HOW TO TEACH CREATIVE WRITING

“I don’t have any ideas!”“I can’t think of anything!”

While we see creative writing as a world of limitless imagination, our students often see an overwhelming
desert of “no idea.”

But when you teach creative writing effectively, you’ll notice that every student is brimming over with
ideas that just have to get out.

So what does teaching creative writing effectively look like?

We’ve outlined a seven-step method that will scaffold your students through each phase of the creative
process from idea generation through to final edits.

7. Create inspiring and original prompts

Use the following formats to generate prompts that get students inspired:

 personal memories (“Write about a person who taught you an important lesson”)
 imaginative scenarios
 prompts based on a familiar mentor text (e.g. “Write an alternative ending to your favorite book”).
These are especially useful for giving struggling students an easy starting point.
 lead-in sentences (“I looked in the mirror and I couldn’t believe my eyes. Somehow overnight I…”).
 fascinating or thought-provoking images with a directive (“Who do you think lives in this mountain
cabin? Tell their story”).

6. Unpack the prompts together

Explicitly teach your students how to dig deeper into the prompt for engaging and original ideas.

Probing questions are an effective strategy for digging into a prompt. Take this one for example:

“I looked in the mirror and I couldn’t believe my eyes. Somehow overnight I…”

Ask “What questions need answering here?” The first thing students will want to know is:

What happened overnight?

No doubt they’ll be able to come up with plenty of zany answers to that question, but there’s
another one they could ask to make things much more interesting:

Who might “I” be?

In this way, you subtly push students to go beyond the obvious and into more original and
thoughtful territory. It’s even more useful with a deep prompt:

“Write a story where the main character starts to question something they’ve always believed.”

Here students could ask:

  What sorts of beliefs do people take for granted?
 What might make us question those beliefs?
 What happens when we question something we’ve always thought is true?
 How do we feel when we discover that something isn’t true?

Try splitting students into groups, having each group come up with probing questions for a
prompt, and then discussing potential “answers” to these questions as a class.

The most important lesson at this point should be that good ideas take time to generate. So don’t
rush this step!

5. Warm-up for writing

A quick warm-up activity will:

 allow students to see what their discussed ideas look like on paper
 help fix the “I don’t know how to start” problem
 warm up writing muscles quite literally (especially important for
young learners who are still developing handwriting and fine motor
skills).

Freewriting is a particularly effective warm-up. Give students 5–10

minutes to “dump” all their ideas for a prompt onto the page for without
worrying about structure, spelling, or grammar.

After about five minutes you’ll notice them starting to get into the
groove, and when you call time, they’ll have a better idea of what
captures their interest.

4. Start planning
Now it’s time for students to piece all these raw ideas together and
generate a plan. This will synthesize disjointed ideas and give them a
roadmap for the writing process.

Note: at this stage your strong writers might be more than ready to get
started on a creative piece. If so, let them go for it – use planning for
students who are still puzzling things out.

Here are four ideas for planning:

 Graphic organisers

A graphic organiser will allow your students to plan out the overall
structure of their writing. They’re also particularly useful in “chunking”
the writing process, so students don’t see it as one big wall of text.
  Storyboards and illustrations

These will engage your artistically-minded students and give greater

depth to settings and characters. Just make sure that drawing doesn’t
overshadow the writing process.

 Voice recordings

If you have students who are hesitant to commit words to paper, tell
them to think out loud and record it on their device. Often they’ll be
surprised at how well their spoken words translate to the page.

 Write a blurb

This takes a bit more explicit teaching, but it gets students to concisely
summarize all their main ideas (without giving away spoilers). Look at
some blurbs on the back of published books before getting them to write
their own. Afterward they could test it out on a friend – based on the
blurb, would they borrow it from the library?

3. Produce rough drafts

Warmed up and with a plan at the ready, your students are now ready to
start wordsmithing. But before they start on a draft, remind them of what
a draft is supposed to be:

 messy
 imperfect
 unfinished
 a work in progress.

