creative writing activities elt

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4 christmas elt activities for your classroom, 7 ways to bring creative writing into the #efl classroom, 7 ways creative writing can help your efl students, classroom resources for easter, creative writing in the language classroom: 8 collected poems.

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Collaborative writing activities

Collaborative writing

Some teachers tend to avoid writing in class, perhaps feeling that as it is something which learners do individually and in silence, it is better done for homework.

However, when writing is done as a collaborative activity, it can have many of the same benefits of a group speaking activity:

Discussing the writing process obviously provides more opportunities for learners to interact in English, a benefit in itself.

It can also help learners to develop their communicative competence by forcing the negotiation of meaning. As learners try to express their ideas to each other, they will have to clarify, rephrase and so on. The process should also help them to actually develop their ideas.

According to Vygostsky’s theory of ZPD (zone of proximal development), working with others can provide the opportunity for learners to work at a level slightly above their usual capacity, as co-operating with others who know a little more can boost achievement.

Collaborative writing has been shown to lower anxiety and foster self-confidence, compared with completing tasks individually ( Johnson and Johnson 1998 )

Research by Storch , found that texts produced by pairs were shorter than those produced individually, but that they were better ‘in terms of task fulfilment, grammatical accuracy and complexity.’ It appeared that the process of working together meant that learners were giving each other useful feedback as they went along, and thereby producing more accurate and complex texts. [Incidentally, I plan to look at feedback on writing in a future post]

Collaborative writing can also be a lot of fun, and, with the growth of webtools for collaboration (not my personal expertise!), it is becoming increasingly popular.

Planning collaboratively

Planning is usually an important part of a successful writing process (though ‘free’ writing has its place). Even if students are to go on to write individually, planning together can be very motivating. It tends to work best if the process is given some kind of structure, so that the group is not simply staring at a blank sheet.

In terms of getting ideas, I love this activity from Learner based Teaching . Students are preparing to write about a topic they know a lot about, such as a hobby or their job. They write the topic at the top of a piece of paper, then, sitting in a circle, the pieces of paper are passed round clockwise. Students have to read each topic and add a question about it, making sure that they don’t duplicate any questions. When the paper comes back to its original author, they then have to write a text which answers ALL the questions, organised in a logical way. The texts are then displayed with the questions and see how they question was answered, asking for clarification if necessary.

One of my favourite activities for collaboratively planning academic type essays is to start by brainstorming the topic onto a mind-map on the board, or use a mind-mapping tool . For example, in describing a festival in your country, you might have sections for dress, food, music and so on.

Then stick a Cuisenaire rod of a different colour onto each section of the mind-map. Of course, you could use coloured strips of paper, but I like Cuisenaire rods… Next, put the students into smallish groups and give each group a set of rods in the same colours. They can then use the rods to decide or to order and arrange the topics within the essay. It’s a simple idea, but there is something about the tactile nature of the rods that seems to help with planning. It’s also concrete, rather than abstract.

Writing collaboratively

The first activity that came to my mind when thinking about collaborative writing was the time-honoured circle writing activity. One student writes a line, then passes it on to another who writes the next line and so on. I have to admit that I am not actually very keen on this activity. It can have some amusing outcomes, but I wonder what exactly the students are learning, as the process rarely produces a coherent or cohesive outcome.

One activity of this sort that I do like, however, is Genre Circle Writing, which I originally found in The Minimax Teacher . This works beautifully with more advanced learners who have been learning about the features of different genres. Start by brainstorming different types of narrative genres, such as news article, romance, conversation, fairytale, sci-fi. Ask each student to choose a genre they would like to write in and ask them to think about the features of their genre, e.g. typical vocabulary and fixed expressions, register, word and sentence length. Put the students into groups of 5-6, then ask each of the to write the first paragraph of a narrative in their genre. After an agreed time limit they pass the papers clockwise, read the new story and write the next paragraph, but in their own genre, rather than following the original genre. Continue until the story reaches its originator, who writes the concluding paragraph. Some of the stories can then be read aloud and the students listening have to say what genre they think each paragraph is. These texts won’t be any more coherent than the usual circle writing texts, but they are really good for raising awareness of genre.

Jigsaw writing is another way of structuring collaborative writing, so that the process is clearly defined. This works well with picture stories or cartoon strips. Put students into small groups and give each group one or two pictures from the sequence. They have to write a paragraph describing what is happening or happened in their picture(s), and should have a copy each. [Incidentally, make sure everyone is using the same tense. ]Then regroup the students into larger groups so that there is someone in each group who has written about each of the pictures, and ask them to decide on the correct order of the pictures and make any changes necessary to turn their paragraphs into a coherent whole. Students can then read and compare the different versions.

If students are quite used to working together, and don’t need quite so much structure, adding an element of competition can provide some fun and motivation. This activity also comes from Learner-based Teaching. Ask the class to choose a current event or issue. Then put them into small groups (3-4) and ask them to write a short article about it together. They should try to make the article as informative as possible. Once the groups have finished the articles are passed around. Each group should look for pieces of information or facts which their group did not remember. Students can then vote for the most informative (and best written) text

What other collaborative writing activities have you used successfully?

55 responses to “ Collaborative writing activities ”

I’m a big fan of collaborative writing! I think the circle writing activity can work with a follow-up (I’ll write this up for my blog sometime). I also have a nice collaborative idea writing a newspaper story using pictures from newspapers that I should write up so thanks for giving me some ideas! Some great new ideas for me here too. I think collaborative writing can be a really good way of getting students to write ‘by stealth’ but you do have to be careful that it doesn’t just end up with the stronger writers doing all the work…

Hi Jo, Thanks for the comment, and looking forward to hearing about your circle writing activity. I agree that there is sometimes an issue with stronger writers taking over, which is why I think it usually works best when everyone has a fairly defined role.

Right confession time coming up. I often say that writing is important and that it should be given class time because of that… I usually use class time only when I need to kill time (which I’m sure the students take as some alternative message to writing is an important skill that you must practice and takes effort)

Having got that off my chest there are occasions when I love group work on writing collaboratively. I did a really fun extension on the classic game consequences where I encouraged pairs to use their game as an outline for a story. I was amazed (and scared by the results)

I also really love my mixed up stories activity where you get every students activity from the weekend/holiday, jumble them up on the board and then students have to guess (and write up) what other people did that weekend/holiday great fun.

In my experience it has only worked when I have given it significant class time.

Thanks for commenting and adding your ideas- I especially like the sound of the mixed up stories. I agree that writing often needs a decent amount of time and, in my experience, having it as a final activity nearly always leads to it being abandoned and ‘finished for homework.’

Hi Rachael, I’ve been blogging recently on writing activities over at http://dogmediaries.wordpress.com/ , in particular, circular writing, which you don’t like 🙂 I guess much depends on the level of the writing level of the students. What are the students learning, you ask. Well, for one thing, they enjoy the activity, so motivation is high, which leads to greater learning possibilities. Second, I monitor and correct constantly, so I hope they are learning to write better. Bear in mind that, at this stage, I’m more worried about their writing in structurally correct sentences than their writing style.

Really, sorry, Chiew, don’t know how I missed this comment. Yes, motivation is a key factor, and, actually, I don;’t think there’s anything wrong with ‘writing for fluency’ sometimes. It’s just the way that circle texts are necessarily disjointed and incoherent that I’m not that keen on. Though, of course, they can be used as the basis for further work.

Haha, and there I was thinking you were ignoring me on purpose 😉 I actually disagree with your “necessarily” – why should it be disjointed and incoherent? It’s a challenge for the students to maintain some kind of flow; they have to read what was written before they start writing. It becomes not only a writing activity, but a reading one, too. Thanks for somehow finding my “lost” comment and replying! 🙂

Fair enough, I guess it shouldn’t be disjointed, but,in my experience, stds generally don’t bother worrying too much about coherence and cohesion. I would never ignore you! 😉

Haha, that’s very sweet of you 🙂 I suppose it depends on many factors – level, aims, number of students, etc. Just as in so many other circumstances, it’s the teacher who has to know if a certain activity is apt for the class or not, I think.

