Is it structure or the selection of knowledge that makes writing historical narrative so difficult? Where does a conceptual focus on change, or causation, come in? James Ellis set out to explore the challenges his Year 9 pupils faced in writing historical narratives about change. Inspired by the work of Orlando Figes, he put together a scheme of work interweaving a macro-narrative with micro-narratives of individuals in Stalin’s Russia, and using Figes’s own text as a model of narrative writing. Ellis unpicks here the outcomes his pupils produced, and what their responses reveal about the challenges of structure, selection and argument inherent in constructing a coherent historical narrative.