Teaching Creative Writing at High School - Planning Help!

When time is limited, here's what I'd cover!

It doesn’t matter if you’re a teacher who’s well-seasoned, a beginner, or one who writes creatively as a successful side hustle, it’s great to have a go-to guide – a checklist if you will – to grab as you approach your Creative Writing Unit.  We hope to provide you with one here!

Assuming you’ve analysed a few stories first and discussed the deliberate, intentional use of techniques, and discussed the effects of those techniques, here’s where I’d go in my writing unit next…

Purpose

I love the acronym, WIPE, to get students thinking about a text’s purpose (to warn, inform, persuade or entertain).  Limit your students by telling them they can write a piece to:

• Warn readers of something (eg: the dangers of getting into a car with a young ‘show off’ driver).

• Entertain (eg: Describe a moment that has reader’s empathizing, comparing their own experiences of this.  Note, humour is hard.  I prefer to let that be a happy accident if it happens.)

Audience

If students can picture the people who would enjoy their text – relate to it – then this helps them channel a more personal voice and speak ‘to’ those people.  Perhaps even have students sketch their audience to visualize them.  This might be:

• A teenager AND

• A parent AND

• An elderly person.

The story of a first kiss would surely entertain multiple age-groups.

If students sketch their audience, they visualise who they're writing for. Even the crudest sketch helps!

Some might be more refined again.  Eg: teens of my culture or older people who don’t understand my culture.

A main idea (message)

Students should BEGIN with a main idea – a lesson they want their readers to learn, so:

1. Have students note their main idea in a full sentence that includes the word ‘that’.  Including ‘that’ prevents students noting down a theme (eg: Coming of age / Growing Up), forcing them to describe the idea about that theme they want their students to understand.  Eg:  I want my readers to know that the awkward moments of a first kiss are an important part of growing up.

2. List on the board the aspects of story that are often used to help illustrate an idea.  I would include:

   • Character development (change from beginning to end – physical/mental).

   • Symbolism (eg: an object or colour).

   • Setting (This can be aligned to character change.  The way they feel about their surroundings might change from beginning to end.)

Students make notes under each.  Eg:  Symbolism – lip gloss, the rain clearing.  Setting – the street barbeque meeting  v. the relaxing walk on the beach (natural).

Focus on a moment not a full tradition story.

Keeping students a little confined helps them focus on details and depth.  Writing a ‘story’ is difficult for students who immediately think “OMG, ten thousand words” (even if you give them a 600-word limit) and “How will I end it?”  My favourites:

• A description of a first crush.  That could be a person, first tricycle, or a necklace inherited from great-grandmother.

• A diary entry of a character from a text we’ve studied.

• A description of the ‘story’ told in an illustration – think Ode on a Grecian Urn but as a story!

• A description of an event where the reader is led to believe they’re reading about one thing (eg: a battle ground with spears and cannons flying everywhere) only to discover at the end that it’s something else entirely (eg: school athletics day – javelins and shotputs flying).

DO give students the scenario OR 3-4 to choose from.  Ensure they are specific (as you see above).

Narrative point of view

Students must decide who is telling this story.  In my experience, one written in the first person works best!

Skills to Teach

How long is a piece of string?  Honestly, learning the skills of narrative writing is a lifelong endeavour.  You might have six lessons to cram this in.  I suggest at the beginning of the year you plan which skills you’ll teach:

• As part of targeted lessons or starters – eg: Mastering the complete sentence, beginning sentences in more interesting ways.

• As part of ongoing ‘catch ‘em while they’re hot’ daily work – eg: correcting their/there, ‘alot’ written as one word (yikes), redundancies, apostrophes etc.

• As part of reading lessons – eg: figurative language, sound devices, connotations.

• As part of your actual writing unit.

Sometimes, giving students a list of EVERYTHING and asking them to highlight the things they feel confident with is a great way to begin a writing unit because it:

• Reminds them of ‘all the things’.

• Provides you with some formative assessment data!

Here’s what I try to cover (not necessarily in this order, but probably roughly so)…

Sentences

• A complete sentence has a subject and a verb and can be read in one breath (unless using a minor sentence or stream of consciousness style sentence for deliberate effect.)

• Different sentence beginnings, including, starting with:

  • A preposition.

  • An adverb (an ‘ly’ word kids – OMG!)

  • A word ending in ‘ing’.

  • A word ending in ‘ed’.

• Sentence structures that are awesome in creative writing, especially:

  • Asyndeton (no conjunctions)

  • Polysyndeton (an overuse of conjunctions)

  • Minor sentences

• Syntax.  Playing around with sentences to change the way they begin (above) is a great way to get students to understand syntax.  Put them in groups with a bunch of cut up words from a sentence and ask them to rearrange them in four different ways.  Then, tell them to remember this activity when they’re editing (bedazzling) their own writing later.

