things to teach creative writing

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How to Teach Creative Writing | 7 Steps to Get Students Wordsmithing

“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”).

Don’t have the time or stuck for ideas? Check out our list of 100 student writing prompts

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.

Did you know? The Story Factory in Reading Eggs allows your students to write and publish their own storybooks using an easy step-by-step guide.

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:

• 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!).

Reading Eggs also gives you access to an ever-expanding collection of over 3,500 online books!

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:

• 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.

A final word on teaching creative writing

Remember that the best writers write regularly.

Incorporate them into your lessons as often as possible, and soon enough, you’ll have just as much fun  marking  your students’ creative writing as they do producing it.

Need more help supporting your students’ writing?

Read up on  how to get reluctant writers writing , strategies for  supporting struggling secondary writers , or check out our huge list of writing prompts for kids .

Watch your students get excited about writing and publishing their own storybooks in the Story Factory

You might like....

• How to write a story
• How to write a novel
• How to write poetry
• Dramatic writing
• How to write a memoir
• How to write a mystery
• Creative journaling
• Publishing advice
• Story starters
• Poetry prompts
• For teachers

How to Teach Writing

Welcome, fellow writing teachers! Here, you'll find ideas for how to teach writing, including topics, worksheets and lesson plans for fiction and poetry classes. If you're teaching adults and want to incorporate a workshop component in your classroom, you can find suggestions for how to run a critique here.

Join our email group for creative writing teachers.

Topics for Teaching Fiction Writing

• Reading fiction
• Character development
• Conflict and plot structure
• Narrative point of view
• Showing versus telling
• Summary versus scene
• Descriptive detail
• Story beginnings
• Story middles
• Story endings
• Types of stories and genres
• Setting and world-building
• Revising fiction

Click here for activity ideas.

Topics for Teaching Poetry Writing

• Reading poetry
• Subject and theme
• Specificity
• Sensory details
• Figurative language
• Lines and stanzas
• Meter and scansion
• Rhyme and rhyme schemes
• Fixed forms
• Voice and tone
• Patterns and repetition
• Visual aspects of poetry
• Revising poetry

Poetry Class Activities

Haiku Students write a haiku, a short unrhymed poem with five syllables in the first line, seven in the second line, and five in the third line. Read more

Found poem Students write a poem using language borrowed from non-poetic sources. Read more

Fairy-tale poem Students write a poem inspired by a fairy tale or folk tale. 

Animal Poem Students write a poem about an animal. Click here for examples and ideas

Epistolary Poem Students write a poem in the form of a letter or email to someone real or imaginary.

Prose Poem Click here to get our Prose Poetry Kit.

Persona poem Students write a poem in the voice of someone else, such as a fictional character, historical figure, or animal.

Blank verse Students write a poem in unrhymed iambic pentameter. Read more

Sonnet Click here for instructions and prompts.

Music Poem You can play music in the classroom and ask students to write poetry inspired by the sounds they hear and the imagery it brings to mind.

Golden shovel poem Students take a line from a poem they admire and use each word from that line as the end word of a line in their new poem. Read more  

Cut-up poem Students write a poem by cutting up a piece of text and rearranging the words or phrases to form something new.

Sestina Click here for instructions, examples, and ideas.

Ekphrastic Poem Students write a poem inspired by a piece of visual art.

Five Senses Poem Students write a poem that describes its subject using details from all five senses.

Anaphora Poem Students write a poem that uses the repetition of a word or phrase at the beginning of each line or stanza for emphasis. Read more

Acrostic Students write a poem where the first letter of each line spells out a word or message vertically. Read more

Concrete Poem Students write a poem where the arrangement of the words on the page forms a visual image related to the poem's theme. Click here to get a worksheet with examples.

Nature walk poem Students take a walk, paying attention to sights, sounds, smells, and other sensations. Then they write a poem inspired by their observations.

Pantoum Click here to get our Pantoum Poetry Kit.

Limerick Click here for instructions, examples, and ideas.

Poetic translation Students can use AI tools and online translators to explore the meaning of a poem written in a foreign language. Then, they use their poetic skills to craft a translation that reads as a successful poem in English.

