Posted on 4th October 2012

A Really Good Creative Writing Exercise

If you’re sitting the 11+ this year then it is vital that you do plenty of preparation for all areas of the examination, including maths, reasoning (verbal and non verbal) and English. The English paper will consist of two parts: a comprehension followed by a piece of creative writing.

Just as an athlete would never consider entering a race without doing some training to prepare, you need to train yourself for the big day. This means doing plenty of exercises to build up your creative writing muscles.

Below is a fantastic exercise to follow. Just answer all of the questions one by one and then use your notes as the main ingredients for a story. Good luck!

1. Write down the name of a place. It might be somewhere really specific like ‘Victoria Station’ or it might be somewhere more general such as ‘a field’ or a particular city.

2. Now write down a time, such as 7:38am or 3:45pm

3. Choose three words that describe how you have been feeling at some point in the last week. For example, ‘excited’, ‘hungry’ and ‘scared’.

4. Think of a name for a character.

5. You now have a person, how they are feeling, where they are and what time it is. Next think of what the date is. You might want to set this in the past or the future, or it could be in the present.

 

6. What is your character wearing?

7. Now that you know who your character is and where they are, describe what they can see.

8. Next come up with a problem they might be facing in this situation.

9. How might they overcome this problem?

10. Now that you have made a plan and come up with some ideas, you should be ready to write your story. Describe in as much detail as possible who your character is, where they are, what the problem is, and how they overcome it.