Yes, absolutely.

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i have not really used collab writing so your post is v useful and just been reading chris wilson’s post on wiki writing so lots of things to think about. the first individual writing activity you describe involving getting others in the class to write questions on student-chosen topic i find appealing.

i guess a benefit of group writing is a way to get students to think of a reading audience beyond their teacher? does the fact that they need to co-construct a text lead to such audience questions more than individual writing?

the paper you cite, Storch, showed that most time was spent on generating ideas, which i find the problematic stage in individual writing. as seen by how relatively poor the outcome is terms of content.

I think audience is very important (see post on Real Life Writing) and getting the audience involved like this works well. This is reminding me now of something else I’ve read recently…will think what it was. I also agree that getting ideas is often problematic- especially, perhaps, for IELTS students who are asked to write about issues they often have never thought about before. Thanks for more thought provocation!

Thanks for sharing your thoughts. I’m particularly fond of collaborative planning. I often use a “post-it” chat activity to prepare for writing. It’s a silent conversation that produces a thread of sticky notes that can be re-arranged afterwards to be used as a writing plan. I blogged about it here for the first time: http://mrschenk.wordpress.com/2012/01/04/silent-post-it-chats/ and elaborated on it here: http://mrschenk.wordpress.com/2012/07/06/multiple-post-it-chats/

That’s really nice- I love the chain of post-its- also very tactile. Thanks for adding it.

Dear sir, U touched the integration of writing and reading or actually how writing could help in developing the skill reading. I want to ask about the importance of following up of the four skills as well as the sequence of the syllabus and the teacher”s marking as an instructional procedure in the process of ELT.

Thanks for commenting. I think in most situations it’s important to have a balance between the skills, and ideally, they should be integrated. Marking or feedback is an important area, and I plan to blog on this soon- there are some interesting comments on this after my post on genre writing too.

Hello Rachael, and thanks for this post! I liked the various activities you listed and described, and I must say I have tried most of them in my classes. However, even though at first I am extremely enthusiastic about the exercises, sometimes the reality bites and I have to eliminate an activity from the list. Why? Well, I teach extremely mixed-level classes. I work in an art school getting students from different walks of life with vary different levels of English yet the final objective is fixed by the programme, so some students have to accomplish an incredible lot, whereas others are almost there immediately. So, in a nutshell, I have for example 15 students with levels from A2 to B2. Now, in a situation like that some activities simply won’t work, no matter how much I would like them to. However, some collaborative writing I do use regularly. For the very reason you pointed out quoting Vygotsky. I like having a group of three different level students composing a story together. It can be so useful, efficient and rewarding. Useful for everyone: weaker students have their peers helping them in a non threatening environment. They have time, they dare to ask for more explanation, they won’t shy away when something’s not clear. The stronger students can only solidify their knowledge! It’s efficient because instead of one teacher dragging along 15 students, then correcting 15 different stories, what we get is a cluster of groups working on their own and producing one hopefully well-polished writing in the end! And it’s rewarding – classroom time has been used efficiently and there is an end product everyone has contributed to. So to answer your question – the writing activities that work really well in a mixed-level class like mine is writing together as a group.

Thanks for the comment, that’s a great example. It’s also not unusual in UK ESOL classes to have a great spread of levels, so this kind of approach can work there too. You might also be interested in the Language Experience Approach if you don’t already know about it, as another way of dealing with mixed level groups productively.

Thanx Rachael for the tip. No, I didn’t know about this approach. Really glad to hear about methods suitable for mixed level classes. Really in need of that!!!!!

Great resource for teachers.

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Hey Rachael, I really enjoyed this piece. I write a blog on Dogme ELT ( http://geraldvonbourdeau.wordpress.com/ ) in the writing classroom and will certainly give some of these ideas a shot in my classes. Cheers!

That’d be great. I’ve just popped over and it looks good. I’ll take a longer look soon.

Reblogged this on Teaching Unplugged in the Triggering Town and commented: Excellent collaborative writing ideas from Rachael Roberts.

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Hi, great post. I really like your comments and ideas. I’m looking forward to using some of them soon.

I do a lot of collaborative writing projects using a Wiki with my classes. Wikis are great as a tool for writing and sharing. If you are interested, check out a post I did about it.

http://1brainsandwich.blogspot.com/2013/02/classroom-make-over.html

Thanks again and keep the posts coming!!

Thanks for commenting, and for the link. Great to have a good example of how students can use a wiki for collaborative writing!

Lots of thanks Rachael Roberts, I bombed your technique of collaborative writing, so fantastic and implementable. I used the technique in my real class and my students enjoyed a lot.Hope some more from you in the days to come. Chetlal Chaudhary Nepal [email protected]

Thank you very much, Chetlal 🙂

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hi thanks for this post. it was very helpful. by the way,i need to find a collaborative writing topic for my class. actually, it is for a research on collaborative writing in wikisapces. can you help me in this regard?

Thanks for stopping by. It’s a bit hard to suggest a topic because it depends on the age and interests of your students.

Fab blog post, very much enjoyed. Am just about to embark on a project where a group of under-16s and I are writing and producing our own film – want them to tell their own story, what affects them and their peers, and present it in a new and unique way. Hoping that some of these collaborative writing exercises will get them going at our first session this evening!

Thanks very much, Charlie. Hope it went well.

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Reblogged this on Talking About Writing and commented: I’ve been doing my collaborative writing exclusively with advanced students, preparing for IELTS. Here are some ideas for other student groups.

Hi, Rachael… I am a student, actually, I have been doing my research about Story Circle Activity (I found it on Harmer’s book (2007)). I just wonder that It seems as same as Genre Circle Writing. I really need the theory of Story Circle Activity (or Genre Circle Writing) to support my research. Do you have some references about it? and if you don’t mind, could you share it to me, please? Thank you 🙂

I think it goes back a lot further than 2007, but I don’t have an actual reference for the first time it was used. I’ll ask around for you.

PS I imagine it originally came from the game of Consequences, which is at least Victorian and probably earlier http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consequences_(game)

It’s in Writing Games (1990) and Jill Hadfield says she thought she might have seen it before that in something by Alan Maley. I’ve also just found it in Keep Talking, Frederike Klippel (1983) .

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Hi professor I am a English Language teacher in junior school and also ELT MA students I am writting proposals please guide me my topics: 1- Turn taking problems. 2- Group working. 3- pretask activity for teaching reading.

Sorry, I’m not sure what you’re asking..which I think is most interesting? I would say that task 2 is probably a much bigger topic than either of the other two.

Collaborative Writing can sure increase the students’ communicative competence and writing performance too.

However I disagree that Theory of JPD is of use in Collaborative Writing. For JPD-Theory, we need two standards of ability : one who they don’t know more and next who do know more. And in a class, learners tend to be of nearly the same ability!

Thanks for commenting. In my experience, no two students know exactly the same things, so there is always room for students to help each other and provide scaffolding, as Vygotsky suggests.

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Very useful activities. I got great ideas to teach all age groups. I am too much thankful for all suggestions.

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Fun ESL Writing Activities ( See Activities )

There are many kinds of ESL Writing tasks, such as free writing, creative writing, and guided writing (i.e., an essay).

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I like to get my students started with free writing at the beginning of each class to encourage creativity and relieve pressure of making mistakes.

Steps to Free writing

Suggest the topic for Free writing.
Suggest the time limit (e.g., start with five minutes for higher level students and three minutes for lower level students). Try to increase the time each week.
Get Ready, Get Set, START WRITING !

Four Rules of Free writing

1. keep writing don’t stop .

Write as much as possible! Aim for quantity over quality. If you can’t think of anything, then simply write, “I can’t think of anything to write.”