Riddle poem Students write a poem that describes something without naming it. Example here  

Erasure Poem: Students write a poem by erasing words from an existing text and leaving behind words that form a new poem. Here's an example created from the Miranda Warning.

Lesson Plans for Teaching Fiction Writing

Character development - teaching ideas.

• Character Development
• How to Show Your Character's Thoughts

Group activity:

Create a character as a class using a picture of a person as a starting point. First, have the students suggest a name for the character. Then, discuss and decide on the character's age and occupation. Continue to develop the character by answering the questions in this character profile questionnaire . To start students thinking about how character profiles can lead to story ideas, ask them the following questions: What problems does this character face? What does this character want more than anything What obstacles could get in the way of the character's desires? In what situation would this character react in an interesting way?

Invent a character with two conflicting personality traits or desires. For example, the character might be exceedingly disorganized yet a perfectionist, or a pacifist with a quick temper, or a rebel who craves parental approval. Imagine a situation where these contradictory aspects come into direct conflict. Write the story.

Worksheets:

• Character Profile Questionnaire
• 160 Characters for Your Stories

Conflict and Plot Structure - Teaching Ideas

• Story Conflict
• Plot Structure
• Story Climax

Present students with one of the following situations:

• Maria goes on vacation to Hawaii.
• David's about to get married.
• Sandra just moved into a new house.

Ask students to suggest ideas for adding conflict to the situation you've presented. What could go wrong for the character?

Choose one of the conflict ideas and ask students to discuss what actions the character might take to try to overcome the story problem. What might happen as a result of the character's actions? How might the character react to that ?

You can use this exercise as an introduction to conflict and the way it moves a story forward.

Write about a job interview, family dinner, celebration, or vacation where something goes terribly wrong. Your character attempts to fix the situation, but their initial efforts only make things worse...

• Plot Templates

Narrators and Narrative Point of View - Teaching Ideas

• Types of Narrators and How to Choose

1) Give students this ten-minute writing task: Write about a first date from the perspective of a character who perceives the date as a disaster. 2) Pair up the students and give them ten minutes to rewrite their partners' scenes from the viewpoint of the other character on the date. This character should view the date as a great success.

Rewrite a fairy tale from the point of view of a character other than the traditional hero. Ideas: "Cinderella" from the point of view of one of the stepsisters, "Little Red Riding Hood" from the point of view of the wolf.

More exercises here

Dialogue - Teaching Ideas

• How to Write Dialogue

Discussion:

Have students read and discuss Hemingway's “ Hills Like White Elephants ” as an example of dialogue where neither character is speaking sincerely. This is a story about a man trying to convince a woman to have an abortion. The man is insincere because he's trying to persuade the woman, and the woman is insincere because she's afraid of losing the man if she refuses to do what he wants. Students can discuss:

• How they know the characters are talking about an abortion, even though abortion is never mentioned specifically.
• How they can tell what each character is feeling, even though it doesn't match what the characters say.

1) The story takes place on a long bus ride between two cities. Two strangers are sharing a seat. Each one secretly hopes to get something from the other. For example, one of them wants a job, money, or a place to stay in the city where they're headed. The other one wants love or a one-night stand. Neither of them mentions directly what they want. They pretend to make casual small talk, but each one is actually trying to manipulate the conversation to achieve their secret goal. Write the conversation. 2) This story takes place at a restaurant. Three acquaintances have gone out to dinner together. Person A has just left their spouse and family. Person B supports this decision. Person C thinks this was criminally irresponsible. Write the conversation. (Suggestion: try giving each character the voice of a different person you actually know. For example, Person A might talk like one of your coworkers, and Person B might talk like your brother or sister. Choose people who are very different from each other. Then try to express each one's unique voice so clearly that you don't need to tell the reader which character said which sentence; the reader can "hear" the difference between who says what.)

Showing Versus Telling, and Summary Versus Scene - Teaching Ideas

• The Truth About "Show, Don't Tell"

Present students with "telling" statements, such as:

•  Julie's angry at Tim.
• Lorena is shy.
• The house is creepy.

Ask students to suggest ways of showing these things instead. Use this to start a discussion the difference between showing and telling, and when it might be better to do one or the other.

