When you ask a student to retell a story, it's doable because they've been hearing the structures and words they need over and over again as you asked and circled your way through the story. Retelling is production or output, but you only do it after tons of input. Writing works the same way. They can produce good, coherent writing using correct structures only after they've been reading and done tons of reading. So I probably wouldn't ask beginners to do much writing at all. Perhaps simply ask them to write down the story after several have been able to retell it.
When you do ask them to write, have them do it in class and only for a maximum of ten minutes. There are TPRS people who say five, but it takes my French students five minutes to get their pens out, so I went for ten. At the end of ten minutes I told them to draw a line and count their words. I didn't get hysterical if someone finished a sentence. Their grade was based on the number of words. My own system, to be adapted, was to do three "fluency writings" in a trimester. I graded them by giving one point if they wrote something, two points if they wrote more than 50 words and three points if they wrote more than a hundred. So they could get 9 out of 10 with three grades and most students managed to get 6. (Students with less than 5 could try to do another one at home.) I would read through their texts, but I DID NOT correct or underline mistakes. ( By the way, underlining things in red is a big mistake, because invariably they remember what was underlined and repeat the same mistake over and over again.) I would draw smile faces next to something I liked or found funny or interesting. That means, I read for content, to learn more about my students and not to give them a grade. Occasionally, if I found something that was really excellent in content and with very few grammar mistakes, I gave an extra bonus point, so it was possible for a student to have 10/10.
As students become more autonomous and get into writing in English, you can assign it as homework. I liked to do it over a two week holiday. I would ask them to write 10 minutes a day for 10 days. Then I would collect and grade them over ten. They could write about anything they wanted. Retell stories, invent stories, nightmares, etc., but a lot ended up making a kind of journal out of it, and I found those the most interesting because I learned so much about my students through their journals. But it was always their choice and I told them that the things they wrote didn't have to be true.
Since I taught in lycée, my students had to learn to write long essays to prepare for the bac. Again, I worked on quantity. If students get to the point that they can produce a fair amount of text, you will find that the quality rather miraculously follows. I'm rather proud of the fact that my colleagues recognized that my students wrote well. I would give my students a typical "bac" subject and the minimum number of required words. They would have one hour to do it in class, with dictionaries and me going around answering questions. This was their first draft and I made it clear that if they wrote the required number of words they would have 10/10. Most, but not all, lycée students can do this. I collected the papers and underlined IN GREEN everything that was correct. I made no annotations or suggestions. I then returned the papers and they had one week to rewrite it and recopy it. Sometimes I let them do this in class because there's a lot of learning going on when a students asks "Why isn't this right?" When I collected the papers again, I asked for the original as well as the final draft. It was interesting to compare and see what they had done to improve their texts. And sometimes I could see that the final version had a mistake that I had overlooked the first time through, so I didn't penalize it.
This is a double correction, which my colleagues always insisted was too much work, but it was effective and I had far fewer mistakes to correct in the final draft. I found it doable. I gave the final draft a grade over 20 for "quality". By weeding out the careless mistakes that they found easy to correct with the first draft, I was able to see which structures were still giving them problems and needed more work in class. Most students were able to get a passing grade, especially with the "quantity" grade over ten to boost them, so they felt successful and less intimidated at the idea of writing in English.
If you have to have a manual, I suggest that you take a text from your manual which is towards the end of the year, something that appears quite difficult, and over a trimester you work on the structures and vocabulary, incorporated into several TPRS stories, without ever assigning the actual text. Then, when you think they are ready, have them read the text in class and answer questions about it as a test. I would expect them to do well on it and that should convince them that your method is effective. You can also use the results of your test to show your non-TPRS colleagues that your students are learning and are up to standard.
Good luck. And enjoy. I'm still teaching, but this year most of my students are adults and I find I really miss my classes. Believe it or not, I miss the troublemakers most of all, because they're the ones who give you the most satisfaction when you actually get through to them.
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