2. No dictionaries!

Looking words up in the dictionary takes a lot of time. If you don’t know a word, they write the word in your language, try to explain it in a different way, or skip it and move on.

3. Don’t worry about mistakes!

The goal is to write as much as possible without worrying about grammar mistakes or vocabulary. Don’t worry about spelling, word usage, etc. Just write!

4. No talking!

Free writing is a time for you to write. Don't talk until the Free speaking time is finished.

Ideas for Free writing

Tell each student to write one word on the board. Then, tell the students to create a story using the words. It’s not necessary to use all the words.
Students write about their weekend to practice using past tense verbs.
Give students a topic each week similar to Free Speaking (e.g., Hometown, Food & Restaurants, etc.).

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7 steps Towards Creative Thinking in the ELT Classroom

Creativity and creative thinking are generally viewed as positive elements in a classroom. When students are being creative, we assume they are having fun, they are motivated and they are using language in a way which will be memorable to them. Similarly, when we describe a colleague as ‘creative’, it’s assumed we are being positive about that teacher. And yet our definition(s) of what creativity is can vary from teacher to teacher, and how we practically integrate creative thinking into the language classroom can present a real challenge. In a recent webinar on this topic, I addressed some of these issues and would like to outline some of the key points below.

Defining creativity and creative thinking

Let’s start with a few perspectives on what creativity is. If we base our definition on Bloom’s Taxonomy, then to ‘create’ is the highest of the 6 cognitive processes. “Students make a new product by mentally reorganizing some elements or parts into a pattern or structure not clearly present before.” (Anderson & Krathwohl, 2001, p.84) In the ELT classroom, this means that the student creates something new by drawing from all the language they have at their disposal and – perhaps writing a poem, making a comic, or creating a blog.

Another perspective separates creativity into big ‘C’ and little ‘c’ (Pugliese, 2010): Big ‘C’ views creativity in terms of historical originality. It’s linked to the work of great artists who achieve breakthroughs which are valued by society. In terms of the ELT classroom, we might bring in works by famous writers, musicians and artists to provide stimulus for a lesson or to inspire students to try and produce something themselves. The little ‘c’ definition is more about creative thinking and the process we all undergo to solve a problem and achieve a task. It’s about personal breakthroughs and in the ELT classroom, it might be that moment when a student writes a short poem using the language they have learned or when a group of students discuss and solve a problem. In the case of the poem, it isn’t big ‘C’ but the little ‘c’ process itself should be viewed as a major achievement for the student. In the case of problem-solving, we are thinking in terms of creative thinking as a twenty-first-century skill and the students’ ability to ‘innovate’ (Trilling and Fadel, 2009).

Thinking outside and inside the box

If we agree that creativity is important in the language classroom, then as teachers we need to consider how we will integrate into our lesson planning. The expression ‘thinking outside the box’ is often used to reflect the idea that creativity is all about imagination and generating new ideas. In classroom terms, it might be the act of putting students into groups and having them brainstorm lots of new ideas. However, it’s misleading to think that this kind of divergent thinking activity alone is enough for creativity and a myth to believe that all creativity comes from thinking outside the box (Burkus, 2014). Creativity thinking also requires convergent thinking in which students reflect on their ideas and apply some judgment (Robinson, 2017, p.131). So, for example, when you ask students to brainstorm new ideas, it’s important for them afterwards to think critically about their ideas and select those that they believe will be effective (Dummett & Hughes, 2019). We could call convergent thinking like this ‘thinking inside the box’. Perhaps it seems counter-intuitive to set limits or constraints on students thinking in this way but, in fact, “constraints force creativity: too much freedom stifles it.” (Didau, D. (2015) Similarly, when we set limits on students, they often find it easier to be creative. After all, if I asked students to write a story with no prompts, most would find it hard to begin. On the other hand, if I give them ten new words I want them to use in the story, most will find it easier to write with such a constraint. They also see the value from a language learning point of view if the ten words are vocabulary they are trying to learn.

Break habitual patterns of thinking

One of the simplest ways of introducing creativity into the classroom is when you break with the normal routines of a lesson – and I’m referring here to both the teachers and the students. It’s easy over time to follow routines in teaching and learning and to assume there’s one way to do something. Speaking from personal experience of teaching English for nearly 30 years, I know that I have developed routine ways of teaching certain language points. Only recently, I taught a low-level class on the topic of describing rules using the target grammar of have to/can’t . Typically, I’d present the grammar structure and then ask students to write sentences about rules in their own countries such as You have to drive on the right in my country. In my recent lesson, I realized I’d fallen into a routine pattern of teaching this structure so – for a change – I asked students to imagine they were the government of a new country. Working in groups, they had to think of a name for their new country and a new set of rules. The activity generated many more creative ideas for rules such as ‘You don’t have to pay taxes’, ‘You can swim with the dolphins’ and – my favorite – ‘You have to drive on the right in the morning and on the left in the evening.’ So creativity in the classroom is as much about the teacher thinking creatively as it is for the students.

When and where do we get creative ideas?

Finally, it’s worth considering the right conditions for creativity and language learning. I was struck by a report on a survey carried out amongst the top CEOs of large businesses. These people were problem-solvers and they were asked about when and where they got their most creative solutions (Smart, 2015). The top three answers were as follows: in the shower, on vacation, traveling to and from work . What was most striking was that no one said ‘a t work ’. In other words, all their creative thinking happened outside of their everyday office environment. I wonder if the same might be true in terms of the classroom. We often do creative thinking (higher-order) activities in the classroom and set lower-order thinking activities such as fill-the-gap type exercises for homework. But there’s also a strong argument for setting homework tasks that encourage creativity. These could include project work, preparing a presentation, or making a video. Note that I’m not making an either-or argument about when and where creativity should happen, only that we should be open to encouraging it both inside and outside the classroom.

For more ideas, thoughts and practical activities related to this topic, you could watch a recording of my webinar here.

Anderson, L. & Krathwohl, D (2001) A taxonomy for learning, teaching and assessing Pearson

Burkus, D. (2014) The Myths of Creativity Jossey-Bass

Didau, D. (2015) What if everything you knew about education was wrong?” Carmarthen, UK and Bethel, CT: Crown House Publishing

Dummett & Hughes (2019) Critical thinking in ELT National Geographic Learning

Pugliese, C. (2010) Being creative Delta Publishing

Robinson, K. (2017) Out of our minds Capstone

Smart, J. (2015) The little book of clarity Capstone

Trilling, B. & Fadel, C. (2009) 21 st Century Skills Jossey-Bass

Author: John Hughes

I was writing about creativity in the classroom recently, and I found it a hard concept to define. Your article helped a lot. Have you come across dynamic and static creativity too? I came across these notions in a book by David Deutsch. If I recall, static creativity is the ability to adapt to the constraints of living in human society, for example, a first day at a new school. The child is obliged to re create the world around him or her – a mental model – in order to operate effectively. To do so requires similar cognitive processes to other creative acts. I think that was Deutsch’s point. (I don’t know where he drew on the concepts or if he made them up) Dynamic creativity was defined as being let ‘off the leash’ like Mozart or Dylan. I wondered therefore if a significant element of artistic creativity is daring to step outside the constraints.

Hi James. Definitions of creativity do vary and my article only covers some of them which I have found useful as a language teacher. I’m not familiar with the Deutsch book but your outline above is interesting. Being ‘let off the leash’ is a little like ‘thinking out the box’ in that creators like Mozart and Dylan spent time thinking inside the box and understanding what it is that makes great music (requiring critical thinking and perhaps what you mean by ‘static creativity’) and then they went ‘off the leash’ and applied what they’d discovered in new and original ways. Anyway, I’ll go off and take a look at the Deutsch book – do you have a title?