1) Your character and their spouse are looking at a house they're thinking of buying. Write a scene which shows (without telling) the following:

• The character doesn't really want to buy a house.
• The character's spouse desperately wants to buy a house.
• The real estate agent is trying to hide something about the house.

2) Two old friends get together for dinner after a long time apart. One of them is secretly in love with the other one. Show this, don't tell it.

Descriptive Detail - Teaching Ideas

• Descriptive details

Group activities:

For an in-person class: if possible, take students somewhere outdoors.

• First, have them take notes on visual details they observe.
• Next, have them spend a few minutes paying attention to, and taking notes on, what they hear.
• Then, have them take notes on smells.
• After that, have them take notes on temperature, textures, and tactile sensations.
• Finally, have students compare notes to discover additional details they might not have noticed.

For an online class, you can conduct a similar activity. Ask students to take notes on their surroundings, starting with visual details, then moving on to sounds, smells, and tactile sensations. Afterwards, have students describe their surroundings to the class.

1) Have students keep a journal, where they take notes on sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and sensations they observe or experience. 2) Prompt: Your character has to leave their hotel in the middle of the night (you decide why; e.g., to catch an early flight, for a clandestine meeting, to avoid paying for the room, etc.). Right when your character is opening the door of their room, all of the lights in the building go out. Your character is determined to leave anyway, even though they can't see a thing. At some point, your character realizes they've lost their way and are in a part of the building they never intended to go. Write the scene, using descriptive details from senses other than sight; i.e., sound, touch, etc.

Story Beginnings - Teaching Ideas

• Great Story Beginnings

Give the students some story beginnings to read, and discuss:

• What expectations are set by each one?
• Which beginnings make them want to read more, and why?

Take a story you've previously written and see if you can improve the beginning.

Try beginning later in the story to see if that works better. Experiment with starting the story in different places.

Experiment with beginning with dialogue, action or something that will provoke the reader's curiosity.

Revision Techniques - Teaching Ideas

• Novel Revision Checklist

For an adult creative writing class, you could offer students the chance to workshop their pieces. It's important to manage the workshops to maintain a positive tone and prevent students from getting discouraged, especially if you are teaching beginning writers.

1) Pretend you're a reader coming to your story for the first time. Read the story from beginning to end. What are your overall impressions?

2) Go through this checklist and see if it gives you ideas for anything you might improve.

3) Experiment with revising or changing different aspects of your story to see if you can make it better. Keep a copy of your original version so that you always have the option to go back to it. That way you can revise without fear, knowing that none of your experiments need to be permanent.

4) Once you have a version you're happy with, go through it again and look for everything you can cut—unnecessary scenes, paragraphs, sentences, or words.

5) Read through your manuscript out loud to look for places where you can smooth or polish the language.

How to Run a Writing Workshop

In most workshops, students read an author's piece ahead of time to prepare for classroom discussion. It's important to keep the discussion encouraging and respectful. Here are two possible workshop formats. Workshop for an advanced class:

• The author should try not to talk during the critique except to ask clarifying questions.
• First, students discuss what they think the piece is about and what it is trying to achieve. At this stage, they are not judging the piece or offering suggestions. This discussion helps the author understand how well the group has grasped the piece.
• Second, students talk about what they think works well in the piece and what caught their interest. Starting with positive feedback makes it easier for the author to listen to criticism later without becoming defensive or discouraged.
• Third, students give constructive criticism. Ensure that criticism is respectful and delivered in a way that helps the author make specific improvements. Keep comments as specific as possible and clearly focused on the piece, rather than on the author.

Workshop for other groups: What is most helpful for beginning writers is often experimentation and practice. The first priority is to help these writers build their confidence and stay motivated. I have found "positive feedback only" workshops to be useful both for beginners and more advanced writers. In these workshops, the authors share their work, and group discussion is limited to the following question:

"What caught your attention about this piece, or what did you think was working well?"

How to Teach Writing - Next Steps

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How to Teach Creative Writing to High School Students

Creative Writing was forced onto my schedule; I didn’t ask for it. But it ended up becoming my favorite class period of the day. While academic English courses can feel high-stakes and always short on time, Creative Writing can be a refreshingly relaxed elective class. In many districts with loose curriculums, Creative Writing is what you make of it. In this post, I outline six steps to show you how to teach creative writing to high school students.

