The Scarlet Girl

If you and I were to read a description of a setting or a character in a book then we would both come up with a different image in our heads.  If I asked you to write a description then it would be that image in your head which you then transfer to the page.  As adults, with a wide ranging life experience, it is relatively easy to form an image in our heads.  This image may be based on real life experiences or virtual experiences from film or other images we have seen.

I wrote a description based on a scene from a film, it won’t take long for many people to recognise the scene:

“A tiny girl wanders through a crowd of dishevelled people all dressed in drab grey, a factory owner and his lover watch the girl dart between a group of adults to a soundtrack of gunshots, shouting and the howling of attack dogs.  The girl is wearing a red coat, the only speck of colour in a sea of grey.”

This scene is one of the most powerful pieces of cinematography ever, if you are still unsure, it is a scene from ‘Schindler’s List.’ Oskar Schindler is watching the liquidation of the ghettoes and he sees a small Jewish girl amidst the carnage.  Without watching the film I would find it very difficult to write this scene as it is completely outside of my own life experience, real and virtual.

I have read the novel ‘Schindler’s Ark,’ this scene is included, the author talks about a ‘scarlet girl.’ However, in my opinion, this girl is lost in a riot of destruction and while the extract is brutal it seems to lack something that the immersive film experience brings.

This is quite an extreme example in order to find something that was outside of my own life experience, however with children we do not need to go to the same extremes.  There are many times we ask children to form a picture in their head, often this picture can be outside of their own life experiences.  It can be as simple as asking a child to write about the beach, it may surprise you how many of the children haven’t set foot on sand! The answer to this is providing the children with an image that they can store in their mind and then transfer to paper.

However in my description I also describe the sounds.  I could imagine some of them from the images, I would have probably described the gun shots and the screaming but without watching the film I wouldn’t have thought to add the sounds of the dogs barking.

We need to feed our children on rich texts, but sometimes we need to supplement these texts with images or film especially if we want some quality writing from it.

Better still start with an image or film, which can give children the experiences they need in order to create their own images when reading.