Creative Writing - Sites and tips

There are many websites related to developing creative writing skills but many of them are general rather than suitable for senior students. Below are a few ideas and sites that may prove helpful for those students who are self-reliant enough to do the extra work that will enhance their creativity. 

Writers’ Tennis

You’ll need two people for this one. One of you writes a few paragraphs of a story. It can be about anything. You then pass it on to your writing partner (email is perfect for this) who then writes the next paragraph and so on and so on. If you both try to keep the two parts of the story consistent you can achieve interesting results.

Pictures & Words

Take a painting and look at it for a while then write a story about it. You can write about the actual painting or take the theme of the painting as the theme of your story. You can do the same with poems or with book and movie titles.

Writing exercises from Wake Up Writing

The Wake Up Writing website (www.wakeupwriting.com) has frequently updated writing exercises. Check out the latest ones below, and keep checking back here as this list will update itself.

The mark of a good short story is economy. Action develops quickly, the crisis is created with the greatest precision, and then, quite sharply, the story ends.

Variety in sentence beginnings. There are a several ways to do this eg by using:

Participles: “Jumping with joy I ran home to tell mum my good news.”

Adverbs: “Silently the cat crept toward the bird”

Adjectives: “Brilliant sunlight shone through the window”

Nouns: “Thunder claps filled the air”

Adverbial Phrases: “Along the street walked the girl as if she had not a care in the world.”

Conversations/Dialogue: these may be used as an opener. This may be done through a series of short or one-word sentences or as one long complex sentence.

Show, Don’t Tell: Students have heard the rule “show, don’t tell” but this principle is often difficult for some writers to master.

Personal Voice: It may be described as writing which is honest and convincing. The author is able to ‘put the reader there’. The writer invests something of him/her self in the writing. The writing makes an impact on the reader. It reaches out and touches the reader. A connection is made.