict against Voldemort, his character is defined by his longing to have a real family and his anger that his parents were taken from him by Voldemort.

As a class, we might examine how Harry’s great achievement is not merely defeating Voldemort but building a new family for himself based on love and respect instead of doing what Voldemort does and building a following based on dominance and fear.

Next we go back to the exposition of these Exquisite Corpse stories to see if the inciting incident of the plot challenges the protagonist’s needs or wants. What, for instance, does Barbie need at the start of our example story? As much as she loves nightly dance parties, is she longing for something deeper? If she is longing for a life that is both fun and emotionally rich, how can we make sure the plot challenges her needs?

To challenge students even more, can we construct a plot that makes our protagonist choose between what they think they want and what we can see they really need?

After these discussions, the student groups revise their initial stories to focus on the growth of the main character. The products are often far less scattershot and whimsical than the first-round versions, but they are also far more relatable and unified, leaving students with an understanding of how plot and character intertwine to make a meaningful story.