Remind them that if they wait for the perfect words to come, they’ll end up with blank
pages.

Instead, it’s time to take some writing risks and get messy. Encourage
this by:

 demonstrating the writing process to students yourself

 taking the focus off spelling and grammar (during the drafting
stage)
 providing meaningful and in-depth feedback (using words, not
ticks!).

2. Share drafts for peer feedback

Don’t saddle yourself with 30 drafts for marking. Peer assessment is a
better (and less exhausting) way to ensure everyone receives the
feedback they need.

Why? Because for something as personal as creative writing, feedback

often translates better when it’s in the familiar and friendly language
that only a peer can produce. Looking at each other’s work will also give
students more ideas about how they can improve their own.

Scaffold peer feedback to ensure it’s constructive. The following

methods work well:

Student rubrics

A simple rubric allows students to deliver more in-depth feedback than

“It was pretty good.” The criteria will depend on what you are ultimately
looking for, but students could assess each other’s:

 clarity
 ideas
 use of language.

Whatever you opt for, just make sure the language you use in the rubric
is student-friendly.

Two positives and a focus area

Have students identify two things their peer did well, and one area that
they could focus on further, then turn this into written feedback. Model
the process for creating specific comments so you get something more
constructive than “It was pretty good.” It helps to use stems such as:

I really liked this character because…

I found this idea interesting because it made me think…

I was a bit confused by…

I wonder why you… Maybe you could… instead.

1. The editing stage

Now that students have a draft and feedback, here’s where we teachers
often tell them to “go over it” or “give it some final touches.”

But our students don’t always know how to edit.

Scaffold the process with questions that encourage students to think
critically about their writing, such as:

 Are there any parts that would be confusing if I wasn’t there to

explain them?
 Are there any parts that seem irrelevant to the rest?
 Which parts am I most uncertain about?
 Does the whole thing flow together, or are there parts that seem out
of place?
 Are there places where I could have used a better word?
 Are there any grammatical or spelling errors I notice?

Key to this process is getting students to read their creative writing from start
to finish.

Important note: if your students are using a word processor, show them
where the spell-check is and how to use it. Sounds obvious, but in the
age of autocorrect, many students simply don’t know.

Types of creative writing

Creative writing comes in many forms. These are the most common:

Novels

Novels originated in the eighteenth century. Today, when people think of books, most
think of novels.

A novel is a fictional story that’s generally told in 60,000 to 100,000 words, though they
can be as short as 40,000 words or go beyond 100,000.

Stories that are too short to be novels, but can’t accurately be called short stories, are
often referred to as novellas. Generally, a story between 10,000 and 40,000 words is
considered a novella. You might also run into the term “novelette,” which is used to
refer to stories that clock in between 7,500 and 19,000 words.
Short stories

Short stories are fictional stories that fall generally between 5,000 and 10,000 words.
Like novels, they tell complete stories and have at least one character, some sort of
conflict, and at least one theme.

When a story is less than 1,000 words, it’s categorized as a work of flash fiction.

Poetry

Poetry can be hard to define because as a genre, it’s so open-ended. A poem doesn’t
have to be any specific length. It doesn’t have to rhyme. There are many different kinds
of poems from cultures all over the world, like sonnets, haikus, sestinas, blank verse,
limericks, and free verse.

The rules of poetry are generally flexible . . . unless you’re writing a specific type of
poem, like a haiku, that has specific rules around the number of lines or structure. But
while a poem isn’t required to conform to a specific length or formatting, or use
perfect grammar, it does need to evoke its reader’s emotions, come from a specific
point of view, and express a theme.

And when you set a poem to music, you’ve got a song.

Plays, TV scripts, and screenplays

Plays are meant to be performed on stage. Screenplays are meant to be made into
films, and TV scripts are meant to be made into television programs. Scripts for videos
produced for other platforms fit into this category as well.