Why Teach Creative Writing

Before we get into the how , let’s first address the why . Why bother teaching Creative Writing in the first place? Students’ basic skills are lower than ever; is now really the time to encourage them to break the rules?

If you want to get really deep into why you should teach Creative Writing, I have a whole post about it here.

But think about why you love reading. Is it because you were made to annotate or close read a bunch of classic novels? Probably not. You probably fell in love with reading while you were reading something that was fun. And because it was fun, you read more, and your skills as a reader grew.

The same principle applies to writing. If we can make it fun for our students, perhaps we can foster a love for it. And passion is what leads, eventually, to mastery.

Giving our students the opportunity to fall in love with writing is a gift that might help them grow in their academic writing later.

Teach Creative Writing to High School Students Step #1: Decide on Your Standards or Goals

Your school or district may have a mandated syllabus or curriculum. Mine did not. 

Whether you’re given student goals or have to create them, you must have an overall vision for what your Creative Writing class will accomplish. 

Is this a laid-back, engaging course designed to help students discover the fun in writing? Or is it a supplement to rigorous academics for college-bound high school students? 

If you know your school’s student population well, I encourage you to think about their needs. Some students just need to write more–more of anything, but lots more. Some students are high achieving and ready to write their first novels! If possible, design your course around the needs and interests of the general student population in your school or district. 

Regardless of how rigorous your Creative Writing course will be, deciding on these goals first will help you in backwards planning. 

Teach Creative Writing to High School Students Step #2: Choose Your Final Assessments and Big Projects

Before we can start planning our lessons, we have to decide what skills or knowledge our students will need. And to know what they need, we have to decide on their summative assessments.

Will your final assessment be a short story? A collection of poetry? Are you required to offer a final exam?

Once you know what students will need to do, you can make a list of the skill they’ll need. This list will become a list of lessons you’ll need to teach.

Fairy Tale Retelling Project

My Fairy Tale Retelling Project is a great Creative Writing assessment. For this project, students had to first choose a fairy tale. Then, they rewrote the story from the perspective of the villain.

This project works really well because students have structure. They can pick any fairy tale they want, but they can’t write about just anything.

Secondly, students already know the story, so they don’t have to worry about a beginning, middle, and end. The open-endedness of writing a story completely from scratch has paralyzed my students before. Structure allows students lots of creative freedom without the excuse of “I don’t know what to write.”

Author Study Project

If you’d like your Creative Writing class to help beginner writers have fun and just get some practice with fiction writing, a Fairy Tale Retelling Project would probably be perfect for your class.

Another project I’ve done with my students is an Author Study . In this project, students choose one author to study in-depth. Then, they attempt to replicate that author’s style in an original work.

If you’d like your class to also include lots of exposure to other writers or classic literature, then this might be a great assessment for your class.

Learn more about doing an author study in this step-by-step post.

Test or Final Exam

I also gave my students a final exam focused on literary terms.

This Literary Terms Test allowed me to test students on the academic knowledge they gained throughout class instead of their writing ability. This test also helped me fulfill my district’s requirement of having a final exam at the end of each course.

Once you’ve decided on your class’s major projects and assessments, you can begin designing the rest of your class.

Teach Creative Writing to High School Students Step #3: Backwards Plan

Now that you know what your students will need to do at the end of this class, you can list out everything you need to teach them in order for them to be successful.

For example, if you opt for an author study as a final project, you know what you will need to cover. You will need to teach students some literary terms so that they can describe an author’s style. You’ll need to show them how to analyze a poem.

During the course of your class, you’ll also want to expose students to a variety of authors and mentor texts. Students will need to practice basic writing techniques in order to replicate those of their chosen authors.

If you need some inspiration for what kinds of lessons to teach, check out this post on essential Creative Writing lessons.

Teach Creative Writing to High School Students Step #4: Decide on Your Class Structure

Once you’ve decided on the end goals for your Creative Writing class, you can use them to help create day-to-day plans. 

What will your class look like? Will it be full of lots of quiet and independent work time? Will it be full of frenetic energy with students working in collaborative groups? Are students writing in notebooks or on laptops?

Of course, a successful class will most likely include a mixture of all of the above. But it’s up to you to decide on your ratio. 

