10 Tips to Help You Teach Creative Writing

Ten tips to help you teach creative writing!

Personal Voice

For some reason, students struggle to grasp this concept, or they turn themselves inside out wondering what their personal voice sounds like!  (I always find this ironic considering the moans about formal writing because “I don’t talk like that though, miss”!  Ugh.)

Stress to students to write as they talk and that they can always edit later.  Encourage the use of first-person narration.  If the student isn’t the participant in their writing, then encourage the use of an alter-ego so that they’re still writing from that first person perspective, experiencing everything as though they are that person.   

Two activities that might help ‘grasp’ that personal voice:

1.Get students to write to a mate about an event they went to.  Tell them to talk to that mate just as they would normally – slang and all (but leaving out the X-rated bits).

2.Try a bit of stream-of-consciousness writing, getting everything they’re thinking in that moment down.  If it helps, give students something to focus on – eg: let them eat something as they write.

Sentence structures

Yes, we want students to use an authentic-sounding personal voice, but I suggest, before you begin your writing unit, you focus on basic sentence structure.  A complete sentence:

• Begins with a capital letter and a full stop.  (Yes, like…actual!  Cry.)

• Contains one idea.

• Has a verb and a ‘something’ doing that verb – a subject.

Students have to know the rules (the basics) to break the rules.

Beautify sentences by beginning sentences in different ways.  For example, with:

• A preposition:  Between the rocks, Sam noticed…

• An adverb:  Silently, the dogs edged closer.

• A past participle:  Exhausted, Bridie leaned back in her chair.

• A present participle:  Aiming carefully, Ella managed to…

Try also, beginning with With… If… When… or As…

The Senses

Developed writing relies on details.  All details relate to our senses.  Senses are how we/characters function.  Once your student has established themselves (or their alter-ego) as the narrator, have them run through what their senses are experiencing.  This includes:

• Sight:  what the person sees.  Encourage students to really look at what’s there – colours, shapes, textures, movement.   Show – don’t tell.  The cat is dead.  Yawn. Instead: The cat lies on its side, front and back feet perfectly aligned, tail perfectly set with a slight curl at the end, but with a look on its face like mum gets when I haven’t emptied the dishwasher after being asked fifteen times.  It was clearly not happy to be dead.

• Hearing:  what the person hears.  Again, show – don’t tell.  I heard the mower.  Ho-hum. Instead: The peaceful sound of chooks clucking together was obliterated by the mower’s whir-screech-clunk as Simon tried to start it.

• Taste:  There is always something to taste – last night’s bit of steak (gross), this morning’s marmite toast, the bitter end of a pencil, the taste of stale spittle or even a smell! 

• Smell:  We often miss smells because we’re so used to them.  But they’re theeerrrreeee….

• Feel – physical/touch:  Plenty of detail can be added to writing if students describe textures.

• Feel – emotions:  How somebody feels ‘inside’.  Encourages students to go beyond one word (sad…happy…excited) to give a full description.  Students should add details about what that person is saying and doing to describe this.  Don’t tell us I was upset about the cat.  Show us I could feel my lips go tight, and I needed to swallow but couldn’t.  I felt in my pocket for a crusty tissue, found nothing, and brought my sleeve-covered hand to my nose. 

Practice by taking students outside to really focus on what their senses are experiencing.  Read on to see author and teacher, John Marsden’s experiences with this!

Synesthesia – add an extra dimension by encouraging students to use this figurative gem.  This is where something experienced by one sense, triggers the sense of another.  (It’s also a real medical phenomenon!)  Examples in writing: 

• The sound was smooth and slippery. (Combining sound and touch.)

• I was massaged with the aroma.  (Combining touch and smell.)

• Her kaleidoscopic voice… (Sight and sound.)

Focus on a moment – we don’t want a novel!

I don’t EVER tell students they’re going to write a short story.  Instead, it’s creative, descriptive or prose.  The word narrative suggests a story too, so that’s out!  Why?  Because a ‘story’ suggests a complete tale.  Complete tales are in danger of becoming long, boring novel-wannabes.  It’s better to get your students to focus on one thing – one experience that occurred in one moment (although that moment could be a few hours long, such as a car ride, of course).

Examples of students NOT focusing on ‘the moment’:

• A student sent me a plan for a story just recently that involved one huge life-changing event after another.  She was given the choice:  write a 1000-page novel or focus on one moment within one of those events.

• Another scenario that’s infuriating is, I got up, I had a shower.  I got dressed. I had breakfast.  I went outside.  The wind hit and suffocated me…  OMG!  Start at The wind hit…!

Ways to explain this to your students:

• Readers didn’t come for the warm-up; they came for the game. 

• We don’t want to watch the cook in the kitchen; we want to eat the food. 

• Zoom in like you would a photo or Google Maps on your phone.  (Get students to imagine using two fingers on the screen to zoom in.)

Examples of descriptive pieces that work:

• Shearing day or the shearing of a sheep.

• That first game.

• Christmas dinner or Christmas morning shambles.

