.png)
A story can be about anything, can’t it? This can be a blessing to those of us with a tale to tell or a story in mind, but the best stories are often the trickiest to write and can take careful planning and a little time. In this quick easy guide to your English creative writing we will look at the 5 Ws and how to write your introduction!
The 5 Ws
Now, plot is a keyword to writing any story. Plot is all the things that happen in your story and the order they happen in. Nice and easy right? But then, if you can write anything it can be hard to settle on one idea. The bit we can help with is deciding and getting started and to do this, we are going to answer 5 essential questions:
Who?
Who is your character? What is their name? How old are they? Are they human?
What?
What happens to your character? Is it good or bad?
Where?
Where is the story set? (Eg. Magic forest, busy city, on a bus)
When?
When does the story take place? (Eg. the past, now, the future)
Why?
Why is what’s happening, happening?
Once we have answered these, we have got an amazing start! Here are some creative 5 Ws examples for you.
Who- Sam, they are 10 years old
What- Sam goes on a magical adventure
Where- A door opens in the bedroom that takes Sam to a lost world
When- Set now
Why- Sam is special with magic powers and can save the lost world from a disaster
Who- A ballerina called Jamila, who is 16 years old
What- She is practising for a worldwide dance competition
Where- Set in a huge futuristic city where she lives with her parents and a dance studio
When- The future
Why- She is trying to win so she can use the prize money to save her home from being knocked down.
Now you write out the 5 Ws for yourself and try it out!
Stunning Sentence Starters
The last thing you need, before you get your scribble on, is an attention grabbing way to start the story.
A sentence starter can set up where you are, what time it is, something about the character or what’s going on at the start of our story. It should use exciting, interesting words, as many features of writing you can get in there and most importantly you need your reader to want to carry on reading. In other words, it definitely should not be boring!
Here at Sammie Allen Tutoring we have come up with some exciting first lines to inspire you to write yours.
You could use alliteration…
It was damp, dark and dreadfully dusty when Sam entered the house.
Story openers that create tension…
Sam could hear her heart beating faster than ever before. Could this really be happening?
Stories that go straight into dialogue…
“But I don’t want to go to school, Mummy,” groaned Sam..
There, see? These are exciting but still give the reader some information about what is going on. Now you choose one of these features and write a story starter for yourself!
Get writing!
The last thing you need to do is to… actually begin!
The great thing about creative writing is that it doesn’t have to be perfect the first time! In fact, we can guarantee it won’t be. The thing to do is to write your heart out, then you can go back and make as many changes as you need. Get the introduction started using a punchy sentence starter, use the 5 Ws to steer the direction of your story and… BOOM!
You are on the way to having an excellent creative writing introduction! :)
Hey! For more support with English and Creative Writing why not check out Sammie Allen Tutoring and we can match you up with one of our fantastic teachers?
Comments