Again, I encourage you to think about your school’s population. If you’re on ninety-minute blocks, is it realistic for students to be quietly writing that whole time? If you have high-achieving students, might they benefit from working independently at home and then getting and giving peer feedback during class time?

Use your goals to help decide on a general class structure. 

Warm-ups for Creative Writing

You’ll need a consistent way to begin each class.

When I initially began teaching Creative Writing, I just wanted to provide my students with more time to write. We began every class period with free writing. I gave students a couple of prompts to choose from each day, and then we’d write for about ten minutes. 

( Those journal prompts are right here . Every day includes two prompts plus a third option of freewriting.)

Students were given the option to share part of their writing if they wanted to. Every couple of weeks I’d flip through their notebooks to make sure they were keeping up, but I only read the entries they starred for me in advance. 

Later, I wanted to add some rigor to my Creative Writing class and leverage more mentor texts. I created a Poem of the Week activity for each week of the course. 

This gave students the opportunity to study professional writing before using it as a mentor text for a new, original piece. 

(You can read more about using these Poem of the Week activities here.) 

As my goals for the class and my students change, so did the way we began class. 

How can you begin your class in a way that supports the end goals or teaches the desired standards? How often will peers work together?

Teach Creative Writing to High School Students Step #5: Focus on Engagement Strategies

Now you can actually start planning lessons and projects!

But as you do so, focus on creating engaging ones–especially if your class is meant to be a fun elective.

Need more tips? Check out this post full of Creative Writing teaching tips!

Use Mentor Texts and Lots of Examples

Have you ever tried putting a puzzle together without knowing what the image was going to look like? It would be pretty difficult! Similarly, students need lots of examples of strong writing to aspire to. 

Without clear models or mentor texts , students will happily turn in unread drafts. They’ll choose the first word that comes to their mind instead of searching for a better one. 

But if you surround students with great writing, highlight strong technique when discussing the writing of others, and challenge them to notice the details in their own writing, they’ll naturally become better at self-editing.

I don’t believe that you can provide students with too many mentor texts or examples of strong writing. As you teach Creative Writing, keep or take pictures of strong writing samples from students to use as examples later. 

Nearly all of my lessons and projects include an example along with instruction.

Model and Create with Your Students

You can even use your own writing as an example. When I had students free write to creative writing prompts, I always wrote with them. Sometimes I would then put my notebook under the document camera and model reading my own work.  

I would cross out words and replace them or underline phrases I thought were strong enough to keep. Model for students not just great writing, but the process of strengthening writing.

And then give them plenty of time to edit theirs. This is when having students engage in peer feedback is a game-changer. 

Without great writing to aspire to, however, students easily become lazy and turn in work that is “good enough” in their eyes. Don’t let them get lazy in their writing. Keep throwing greater and greater work in front of them and challenge them to push themselves. 

(This is another reason I love using Poem of the Week warm-ups –they expose students to a new writer every week!)

Set Clear Expectations

Creative writing causes a lot of students anxiety. There’s no “right” answer, so how will they know if they creatively wrote “correctly?”

Help them out by setting clear expectations. Offering a rubric for every project is great for this. If you can, give them specifics to include. “At least 500 words” or “three or more similes” are nice, concrete guidelines that students can follow.

Give Students Choice

Offering students choice always boosts engagement. It lets students take charge of their learning and pursue something that interests them.

For example, when I teach odes , students are given the opportunity to write about something they love.

With an author study , students can study a writer whose style and work they admire.

Teach Creative Writing to High School Students Step #6: Use Clear and Structured Expectations

While showing students excellent prose or perfect poetry should help inspire students, your writers will still need some hard parameters to follow. 

Academic writing is often easier for students than creative writing. Usually, academic writing follows a structure or certain formula. The rubric dictates exactly how many quotes need to be included or how long an essay needs to be. MLA or APA formats tell students how to punctuate quotes and citations. 

These rules don’t apply to creative writing. And while that’s exactly what makes creative writing awesome, it’s often overwhelming. 

So do your students a favor and give them some clear expectations (without, of course, entirely dictating what they need to write about).  

The project also includes a rubric, so young writers know what should be included in their stories.