Connecting ELT professionals in Australasia and beyond

Creative writing in the esl classroom.

post by Cat McLean

Recently, Cat McLean posted a request for ideas to the #AusELT Facebook page:

The #AusELT community responded enthusiastically with many ideas and suggestions (you can read the thread on Facebook here ). Cat then generously agreed to compile the responses so we have a permanent record of them and she has written this brilliant blog post. Enjoy and learn!

Creative Writing in the ESL Classroom

I teach creative writing to pre-intermediate and intermediate ESL students. I have a creative writing background, so at the start, I tried a lot of the techniques that were taught to me by my own creative writing teachers. Some things worked in the ESL context, others didn’t. I’m loath to admit that a lot of the time, my approach to this course was rather (ahem) experimental, often with far too little scaffolding. So I took my dilemma to the #AusELT brains trust. Here’s what we came up with as a better approach to creative writing in the ESOL context.

It’s a triple didactic challenge

If the students don’t have a good background as readers, they will be unable to write anything decent even in their L1. That’s why a course like this is a triple challenge for an educator. A great piece of advice in the discussion was this: Develop students as readers in BOTH languages, develop them as analysts, and then develop them as writers.

Develop them as readers

Let’s start with how to develop students as readers. You should provide students with opportunities of extensive reading of creative writing genres as part of the class or for homework. This will inspire their writing and help them to have a grammar goal to work towards. Give them a related activity such as thinking about how many tenses the author used on one page and asking them to replicate it in their own piece later on.

If you do well, maybe you will get lucky and see the students put the learning into their own hands. One contributor to the conversation mentioned the idea of a book club to his students and a small group decided to start one of their own where they got through one graded reader a week.

Try to help them find a genre that works for them – or at least one that is familiar to them. My students are 90% Colombian, so I have tried to use some translations of Latin American magic realism with which they are likely to be familiar. You could also use fairytales as a stepping stone for students to retell stories from their own culture.

The next step: Understanding text and technique

Before they can write their own piece, students must comprehend writing techniques and how to use them. You should provide extracts from a variety of texts and go through fabula, plot, text organisation and structure, tropes, narrative styles, as well as the differences between metaphor, comparison and simile. Students should do plenty of theoretical and practical literary and linguistic analysis prior to actually writing something. This is how they can acquire sophisticated grammatical understanding.

Richard Ingold’s work on exploiting model texts provides strategies to apply grammar analysis of a model text and how to apply it to new writing. His work has an academic focus but many strategies could be equally used to demonstrate the link between grammar and creative writing more explicitly.

Give them grammar

In a creative writing class, it’s typical for ESL students to want more grammar handouts and tangible things. Students often need to be taught that education doesn’t only exist in gap fill exercises, it can exist in authentic texts and other realia. Here are some suggestions to combat this sort of thinking:

What grammar would you use if you’re talking about this…: Ask them to think about and discuss this question before they start an activity.

What would you do if…: Give students some activities that use certain grammar points in narrative; such as narrative tenses or conditionals. For example, ask them to write a story with the prompt ‘What would you do if…?’

Reflection: At the end of class, ask students to reflect on the grammar points and vocabulary they encountered during the class.

Peer correction: At the end of a writing activity, ask students to pass their writing to another student and ask them to correct that person’s errors. This one will do wonders for your sanity too so you’re not running between students beckoning you over to correct every little mistake they make.

Unleashing creativity

So we’ve finally made it to the creating stage. I’m sure I’m not alone in that the majority of my students have never done anything creative whatsoever. No macaroni artworks in primary school, no high school drawing class, and certainly no creative writing. You must teach them how to be creative, how to generate ideas, and how to let go. This can be scary for students who have never been allowed to do so.

So how can we teach them to let go?

Writing storms: One idea to help students feel more comfortable writing freely in English is to use writing storms. In other words, just write. Students write about something of their choosing or via a prompt for 3-4 minutes without stopping to edit or look up words. Tell them not to worry about accuracy or appropriacy of forms, choices, spelling, or punctuation. This is a good bridging activity to get them writing on a more regular basis.

Here, follow-up need not be editing and improving. It could be simply providing them the opportunity to reflect on the piece’s message, purpose, or what they could add in their own and others’ writing.

Inspire them with World Englishes: Another idea is to share some writing that is representative of World Englishes. This will help students feel more comfortable with the idea that even through they don’t write English in a typical way a native speaker would, it doesn’t make it less valid.

The variation and beauty of alternate English can be an asset to their work. One of my students wrote a piece titled ‘Life Is Not Pink in Colour’ – a strangely worded title to the English ear, but I found something very poetic in the way it was expressed.

Here is another inspirational character, a young slam poet called Solli Raphael. His book, Limelight , might be inspirational for students and will provide them with some great writing tips.

Where to from here?

Once your students have a better grip on the power of reading and literary/linguistic analysis, and the creative juices are flowing, it’s time to start creating their own texts.

Short film: Short films are a good stimulus for creative writing. One contributor found short films to be a good stimulus for creative writing. Show a short (around 3-12 minute) film and then ask them to write “what happens next” or “what happened before”. This way, they already have the idea of a narrative, scene, and characters.

You can find some film suggestions on the #AusELT website Movies & Videos page here .

Story reproduction via a model text: Dictate one of your own short stories on a particular prompt like ‘an embarrassing moment’. The students hear it once and try to summarise what happened. They hear it again and can make a note of the main plot points. Then you tell them that they’ll need to recreate it with a partner and give them one more listen. They then have to write it down. This will help you find what grammar they need and to help them analyse the grammar in your story and how it’s used in creative writing. Then they use the same prompt to write a story of their own. This is a nice way of satisfying their desire for grammar, while still encouraging them to create something of their own.

Embrace artistry through graphic novel/comics: Many students will shudder at the thought of drawing, but even stick figure storyboards can be effective. One suggestion was to have students storyboard an article about a man who got lost in the desert and survived by eating frogs. The written focus in these kinds of activity can be on short utterances – mainly dialogue and descriptions.

If the issue of drawing is causing a stalemate, you can use existing textless graphic novels (or blank out the text) and have them write in the text.

Language is poetry: A daily 10 minute poem challenge is a nice way to warm up or cool down. Try some easy (non-rhyming) poetry like adjective, shape, acrostic or simple haikus every day.

Dancing with the Pen: The Learner as a Writer by New Zealand Ministry Of Education staff

Reading for Life: The Learner As A Reader by New Zealand Ministry Of Education staff

Creative Output: Activities for Teaching Speaking and Writing by Hall Houston and Gerhard Erasmus

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43 Creative writing exercises

A selection of fun creative writing exercises that can be completed solo, or with a group. Some are prompts to help inspire you to come up with story ideas, others focus on learning specific writing skills.

I run a Creative Writing Meetup for adults and teens in Montpellier or online every week. We start with a 5 to 20 minute exercise, followed by an hour and a half of silent writing, during which each participant focuses on their own project. Every exercise listed below has been run with the group and had any kinks ironed out. Where the exercises specify a number of people, if you have a larger group, simply split everyone up into smaller groups as appropriate.

The solo exercises are ideal to help stimulate your mind before working on a larger project, to overcome writer’s block, or as stand-alone prompts in their own right. If a solo exercise inspires you and you wish to use it with a larger group, give every member ten minutes to complete the exercise, then ask anyone who wishes to share their work to do so in groups of 3 or 4 afterwards.

Looking for something quick to fire your imagination? Check out these creative writing prompts for adults .

Writing Retreat in South France

A note on running exercises remotely

While you can enjoy the exercises solo, they are also designed for online writing groups using Zoom, WhatsApp, or Discord.

If you're running a group and follow a ' Shut Up and Write ' structure, I recommend connecting on WhatsApp (for example) first, doing the exercise together, sharing writing samples as needed. Next, write in silence for an hour and a half on your own projects, before reconnecting for a brief informal chat at the end. This works great with small remote groups and is a way to learn new techniques, gain online support, and have a productive session.