• Watching the madness of athletics day.

• Catching the tube/subway for the first time.

• The car trip.

Add some oomph with symbolism

This activity has two block-buster effects:

1. It forces students to think about the idea they want to get across.

2. It helps students develop their writing, giving it detail, depth and maturity.

Have students think about the main idea they want to convey.  As always, ensure they tell you this in a ‘that’ sentence.  Eg: 

• I want my reader to understand the idea that footy training is both terrifying and exhilarating.

• I want my readers to understand the idea that it’s okay to prefer home over the party scene.

Next have students brainstorm thematic symbols to reflect that idea.

Finally, students scatter these symbols throughout their writing – perhaps in clothing or ‘props’ a character uses, perhaps in items around the scene, the weather, flora and fauna, colours…

For extension:

• Students could begin with an extended metaphor then develop their story around that.

• Turn that extended metaphor into a tale with a twist.  For example, the description of the battle ground with injuries, spears and cannons…that’s revealed at the end to be athletics day.

Develop characters through dialogue:

One of the main ways we get to know a person is through what they say.  Ironically, many of don’t exactly promote the addition of dialogue to students because the dramas with format and punctuation drive us over the edge.  We’re really missing out on a key tool for adding depth to a piece though. 

Teach students these two basic rules:

1. Change in speaker means a change in paragraph. (Encourage indenting the first line with the tab key to show new paragraphs throughout the piece because missing whole lines with a lot of dialogue just looks silly!)

2. Always have a ‘bit’ of punctuation before the quotation mark.  (It might be the full stop of the sentence before it.)

Avoid those cliches!

My father used to get us to look at the bush and ask what colours we saw there.  My brother and I would answer “green”.  Dad would tell us to look again!  The point was, you have to look at what’s really there.  Then, years ago, at an English teachers’ conference, I listened to the late great John Marsden, author of Tomorrow When the War Began and more, talk about teaching creative writing.  He told us about a time he took his students to the top of a hill where they could look out over the sea.  He asked his students to describe what they saw.  He noticed many of them writing things like:

• “The sea glistens…”

• “The sea sparkles…”

• “The waves lap onto the beach.”  etc.

Then he asked them to LOOK.  It was a grey, miserable day, he said.  Did any of them see a single sparkle?  The sea was raging, would any of them describe the waves as ‘lapping’, as though gentle?

Marsden put his thinking hat on and, back in the classroom, told his students they were going to write a ghost story.  To prepare, he said, they’d brainstorm all the things you’d expect to find in a ghost story.  The board was filled with chains, stormy nights, big scary houses, owls hooting, cobwebs…all the usual things.  Then he said to his students, you can’t use ANY of those things in your story.  Boom.

Get your students to write in a genre without the cliches of that genre!  We’ve got a freebie to help you with this activity.  Click here to grab it or join the team by logging into the website and finding it in our Freebies library.

Editing:

Students always get mixed up between editing and proofreading.  Editing is bedazzling!  Creative writing can be bedazzled with:

• Vocabulary – swish it up…but be wary of getting so fancy that the writing is bogged down.

• Cliches – see previous page on this too!

• Figurative language – give students a list, with examples of these.  They include the four basics of: metaphor, simile, personification, hyperbole.

• Sound devices – again, give them that list.  Include repetition, onomatopoeia, sibilance and, if students are clever, assonance.  Rhyme and alliteration?  Not so much for our creative pieces!

• Sentence structures.  Can they begin their sentences in different ways (see above re sentences)?  Use a long rambling sentence instead to help show a character’s panic.  Harness the power of the minor sentence?

• Deletion – redundant language, or larger sections that bog writing down must go!  (Try the next idea to help with this!)

Crafting!  The 100 words activity

Jo put me onto this one and I love it!  Give students a prompt and tell students they have to write about it in EXACTLY 100 words.  Students are forced to think about what they include and how they say things, editing carefully to get their 100 words.  I doubt there’s an activity that’s as hard hitting as this one for getting students to understand crafting!

Proofread

So often we’re a bit flippant about this, telling students to proofread and leaving it at that. Instead, ask students to bring you their work and get them to read it aloud (just quietly the rest of the class don’t have to hear everything).  Stop them if they’re not reading it slowly and with expression.  It is only in this way that students can ‘hear’ what they have written.  This helps them check for sense.  Also, WATCH where they take their breaths.  Pull them up when they take a breath for commas!  A comma is a like a give way sign – you can keep the tires rolling.  A full stop (or ? Or !) is like a stop sign.  You stop.  Take breaths only for full stops. (See our vlog on a fun and effective ‘Drop a Dot’ activity!)

Tense is the other thing students should pick up in their proofreading.  Students really struggle with this – indicative of a lack of reading for pleasure and because we (and parents) don’t pull them up enough when they’re speaking incorrectly.

Capital letters, spelling and apostrophes are the other common errors, although laptops are picking these up now.   Do your students actually know these, though?  It’s worth doing regular handwriting activities and checking notebooks/1B5s if you’re clever enough to have gone back to using these in class!

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