Plays, TV scripts, and screenplays have a lot in common with novels and short stories.
They tell stories that evoke emotion and express themes. The difference is that they’re
meant to be performed rather than read and as such, they tend to rely much more on
dialogue because they don’t have the luxury of lengthy descriptive passages. But
scriptwriters have more than just dialogue to work with; writing a play or script also
involves writing stage or scene directions.
 Each type of script has its own specific formatting requirements.

Creative nonfiction

Creative nonfiction covers all the kinds of creative writing that aren’t fiction. Here are
some examples:

 Personal essays: A personal essay is a true story told through a narrative framework.
Often, recollections of events are interspersed with insights about those events and
your personal interpretations and feelings about them in this kind of essay.

 Literary journalism: Think of literary journalism as journalism enhanced by creative

writing techniques. These are the kinds of stories often published in outlets like The
New Yorker and Salon. Literary journalism pieces report on factual events but do so in
a way that makes them feel like personal essays and short stories.

 Memoirs: Memoirs are to personal essays what novels are to short stories. In other
words, a memoir is a book-length collection of personal memories, often centering
around a specific story, that often works opinions, epiphanies, and emotional insights
into the narrative.

 Autobiographies: An autobiography is a book you write about yourself and your life.
Often, autobiographies highlight key events and may focus on one particular aspect of
the author’s life, like her role as a tech innovator or his career as a professional athlete.
Autobiographies are often similar in style to memoirs, but instead of being a collection
of memories anchored to specific events, they tend to tell the author’s entire life story in
a linear narrative.

 Humor writing: Humor writing comes in many forms, like standup comedy routines,
political cartoons, and humorous essays.

 Lyric essays: In a lyric essay, the writer breaks conventional grammar and stylistic
rules when writing about a concept, event, place, or feeling. In this way, lyric essays are
like essay-length poems. The reason they’re considered essays, and not long poems,
 is that they generally provide more direct analysis of the subject matter than a poem
would.

What is creative writing?

Creative writing is writing meant to evoke emotion in a reader by communicating a

theme. In storytelling (including literature, movies, graphic novels, creative nonfiction,
and many video games), the theme is the central meaning the work communicates.

Take the movie (and the novel upon which it’s based) Jaws, for instance. The story is
about a shark that terrorizes a beach community and the men tasked with killing the
shark. But the film’s themes include humanity’s desire to control nature, tradition vs.
innovation, and how potential profit can drive people in power to make dangerous, even
fatal, decisions.

A theme isn’t the only factor that defines creative writing. Here are other components
usually found in creative writing:

 Connecting, or at least attempting to connect, with the reader’s emotions

 Writing from a specific point of view

 Organizing the text around a narrative structure

o A narrative structure can be complex or simple and serves to shape how the reader
interacts with the content.

 Using imaginative and/or descriptive language

Creative writing typically uses literary devices like metaphors and foreshadowing to
build a narrative and express the theme, but this isn’t a requirement. Neither is
dialogue, though you’ll find it used in most works of fiction. Creative writing doesn’t
have to be fictional, either. Dramatized presentations of true stories, memoirs, and
observational humor pieces are all types of creative writing.

What isn’t creative writing?

In contrast, research papers aren’t creative writing. Neither are analytical

essays, persuasive essays, or other kinds of academic writing. Similarly, personal and
professional communications aren’t considered creative writing—so your emails, social
media posts, and official company statements are all firmly in the realm of non-creative
writing. These kinds of writing convey messages, but they don’t express themes. Their
goals are to inform and educate, and in some cases collect information from, readers.
But even though they can evoke emotion in readers, that isn’t their primary goal.

But what about things like blog posts? Or personal essays? These are broad
categories, and specific pieces in these categories can be considered creative writing if
they meet the criteria listed above. This blog post, for example, is not a piece of
creative writing as it aims to inform, but a blog post that walks its reader through a first-
person narrative of an event could be deemed creative writing.