Don’t give your students so much creative freedom that it paralyzes them! Your writers are still students; give them the same level of structure and organization that you would in any other class. 

Engage your students in more creative writing!

Sign up and get five FREE Creative Writing journal prompts to use with your students! 

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Teach Creative Writing to High School Students Step #7: Give Students Choices

So how do you give students frameworks, requirements, and uphold high expectations without stifling their creativity?

Give students choices. You can write about A, B, or C, as long as you meet requirements 1, 2, and 3. 

Offering choices works with small one-day assignments or lessons as well as bigger, longer-term projects. 

The previously mentioned Fairy Tale Retelling Project is a great example of offering a narrow selection of choices that uphold expectations without dictating what students write. 

Another one of my favorite examples of offering students choices is my “Show. Don’t Tell” Mini-lesson . This lesson touches on everything students need to successfully learn creative writing. 

First I teach them the concept of showing vs. telling in writing through direct instruction. I show them lots of examples of expanding a “telling sentence” into a “showing paragraph.”

Then I model for students how I would write a paragraph that shows crucial information, rather than telling it. 

Lastly, I have students pick a strip of paper from a hat or a bag. Each strip of paper contains a “telling sentence” that they must then write as a “showing paragraph.” Students are limited by the sentences I provide, but they still have complete freedom over how they achieve that detailed paragraph. 

If you wanted to give students even more freedom, you could let them pick their sentences or trade with a peer rather than blindly choosing. 

Any time you can give students a choice, you give them permission to use their creativity and allow them to take some of the initiative in their own learning.

Teach Creative Writing to High School Students Step #8: Encourage Peer Collaboration and Feedback

We can tell students something a hundred times, but they won’t listen until a peer says the same thing. Us educators know the value of positive peer interaction, so don’t limit it in a creative writing class!

There are a ton of ways to implement peer interaction in a creative writing class. I often do this on the first day of class with a writing game. You’ve probably heard of it: everyone writes a sentence on a piece of paper, then everyone passes the paper and adds a sentence, and so on. 

I highly encourage you to use peer feedback throughout the class. I usually start having students share their work from day one with my free “I Am” Poem Lesson so that they can start getting used to having their work read by others immediately.

Make getting feedback so routine in your room that students don’t even question it.

It’s really tempting to let students get away without sharing their work. We don’t want to make shy or anxious students uncomfortable. I mean, what better way to completely ruin creative writing for a student than to make them feel embarrassed all the time, right?

But keep trying to encourage shy students to share. Even if that means you share it anonymously or read it aloud for them. 

I recommend including some kind of peer feedback with every writing assignment . Yes, even short practice assignments. This will work as a kind of “immersion therapy” for receiving feedback on more involved work.

After some time, you might find that your students even begin to share their work without your prompting! 

I like to organize the desks in my Creative Writing class so that students are in little groups. I’ve found that at least half of my classes will begin talking and sharing with one another in their little groups while working on projects. 

They’ll ask each other questions or to remind them of a word. They’ll read sentences aloud and ask if they sound right. Personally, I would much rather hear this kind of chatter in my class than have a dead silent room of boring writers!

However you decide to allow students to work together, be sure to provide the opportunity. Reading and getting feedback from peers could possibly teach students more about writing than any of your instruction (sorry!).

One of the truly great things about teaching creative writing to high school students is that there often isn’t a rigid curriculum. Of course, this is also sometimes one of the worst things about teaching creative writing to high school students!

You have total freedom over the assignments you give, the standards you teach, and how you organize and structure your classroom. After a few years of teaching Creative Writing, however, I’ve found that sticking to these six steps is a great way to have a successful semester.

If you’re excited about teaching your Creative Writing class, but are running low on prep time, check out my complete 9-week Creative Writing course ! Included are two different types of warm-ups, poetry analysis activities from well-known authors, mini-lesson, projects, and more!

4 strategies for teaching creative writing

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Tip 1: Crossing out

Tip 2: explicitly teach sentence stems, tip 3: build a planning routine, tip 4: go big or go home.

A blank page can be a fearful thing. As I sit typing this (cocooned in the corner of a bustling coffee shop), it seems a fearful thing to me, too. One by one, words tentatively appear, and yet the whiteness of the page dominates and suffocates the lettered blackness.