If you have a larger online group, it's worth looking into Zoom, as this has a feature called Breakout Rooms . Breakout Rooms let you split different writers into separate rooms, which is great for group activities. The free version of Zoom has a 40 minute limit, which can be restrictive, but Zoom Pro is well worth it if you're going to use it on a regular basis. In my experience, Zoom has a better connection than Facebook chat or WhatsApp.

A Letter From Your Character To You

Letter from fictional character to the author

Spend ten minutes writing a letter from a character in your novel to you , the author, explaining why you should write about them. This serves three purposes:

As you write, it helps you get into the mindset of the character. Ask yourself how they would language this letter and what they would consider important.
It's motivating to know that your character wants you to write about them.
If your goal is to publish a complete work of fiction one day, whether it be a novel, a play or a movie script, you will want to contact an agent or publisher. This helps you practice in an easy, safe way.

If you're doing this exercise with a group of teens or adults, and some of the group haven't already started working on their masterpiece, they can instead choose any fictional novel they love. Ask participants to imagine that a character within the book wrote to the author in the first place to ask them to write their story. How did they plead their case?

The Opening Sentence

The opening sentence has to grab the reader's attention and make them want to keep reading. Many authors achieve this by starting with an action scene. In modern literature, it's best to avoid starting with someone waking up, or a description of the weather. In this exercise the task is to write an opening sentence either to a book you're currently writing, or simply for an imaginary piece of literature. Here are some of my favourite opening sentences to get you going:

It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.

George Orwell , 1984

The Golem's life began in the hold of a steamship.

Helene Wecker , The Golem and the Djinni

All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

Leo Tolstoy , Anna Karenina

It wasn't a very likely place for disappearances, at least at first glance.

Diana Gabaldon , Outlander

You better not never tell nobody but God.

Alice Walker , The Color Purple

The cage was finished.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez , Balthazar’s Marvelous Afternoon

Imagine that you are living your life out of order: Lunch before breakfast, marriage before your first kiss.

Audrey Niffenegger , The Time Traveler's Wife

Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun.

Douglas Adams , The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

There are a plethora of ways you can start a book, however two ways that help engage the reader immediately are:

Set the scene in as few words as possible, so the reader immediately knows what's happening and wants to know what happens next. The scene must be original and create a vivid image in the reader's mind.
Surprise the reader with an unusual event or usual point of view.

Spend 5 minutes working on your own opening sentence, then share it with the other participants.

Make your protagonist act!

Exercise for 2 writers, or can be done solo.

According to John Gardner:

"Failure to recognise that the central character must act, not simply be acted upon, is the single most common mistake in the fiction of beginners."

Spend 5 minutes writing a scene where the protagonist is passive in a conversation with one other character. It could be that the other character says something dramatic, and the protagonist just listens, or it could be anything else of your choice!

Once the 5 minutes is up, swap papers with another writer. If you're using Zoom, or working online, send it to each other in a private chat. Now the other person spends 8 minutes rewriting the scene to make the protagonist as active as possible. This might include:

Read both scenes together. Which makes you want to keep on reading?

If you're doing this as a solo writing exercise, simply complete both parts yourself.

Showing the emotion this evokes.
Getting them to disagree with the other character.
Showing how they respond physically (whether it's as a physical manifestation of how they feel, or a dramatic gesture to make a point).

Overcoming writer's block

Are you staring at a blank page or stuck for any story ideas? This exercise will help anyone who's experiencing writer's block with a particular piece of writing. If this isn't you, that's great, others will value your input!

If anyone has a particular scene they're stuck with (a pool of blood on the floor they have no explanation for, a reason why the rich lady just walked into a particular pub, etc.) then at the start of the exercise everyone briefly describes their scenes (if working online with a large group, typing it into the chat might be best). Everyone then chooses one scene to use as a writing prompt to write a short story for 10-15 minutes.

Afterwards, split into small groups if necessary, and read out how you completed someone else's writing prompt. As everyone listens to everyone else's ideas, this can be a wonderful source of inspiration and also improves your writing. As an alternative solo exercise, try free writing. With free writing, simply write as quickly as you can on the topic without editing or censoring yourself - just let your creative juices flow. If you're not sure what happens next, brainstorm options on the page, jot down story ideas, or just put, "I don't know what happens next." Keep going and ideas will come.

Writing Character Arcs

There are several different types of character arc in a novel, the 3 most common being:

For this exercise choose either a positive or negative character arc. Spend 8 minutes writing a scene from the start of a novel, then 8 minutes writing a scene towards the end of a novel showing how the character has developed between the two points. Don't worry about including how the character has changed, you can leave that to the imagination.

The point here is to capture the essence of a character, as they will be the same, but show their development.

Positive - Where a character develops and grows during the novel. Perhaps they start unhappy or weak and end happy or powerful.
Negative - Where a character gets worse during a novel. Perhaps they become ill or give in to evil tendencies as the novel progresses.
Flat - In a flat character arc the character themself doesn't change much, however the world around them does. This could be overthrowing a great injustice, for example.

Sewing Seeds in Your Writing

In this exercise, we will look at how to sew seeds. No, not in your garden, but in your story. Seeds are the tiny hints and indicators that something is going on, which influence a reader's perceptions on an often unconscious level. They're important, as if you spring a surprise twist on your readers without any warning, it can seem unbelievable. Sew seeds that lead up to the event, so the twists and turns are still surprising, but make intuitive sense. Groups : Brainstorm major plot twists that might happen towards the end of the novel and share it in a Zoom chat, or on pieces of paper. Choose one twist each. Individuals : Choose one of the following plot twists: - Your friend is actually the secret son of the king. - Unreliable narrator - the narrator turns out to be villain. - The monster turns out to be the missing woman the narrator is seeking. - The man she is about to marry happens to already have a wife and three kids.

Write for ten minutes and give subtle hints as to what the plot twist is. This is an exercise in subtlety. Remember, when the twist occurs, it should still come as a surprise.

This is a fun writing activity for a small group. You’ve found a magic potion labelled ‘Cat Chat’ and when you drink it, you turn into whichever animal you’re thinking about; but there’s a problem, it also picks up on the brainwaves of other people near you!

Everyone writes down an animal in secret and then reveals it to the other writers. The spell will turn you into a creature that combines elements of all the animals. Each person then spends 5 minutes writing down what happens when they drink the potion.

After the 5 minutes is up, everyone shares their story with the other participants.

If you enjoy this exercise, then you may also want to check out our Fantasy and Sci-Fi writing prompts full of world building, magic, and character development prompts..

Joe Brainard wrote a novel called: I Remember It contains a collection of paragraphs all starting with “I remember”. This is the inspiration for this exercise, and if you’re stuck for what to write, is a great way to get the mental gears turning. Simply write “I remember” and continue with the first thing that pops into your head.

Spend 5 minutes writing a short collection of “I remember” stories.

Here are a couple of examples from Joe Brainard’s novel:

“I remember not understanding why people on the other side of the world didn't fall off.”

“I remember waking up somewhere once and there was a horse staring me in the face.”

Giving feedback to authors

If you're running a workshop for more experienced adult authors and have at least an hour, this is a good one to use. This is the longest exercise on this page, but I felt it important enough to include.

Give each author the option to bring a piece of their own work. This should be double spaced and a maximum of 3 pages long. If you're running a workshop where not everyone is likely to bring a manuscript, ask everyone who wants to bring one to print two copies each. If someone forgets but has a laptop with them, the reader can always use their laptop.

Print out a few copies and hand them around to everyone in the workshop of the guide on: 'How to give constructive feedback to writers'

Each author who brought a sample with them then gives them to one other person to review. They write their name on the manuscript in a certain colour pen, then add any comments to it before passing it to a second person who does the same (commenting on the comments if they agree or disagree).

Then allow 5 minutes for everyone to discuss the feedback they've received, ensuring they are giving constructive feedback.

