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Great stories are often about great characters. To get a feeling of what a character I am creating is all about, I like to make a collage from old magazines and newspapers.
Find pictures of things like: how they might look; the car they might drive; the sister they might have; the food they might like to eat; and so on.
The point is to feel that you know your character as if they were a real person.
Short stories for you to download for free. (To download these stories, click on the title and save to your desktop/device).
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Toby Jones, actor and writer, draws upon his experience in film and drama to create fun and inspirational writing games in this useful resource. Designed for secondary students, these activities will also be of interest to anyone looking for fun and inspiring creative writing activities.
Playwright Rachel Barnett has developed some fun and dynamic workshop exercises to generate imaginative creative writing. These activities were designed for use with young people at Key Stage 3 and 4 but will be of interest to anyone interested in developing characters for creative writing.
With an emphasis on the playful and even the anarchic, these quick and easy activities created by actor and writer Toby Jones will help teachers and pupils at both primary and secondary level to free up their thinking as a precursor to writing. Although designed for use in the classroom or a workshop setting, they will be of interest to anyone looking for fun and stimulating creative writing exercises.
Pie Corbett, author of many books promoting creative approaches in the classroom, uses games and quick-fire activities to 'jumpstart' writing. This comprehensive resource includes lots of examples of fun activities which are designed for use with both primary and secondary students, but which anyone looking to stimulate creative writing may find useful.
Screenwriter and novelist Andrew Norriss offers teachers, students at Key Stage 4 and A Level, and anyone with an interest in writing a professional's insight into the process of redrafting an extended piece of writing.
Write ‘I remember’ at the top of a page. Now, in 10 minutes, make a list of all the things you remember, from yesterday or 30 years ago. Go into detail with some.
The aim is to exercise your memory and start getting ideas for a story. Stories are often about small things. And because it happened to you, it should be believable and interesting.
In Ideas Everywhere Polly Dunbar set out to write a story about how to write a story. Based on the idea that scraps of paper can become ideas and then stories, Polly has used this method in classrooms where children have very quickly come up with brilliantly inventive, daft and yet rounded stories.
Get a pen and paper, and make sure you won’t be interrupted for five minutes. Now open a magazine or newspaper at any page, or turn on the TV, and write down the first line you read or hear.
Use this line as the first line of your writing. It doesn’t have to be a story, or even make sense. Do this every day for a week and see what happens – are you loosening up?
It’s easier to see where to start when you’ve got all your ideas onto a page, and you don’t forget any important bits either.
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Your local library is a great place to start. Many have collections of local historical documents, newspaper articles and photographs. You might have to arrange to see them in advance, so it’s worth ringing the library, or checking their website if you’re online.
What’s your story?
Truth is stranger than fiction, they say. So if creative writing isn’t your thing, why not do some detective work into your own family story? Or perhaps you’d like to know more about your local area and its history?
The Rough Guide to London by the Book is a special edition Rough Guide published for Get London Reading 2006.
From Bloomsbury to Bromley, Geoffrey Chaucer to Zadie Smith, London by the Book is a guide to the city through writers and their writing.
Packed with obscure and intriguing information (How did Graham Greene survive the bombing of his Clapham house in 1941? Which nineteenth-century poet was in the habit of sliding naked down the banisters?), it chronicles the waves of novelists, poets and playwrights who have lived in London over the centuries, written about it, and developed its identity as a result.
A writing club might just be you and a neighbour getting together every now and then and talking about your writing over a cup of tea; it might be a larger group of your friends and family; it might be a local group that already meets at the local library that you can join. It should be whatever works best for you.
Here you will find listings for short story competitions that you can enter, when they close and where to go to get your entry form.
To ensure this list stays comprehensive, if you're running a short story competition, please email us with a link to it.
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