Punctuation

• Apostrophes (Groan.)

• Commas – especially the ‘comma sandwich’ where we add a non-essential phrase/clause to the middle of a sentence.

Dialogue

• Formatting - change in speaker = change in paragraph, indent your paragraphs (and this is what you can use your tab key for).

• Quotation marks (Tip – always have a punctuation mark before a quotation mark.)

• Leading in and out of quotations.

I prefer student have no or a very limited amount of dialogue because it tends to slow the text down, but up to you of course.

Figurative language

• Metaphor

• Simile

• Personification

• Hyperbole

• Synaesthesia

• Apostrophe

I ask students to highlight the figurative language they use and annotate their text to explain WHY they used it – the specific effect they’ve gone for.  I don’t want an ‘unnatural’ metaphor plonked in just to show they can.

Sound devices

I hate these – especially alliteration.  Great for a children’s book but can we move on.  I’ll give in to a bit of onomatopoeia, used well, but what I really love is:

• Elision when it’s used to show how somebody speaks.  See Langston Hughes’ Mother to Son to see what I mean; you can really ‘hear’ her dialect.

• Pause created with the em-dash or ellipsis (…).

Structure

Beginning, middle and end, yes but bear in mind if you’re sticking to that scenario – a story based around a specific moment – this might look a little different.  I prefer students:

• List their ideas about what’s happening/what things look, sound etc like in the beginning.

• List their ideas about what we see at the end.

• List the things that appear in the middle…then try to arrange those in some kind of logical order.  In a traditional story, these might be turning points, but in something more descriptive they might be more like stages in feelings, or stages in haymaking that day, or stages of the school ball that night.

Two other tools I find work well in helping students structure their creative writing are to think about:

• Character:

  • How a character looks, feels, behaves at the beginning of the story.

  • How that character looks, feels, behaves at the end of the story.

  • What they experience in between that forced that change.

• The use of a symbol (or motif or extended metaphor)

  • Where does it appear – when and in what form?

  • Is there a change in the way this symbol is viewed by the character(s)/narrator?

  • Does the symbol carry the story – so is it more of an extended metaphor?

See also narrative point of view mentioned earlier.

Developing ideas

Tell students this involves adding details.  I’ve found the best way to draw these details out of them is to have student channel their five sentences to think about how an object, character or place:

• Looks

• Sounds

• Smells

• Tastes

• Feels (physically and emotionally)

Personal voice

• Avoid the obvious.  I remember hearing John Marsden, author of the wonderful Tomorrow When the War Began, speaking at a conference.  He said he took his students to a clifftop overlooking the ocean.  He asked the students, pens at the ready, to describe what they saw.  They all wrote about how the sea “sparkled” and was a “beautiful deep blue” etc.  He asked them to stop and LOOK properly, for the day was dark and grey, the sea equally so.  Marsden also told us about asking students what they’d expect to find in a ghost story.  He duly listed all their ideas on the board

  then asked them to write a ghost story that included NONE of those things.  Boom, right?!

• Speak as though you’re talking to a mate.  Be YOU!  You can always edit it later! 

Vocabulary

Get out the thesaurus to find ‘better’ words.  What makes a word better?

• It’s more precise in meaning.  That is, it really hits the nail on the head.  Eg: The pipes rubbed together v The pipes grated together. 

• It elicits strong imagery (‘pictures’…sigh…) or feelings.  As part of their close reading studies, students should already be familiar with the power of connotations.   Words with strong connotations also help build atmosphere.

• It’s less common (boooorrrriiinnngg).  We all know about ‘good’ and ‘nice’.

Editing is 'bedazzling'. Proofreading is just checking.

Editing

Editing is bedazzling!  Bringing out the bling.  Making it ‘chur’.  Making it pretty.  Making it sing…  Sit students beside a checklist as they go through their work – create one that covers the things we discuss here.

Proofreading 

This involves reading:

• Aloud

• Slowly

• With expression

I remind students they canNOT take a breath for commas!  Put some full stops in before we all suffocate!  Ugh.  I regularly roam, getting students to read excerpts for me, teaching them how to read like this. (Yes, including especially Grade 12/Year 13!)

Proofread to check for sense, then proofread to check for errors (spelling, grammar, punctuation – the mechanics).

Use this blog as a checklist when teaching creative writing at high school.  Add your own ideas as you teach if you like. 

Enjoy your teaching and may your students enjoy their crafting!

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