It can be an especially fearful thing for our students. Surrounded by the silence of an examination hall, pens scratching cold paper, they sit and stare at the mountainous alps of their booklet. The summit stretches out a great distance away, with so little time to plot and navigate their way.

This is often most keenly felt in creative writing. Being creative on demand is no easy task. The blankness of the paper is only compounded by the apparent blankness of ideas. And still, the clock ticks. In this article, I’ll share four top tips for helping students get better at creative writing, ensuring they always have something ready to fill the whiteness of the page.

One of the biggest conceptual shifts I’ve made in my teaching of creative writing is to focus on crossing out . When we—or our students— cross something out in their writing, what does it imply? It invariably implies a moment of thought and consideration. Is this the best word the gesture suggests, or should I use a different one?

Encouraging students to adopt a crossing-out mentality can be hugely powerful. As we write, I’ll often remind students to look for any words they could cross out, modelling this in my own writing. As I write, I cross out, always being sure to narrate why I’ve crossed something out and what is replacing it .

Of course, in and of itself, crossing out does not guarantee progress. It is a proxy, but a helpful one. Crossing out becomes a concrete and easily understood analogy for the kind of deliberate, sustained crafting that so often characterises the best writing. We don’t just want students to fill up their blank pages; we want them to fill them up with excellent writing .

In order to cross out, students need something to cross out in the first place. This is where repeatable and recyclable sentence stems come into their own. They provide students with snippets of excellent writing they can drag and drop into their response, adapting as necessary.

Students often complain—rightly so—that creative writing can be bereft of content to revise. Sentence stems give them something tangible to rehearse. Teach them in advance, show students how to manipulate them, and get students to experiment on their own.

If the sentence occupies the micro, then students also need a sharp and cohesive macro structure in order to succeed. This is where planning becomes essential.

To help students with this, I explicitly teach and model a particular planning routine that can be adapted and adopted at the start of an examination. This helps students make sure they’re asking the best questions as well as get them into the zone.

This routine always looks the same, sketched out on a single side of A4, and goes like this:

• POV: Students decide the narrative point of view they wish to adopt, which is especially valuable if responding to an image, like many questions require.
• Happy or sad: Students now consider if their point of view is happy or sad. I purposely keep this question very broad, but they may wish to be a little more nuanced in their emotional choice. The key is that they’re thinking about an emotional groove for their piece.
• Why? Now, students can reflect on why their point of view is happy or sad, beginning to build some kind of backstory or narrative thrust to their writing.

At this point, and with some basics covered, students can sketch out an overall structure for their response. At the most basic level possible, I like: First, Next, Next, And Then . What happens first, and then next, and then next, and then how does it end?

Finally, I ask students to consider a big idea they would like to convey within their writing.

With all of this mapped out, students can now begin to write.

Let’s pause for a moment on this idea of a ‘big idea’. It is easy to imagine what this means when teaching a literature text, and we probably spend a lot of time considering it with our classes.

What is Shakespeare trying to accomplish in Macbeth, we might explore? Interwoven with our discussion of the play, we consider Shakespeare’s depiction of power and the way it corrupts, as well as his depiction of kingship or femininity. These are some of the play’s big ideas.

A consideration of the ‘big’ is just as important for a student’s own writing as it is for the literature they study. What is it that they wish to show or explore in their writing? What do they want to do? Helping students to appreciate they can have something to say within their own writing can be truly empowering and liberating.

In my own modelling, I like to return to the concept of time . This unlocks so many interesting directions: transience, time passing, memory, recapturing youth. But it also provides a wealth of imagery for students to leverage. Wrinkled hands, a faded wedding ring, a scratched and crumpled photograph, an item of clothing lovingly stored away at the back of a wardrobe, gathering dust.

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A blank page can be a fearful thing, it’s true. But one filled with scribbled writing, well, that can be joyful.

These four strategies will hopefully help your students make sure they turn their blank pages into a piece of writing they can be truly proud of.

Andrew Atherton

Andrew Atherton is an English teacher at a school in Berkshire. He runs the popular blog site Codexterous , which includes a wealth of posts outlining strategies for teaching English Literature and English Language as well as lots of resources.

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