The Five Senses

Painting by Giovanni Battista Manerius - The Five Senses

Choose a scene and write it for 5 minutes focusing on one sense, NOT sight. Choose between:

Hearing Taste Smell Touch

This can be internal as well as external (I heard my heartbeat thudding in my ears, or I smelt my own adrenaline).

After the 5 minutes stop and everyone reads it out loud to each other. Now write for another 5 minutes and continue the other person's story, but do NOT use sight OR the sense they used.

You can use any sense to communicate the essentials, just focus on creating emotions and conveying the story with the specific sense(s).

If you need some writing prompts, here are possible scenes that involve several senses:

Climbing through an exotic jungle
Having an argument that becomes a fight
A cat's morning
Talking to someone you're attracted to

Show don't tell

2 or 3 people

A lot of writing guides will advise you to, "Show, don't tell". What does this actually mean?

If you want to evoke an emotional reaction from your reader, showing them what is happening is a great way to do so. You can approach this in several ways:

Split up into pairs and each person writes down a short scene from a story where they "tell" it. After this, pass the description of the scene to your partner and they then have 5 minutes to rewrite it to "show" what happened. If there are an odd number of participants, make one group of three, with each person passing their scene clockwise, so everyone has a new scene to show. After the 5 minutes, for small groups everyone reads their new description to everyone else, or for large groups, each person just reads their new scene to their partner.

Avoid internal dialogue (thinking), instead have your protagonist interact with other people, or have a physical reaction to something that shows how s/he feels. Does their heart beat faster? Do they notice the smell of their own adrenaline? Do they step backwards, or lean forwards?
Instead of using an adjective like creepy, e.g. "Mary entered the creepy house", show why the house is creepy through description and in the way the protagonist responds - "The light streamed through the filthy skylight, highlighting the decomposing body of a rat resting on top of it. As Mary stepped inside, she felt a gust of freezing air brush past her. She turned, but there was nothing there..."

World building

World building is the art of conveying the magic of living in a different world, whether it's a spaceship, a medieval castle, a boat, or simply someone's living room. To master world building, it's not necessary to know every intricate detail, rather to convey the experience of what it would be like to live there.

Choose one of the above images as a prompt and spend 10 minutes writing a scene from the perspective of someone who is seeing it for the first time. Now, move your character six months forward and imagine they've spent the last six months living or working there. Write another scene (perhaps with an additional character) using the image as a background, with the events of the scene as the main action.

Click the above image for a close-up.

Gossiping about a character as if they're a friend.

Easy to gossip with friends about a character

Judy Blume says that she tells her family about her characters as if they’re real people.

Chris Claremont said, "For me, writing the 'X-Men' was easy - is easy. I know these people, they're my friends."

Today’s exercise has 2 parts. First, spend 5 minutes jotting down some facts about a character you’ve invented that might come up if you were telling your friends about them. Either choose a character in something you’ve already written, or invent one from scratch now.

Answer the questions:

What are they up to? How are they? What would you say if you were gossiping about them?

Then split up into groups of 4 to 6 writers. 2 volunteers from each group then role-play talking about their character as if they were a friend (perhaps another character in the story). The other participants will role-play a group of friends gossiping about the character behind their back and ask questions. If you don’t know the answer, invent it!

Degrees of Emotion Game

This is based on an acting game, to help actors understand how to perform with different degrees of emotion.

Ask everyone to write the following 4 emotions:

For groups of 5 or less, write down numbers starting with 1 and going up until everyone has a number, then give them out in order. For groups of 6 or more, divide groups into 3's, 4's or 5's.

Each person has to write a scene where the protagonist is alone and is only allowed to say a single word, e.g. "Banana". The writer with number 1 should write the scene with a very low level of the emotion (e.g. happiness), number 2 increases the intensity a bit and the highest number writes a scene with the most intense emotion you can possibly imagine.

Once each writer has written about happiness, rotate the numbers one or two spaces, then move onto anger, then fear, then sadness.

It can help to give everyone numbers showing the intensity of the emotions to write about at the start of the exercise, in which case you may wish to print either the Word or PDF file, then use the ones corresponding to 3, 4 or 5 writers.

Everyone shares their scene with the other course participants.

Three birds, one line

The first paragraph of a surprising number of best-selling novels serves multiple purposes. These are to:

Establish a goal
Set the scene
Develop a character

Nearly every chapter in a novel also serves all three purposes. Instead of establishing a goal though, the protagonist either moves towards it, or encounters an obstacle that hinders them from achieving it.

Some books manage to meet all three purposes with their opening lines, for example:

Mr and Mrs Dursley, of number four, Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much.

J.K. Rowling , Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone

A little more than one hundred days into the fortieth year of her confinement, Dajeil Gelian was visited in her lonely tower overlooking the sea by an avatar of the great ship that was her home.

Iain M. Banks , Excession

"We should start back," Gared urged as the woods began to grow dark around them.

George R.R. Martin , A Game of Thrones

For this exercise write a sentence or short paragraph that serves all three purposes. If you're already writing a novel, then see if you can do this for the first line in a chapter. If not, choose any combination from the following table:

Blind Date on Valentine's Day (Exercise for Adults)

In pairs one writer spends a minute or two describing a character they're writing about, or alternatively they can describe a celebrity or someone from a work of fiction. The next writer then describes their character.

The story is that these 2 characters (or in my case, person and alien, as I'm writing a sci-fi) have accidentally ended up on a blind date with each other. Perhaps the waiter seated them in the wrong location, perhaps it's an actual blind date, or perhaps they met in some other fashion the writers can determine.

Now spend 10 minutes discussing what happens next!

A Success (Works best for online groups)

This exercise works best for online groups, via Zoom, for example. The instructions to give are:

"In a few words describe a success in your life and what it felt like to achieve it. It can be a small victory or a large one."

Share a personal example of your own (mine was watching my homeschooled sons sing in an opera together).

"Once you have one (small or large), write it in the chat.

The writing exercise is then to choose someone else's victory to write about for 10 minutes, as if it was the end of your own book.

If you want to write for longer, imagine how that book would start. Write the first part of the book with the ending in mind."

This is great for reminding people of a success in their lives, and also helps everyone connect and discover something about each other.

Your dream holiday

You’re going on a dream holiday together, but always disagree with each other. To avoid conflict, rather than discuss what you want to do, you’ve decided that each of you will choose a different aspect of the holiday as follows:

Choose where you’ll be going – your favourite holiday destination.
Choose what your main fun activity will be on the holiday.
Decide what mode of travel you’ll use to get there.
If there’s a 4 th person, choose what you’ll eat on the holiday and what you’ll be wearing.

Decide who gets to choose what at random. Each of you then writes down your dream holiday destination/activity/travel/food & clothes in secret. Next spend 5 minutes discussing your dream holiday and add any other details you’d like to include, particularly if you’re passionate about doing something in real life.

Finally, everyone spends another 5 minutes writing down a description of the holiday, then shares it with the others.

A haiku is a traditional Japanese form of non-rhyming poetry whose short form makes it ideal for a simple writing exercise.

They are traditionally structured in 3 lines, where the first line is 5 syllables, the second line is 7 syllables, and the third line is 5 syllables again. Haiku tend to focus on themes of nature and deep concepts that can be expressed simply.

A couple of examples:

A summer river being crossed how pleasing with sandals in my hands! Yosa Buson , a haiku master poet from the 18 th Century.

And one of mine:

When night-time arrives Stars come out, breaking the dark You can see the most

Martin Woods

Spend up to 10 minutes writing a haiku. If you get stuck with the 5-7-5 syllable rule, then don’t worry, the overall concept is more important!

See How to write a haiku for more details and examples.

Unlike a haiku, which is profound and sombre, a limerick is a light-hearted, fun rhyming verse.

Here are a couple of examples:

A wonderful bird is the pelican. His bill can hold more than his beli-can He can take in his beak Food enough for a week But I'm damned if I see how the heli-can.

