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Inventing Characters Read! Journal Word Notebook

Choosing Titles The Fab Four Golden Rules Generating Ideas Stealing Ideas From an Idea to a Plan Planning from a Picture Stories Based on a Passage Stories Based on a Sentence An Example of Good Planning

Describing a Location Longer descriptions Describing a character's appearance Dialogue Distinctive Voices Show, Don't Tell Characterisation: Shown Feelings More Characterisation Techniques Playing with Sentences Playscripts Action Suspense

What is story structure? 1 Exciting opening line 2 Set the scene 3 Talking and describing character 4 Characterisation 5 Suspense 6 Action 7 Cliffhanger Standing Out: How can you stand out from the crowd? Clever Clogs: Non-Linear Clever-clogs: Two perspectives Clever-clogs: Narrative voice Practice 11+ exam titles

Checking your story in an exam Redrafting = improving your story What if I run out of time in an exam? The Grumpy Examiner's Pet Hates

Year 2 into 3 Lemony Snicket After Harry Potter Must-Read Authors Spy Novels Horror Stories Classics Animal Stories Adventure Historical Fiction Myths & Legends Fantasy Family Stories & Comedies

Writing an extremely short story in just half-an-hour is tough. There are so many things you want to include, but such little time to do it.

The hardest part is indubitably the planning stage. You are shown a title, for example, ‘Write a story beginning with the words: ‘I should have listened to my Mother’’, and you’ve got five minutes to come up with a plot, characters and a location.

Now, of course, you know how to plan by now. You’ve been practicing for months, and you know you can come up with a decent plan - but how can you come up with a great plan? The vast majority of the pupils in your examination will come up with the same sort of plan – and their stories will share the same basic flaws:

Flat, two-dimensional characters
Obvious plots

Their punctuation will be good; they’ll probably include some ‘bonus words’; they’ll certainly include some description, thoughts and feelings – but these stories will have to be well-written to impress the Grumpy Examiner. He’ll keep seeing the same characters – soldiers; middle-class eleven-year old boys and girls living in West London; animal characters. Imagine marking two hundred stories featuring an animal or a wizard! He’s crying out for something distinctive.

Let’s imagine that two girls, Clever Clarissa and Mediocre Mandy, are sitting the St Cakes' examination, and they both choose to answer the same question: Write a story entitled ‘An Uninvited Guest’.

Mediocre Mandy plans a story about a nice girl whose mean Auntie comes to stay unexpectedly.

Clever Clarissa plans a story about a mean Auntie whose polite young niece comes to stay!

You’ve still got the chance to stand out! Let’s imagine you’ve just completed a comprehension passage about a couple of boys playing in the wreck of a WWII fighter plane, and you’ve been asked for your composition to ‘write the next part of the story’.

Obviously, everyone in the room is writing about the same characters, location and conflict. Think you’ve got no chance of ‘standing out’? Wrong! You could use a non-linear structure (i.e. make the end of the story the last paragraph, and then cut back to the beginning) or write from multiple-perspectives (i.e. write in the first-person from the point-of-view of one of the boys, and then write from the point of view of another character)!

Last updated on August 10, 2007