Dixon Lanier Merritt, 1910

There was a young lady named Bright, Whose speed was far faster than light; She started one day In a relative way, And returned on the previous night.

Arthur Henry Reginald Buller in Punch, 1923

The 1 st , 2 nd and 5 th line all rhyme, as do the 3 rd and 4 th line. The overall number of syllables isn’t important, but the 3 rd and 4 th lines should be shorter than the others.

Typically, the 1 st line introduces the character, often with “There was”, or “There once was”. The rest of the verse tells their story.

Spend 10 minutes writing a limerick.

Time Travel - Child, Adult, Senior

Imagine that your future self as an old man/woman travels back in time to meet you, the adult you are today. Alternatively, you as a child travels forward in time to meet yourself as an adult. Or perhaps both happen, so the child you, adult you, and senior you are all together at the same time. In story form write down what happens next.

Participants then share their story with other writers either in small groups, or to the whole group.

Focus on faces

Solo exercise.

One challenge writers face is describing a character. A common mistake is to focus too much on the physical features, e.g. "She had brown eyes, curly brown hair and was five foot six inches tall."

The problem with this is it doesn't reveal anything about the character's personality, or the relationship between your protagonist and the character. Your reader is therefore likely to quickly forget what someone looks like. When describing characters, it's therefore best to:

Animate them - it's rare that someone's sitting for a portrait when your protagonist first meets them and whether they're talking or walking, it's likely that they're moving in some way.
Use metaphors or similes - comparing physical features to emotionally charged items conjures both an image and a sense of who someone is.
Involve your protagonist - if your protagonist is interacting with a character, make it personal. How does your protagonist view this person? Incorporate the description as part of the description.
Only give information your protagonist knows - they may know if someone is an adult, or a teenager, but they won't know that someone is 37 years old, for example.

Here are three examples of character descriptions that leave no doubt how the protagonist feels.

“If girls could spit venom, it'd be through their eyes.” S.D. Lawendowski, Snapped

"And Ronan was everything that was left: molten eyes and a smile made for war." Maggie Stiefvater, The Dream Thieves

"His mouth was such a post office of a mouth that he had a mechanical appearance of smiling." Charles Dickens

Spend 5 minutes writing a character introduction that is animated, uses metaphors or similes and involves your protagonist.

If working with a group, then form small groups of 3 or 4 and share your description with the rest of the group.

Onomatopeai, rhyme and alliteration

Today's session is all about sound.

Several authors recommend reading your writing out loud after you've written it to be sure it sounds natural. Philip Pullman even goes as far as to say:

"When I’m writing, I’m more conscious of the sound, actually, than the meaning. I know what the rhythm of the sentence is going to be before I know what the words are going to be in it."

For today's exercise, choose the name of a song and write for 10 minutes as if that's the title for a short story. Focus on how your writing sounds and aim to include at least one onomatopoeia, rhyme or alliteration. At the end of the 10 minutes, read it out loud to yourself, or to the group.

Alliterations

An alliteration example from Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”

The fair breeze blew, the white foam flew, The furrow followed free; We were the first that ever burst Into that silent sea.

Onomatopoeias

Buzz, woof, quack, baa, crash, purr, beep, belch,...

The alphabet story - creating a story as a group

This is a novel way to write a story as a group, one word at a time. The first person starts the story that begins with any word starting with “A”, the next person continues the story with a word starting with “B”, and so on.

Keep going round until you have completed the alphabet. Ideally it will all be one sentence, but if you get stuck, start a new sentence. Don’t worry if it doesn’t make complete sense!

It can be tricky to remember the alphabet when under pressure, so you may wish to print it out a couple of times, so the storytellers can see it if they need to, this is particularly helpful if you have dyslexics in the group.

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

Here’s an example of an alphabet story:

A Band Can Dance Each Friday, Ghostly Hauntings In Jail Kill Lucky Men, Nobody Or Perhaps Quiet Rats, Still That Unifies Villains Who X-Ray Your Zebras.

As I mentioned, it doesn’t need to make sense!

A question or two

Small or large groups

The standard format in our group is a short writing exercise followed by an hour and a half of silent writing on our projects.

At one point I felt like we'd done a lot of small group exercises, and wanted to gain an insight into what everyone was working on, so we did the following exercise instead:

Go round the table and ask everyone to briefly talk about their writing. Each person then asks one or two yes/no questions.

Everyone responds either by raising their hand for 'yes' or shaking their heads for 'no'. You can also leap up and down to indicate a very strong 'yes'.

Questions can be about anything, and you can use them either to help guide your writing or to help find other people in the group who have similar interests.

Here are some random examples you might ask:

I want to write a romance novel and am considering setting it in Paris, a traditional romantic setting, or Liverpool which is a less obvious setting. Who thinks Liverpool would be best?
I need to know more about the life of a farmer. Has anyone got farming experience who I can interview in exchange for a drink?
My character gets fired and that night goes back to his office and steals 35 computers. Does that sound realistic as the premise of a story?

This works best when you give participants some advance notice, so they have time to think of a question.

Murder Mystery Game

Groups of 3 or 4

This exercise takes 20-30 minutes and allows participants to create a murder mystery outline together.

Phase 1 (3 minutes)

Split into groups of 3 or 4
Decide as a group where the murder occurs (e.g. the opera house, a bar, a casino)
Decide one person who will write the details of the victim and the murder itself. Everyone else writes the details of one suspect each.
The ‘victim author’ then invents a few extra details about the scene of the crime, who the victim was (a teenage punk, an adult opera singer, etc.) and the murder weapon and summarises this to the others.

Phase 2 (10 minutes)

Each person then writes a police report as if they are either describing the scene of the crime, or recording the notes from their interview with a single suspect:

Write the following:

1 line description of the victim.
When they were last seen by a group of witnesses (and what they were doing).
How the murder occurred in more detail based on the evidence available.

Write the following (from the perspective of the investigator):

1 line description of the suspect
What they said during the interview (including what they claim to have doing when the murder occurs).
A possible motivation (as determined by the police from other witnesses).

Phase 3 (5 minutes)

Each person reads out their police reports to the other members of their small group
As a group, decide who the murderer was and what actually happened

See more ideas on creating murder mystery party games

The obscure movie exercise

Pick a famous movie and spend 5 minutes writing a scene from it from an unusual perspective. Your aim is to achieve a balance between being too obscure and making it too obvious. Feel free to add internal dialogue.

At the end of the 5 minutes, everyone reads their movie scene to the others and all the other participants see if they can guess what the movie is.

How to hint at romantic feelings

Write a scene with two people in a group, where you hint that one is romantically interested in the other, but the feelings aren’t reciprocated.

The goal of this exercise is to practice subtlety. Imagine you are setting a scene for the future where the characters feelings will become more important. Choose a situation like a work conference, meeting with a group of friends, etc. How do you indicate how the characters feel without them saying it in words?

Some tips for hinting at romantic feelings:

Make the characters nervous and shy.
Your protagonist leans forward.
Asks deeper questions and listens intently.
Finds ways to be close together.
Mirrors their gestures.
Gives lots of compliments.
Makes eye contact, then looks away.
Other people seem invisible to your protagonist.

A novel idea

Take it in turns to tell everyone else about a current project you’re working on (a book, screenplay, short story, etc.)

The other writers then brainstorm ideas for related stories you could write, or directions your project could take. There are no right or wrong suggestions and the intention is to focus on big concepts, not little details.

This whole exercise takes around 15 minutes.

Creative writing prompts

Exercise for groups of 3-5

If you're in larger group, split up into groups of 3 or 4 people.

Everyone writes the first line of a story in the Zoom chat, or on paper. Other people can then choose this line as a writing prompt.

For this exercise:

Say who the protagonist is.
Reveal their motivation.
Introduce any other characters

Once everyone's written a prompt, each author chooses a prompt (preferably someone eles's, but it can be your own if you feel really inspired by it.) Then write for 10 minutes using this prompt. See if you can reveal who the protagonist is, what their motivation is (it can be a small motivation for a particular scene, it doesn't have to be a huge life goal), and introduce at least one new character.

Take turns reading out your stories to each other.

Write in the first person.
Have the protagonist interacting with an object or something in nature.
The challenge is to create intrigue that makes the reader want to know more with just a single line.

Creative story cards / dice

Cut up a piece of paper and write one word on each of the pieces of paper, as follows:

Give each participant a couple of pieces of paper at random. The first person says the first sentence of a story and they must use their first word as part of that sentence. The second person then continues the story and must include their word in it, and so on. Go round the group twice to complete the story.

You can also do this creative writing exercise with story dice, your own choice of words, or by asking participants to write random words down themselves, then shuffling all the cards together.

Alternative Christmas Story

Every Christmas adults tell kids stories about Santa Claus. In this exercise you write a Christmas story from an alternative dimension.

What if every Christmas Santa didn't fly around the world delivering presents on his sleigh pulled by reindeer? What if gnomes or aliens delivered the presents? Or perhaps it was the gnomes who are trying to emulate the humans? Or some other Christmas tradition entirely that we humans have never heard of!

Group writing exercise

If you're working with a group, give everyone a couple of minutes to write two possible themes for the new Christmas story. Each theme should be 5 words or less.

Shuffle the paper and distribute them at random. If you're working online, everyone types the themes into the Zoom or group chat. Each writer then spends 10 minutes writing a short story for children based on one of the two themes, or their own theme if they really want to.

If working alone, choose your own theme and spend 15 minutes writing a short story on it. See if you can create the magic of Christmas from another world!

Murder Mystery Mind Map

In a murder mystery story or courtroom drama, there's often conflicting information and lots of links between characters. A mind map is an ideal way to illustrate how everything ties together.

Split into groups of 3 or 4 people each and place a blank piece of A3 paper (double the size of A4) in the middle of each group. Discuss between you who the victim is and write their name in the middle of the piece of paper. Then brainstorm information about the murder, for example:

Feel free to expand out from any of these, e.g. to include more information on the different characters involved.

The idea is that everyone writes at the same time! Obviously, you can discuss ideas, but anyone can dive in and write their ideas on the mind map.

Who was the victim? (job, appearance, hobbies, etc.)
Who did the victim know?
What were their possible motivations?
What was the murder weapon?
What locations are significant to the plot?

New Year’s resolutions for a fictional character

If you’re writing a piece of fiction, ask yourself how your protagonist would react to an everyday situation. This can help you to gain a deeper insight into who they are.

One way to do this is to imagine what their New Year’s resolutions would be.

If completing this exercise with a group, limit it to 3 to 5 resolutions per person. If some participants are historical fiction or non-fiction writers, they instead pick a celebrity and either write what their resolutions will be, or what their resolutions should be, their choice.

Verb Noun Fiction Exercise (Inspired by Stephen King)

Stephen King said, "I believe the road to hell is paved with adverbs, and I will shout it from the rooftops."

He also said, "Take any noun, put it with any verb, and you have a sentence. It never fails. Rocks explode. Jane transmits. Mountains float. These are all perfect sentences. Many such thoughts make little rational sense, but even the stranger ones (Plums deify!) have a kind of poetic weight that’s nice."

In this fiction writing exercise, start by brainstorming (either individually or collectively) seven verbs on seven different pieces of paper. Put those aside for later. Now brainstorm seven nouns. Randomly match the nouns and verbs so you have seven pairs. Choose a pair and write a piece of fiction for ten minutes. Avoid using any adverbs.

It’s the end of the world

It’s the end of the world! For 5 minutes either:

If working as a team, then after the 5 minutes is up each writer reads their description out to the other participants.

Describe how the world’s going to end, creating evocative images using similes or metaphors as you wish and tell the story from a global perspective, or
Describe how you spend your final day before the world is destroyed. Combine emotion and action to engage the reader.

7 Editing Exercises

For use after your first draft

I’ve listened to a lot of masterclasses on writing by successful authors and they all say variants of your first draft won’t be good and that’s fine. Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman summarise it the best:

“The first draft is just you telling yourself the story.”

Terry Pratchett

“For me, it’s always been a process of trying to convince myself that what I’m doing in a first draft isn’t important. One way you get through the wall is by convincing yourself that it doesn’t matter. No one is ever going to see your first draft. Nobody cares about your first draft. And that’s the thing that you may be agonising over, but honestly, whatever you’re doing can be fixed… For now, just get the words out. Get the story down however you can get it down, then fix it.”

Neil Gaiman

Once you’ve written your first draft, it will need editing to develop the plot, enhance the characters, and improve each scene in a myriad of ways – small and large. These seven creative editing exercises are designed to help with this stage of the process.

The First Sentence

Read the first paragraph of the novel, in particular the first sentence. Does it launch the reader straight into the action? According to On Writing and Worldbuilding by Timothy Hickson, “The most persuasive opening lines are succinct, and not superfluous. To do this, it is often effective to limit it to a single central idea… This does not need to be the most important element, but it should be a central element that is interesting.” Ask yourself what element your opening sentence encapsulates and whether it’s the best one to capture your readers’ attention.

Consistency

Consistency is crucial in creative writing, whether it’s in relation to location, objects, or people.

It’s also crucial for personality, emotions and motivation.

Look at scenes where your protagonist makes an important decision. Are their motivations clear? Do any scenes force them to choose between two conflicting morals? If so, do you explore this? Do their emotions fit with what’s happened in previous scenes?

As you edit your manuscript, keep the characters’ personality, emotions and motivation in mind. If their behaviour is inconsistent, either edit it for consistency, or have someone comment on their strange behaviour or be surprised by it. Inconsistent behaviour can reveal that a character is keeping a secret, or is under stress, so characters don’t always need to be consistent. But when they’re not, there has to be a reason.

Show Don’t Tell One

This exercise is the first in The Emotional Craft of Fiction by Donald Maass. It’s a writing guide with a plethora of editing exercises designed to help you reenergize your writing by thinking of what your character is feeling, and giving you the tools to make your reader feel something.

Select a moment in your story when your protagonist is moved, unsettled, or disturbed… Write down all the emotions inherent in this moment, both obvious and hidden.
Next, considering what he is feeling, write down how your protagonist can act out. What is the biggest thing your protagonist can do? What would be explosive, out of bounds, or offensive? What would be symbolic? … Go sideways, underneath, or ahead. How can your protagonist show us a feeling we don’t expect to see?
Finally, go back and delete all the emotions you wrote down at the beginning of this exercise. Let actions and spoken words do the work. Do they feel too big, dangerous, or over-the-top? Use them anyway. Others will tell you if you’ve gone too far, but more likely, you haven’t gone far enough.

Show Don’t Tell Two

Search for the following words in your book:

Whenever these words occur, ask yourself if you can demonstrate how your characters feel, rather than simply stating it. For each occasion, can you use physiological descriptors (a racing heart), actions (taking a step backwards) or dialogue to express what’s just happened instead? Will this enhance the scene and engage the reader more?

After The Action

Find a scene where your characters disagree – in particular a scene where your protagonist argues with friends or allies. What happens next?

It can be tempting to wrap up the action with a quick resolution. But what if a resentment lingers and mistrust builds? This creates a more interesting story arc and means a resolution can occur later, giving the character development a real dynamic.

Review how you resolve the action and see if you can stretch out the emotions for a more satisfying read.

Eliminating the Fluff

Ensure that the words used don’t detract from the enormity of the events your character is going through. Can you delete words like, “Quite”, “Little”, or “Rather”?

Of “Very” Florence King once wrote: “ 'Very' is the most useless word in the English language and can always come out. More than useless, it is treacherous because it invariably weakens what it is intended to strengthen .” Delete it, or replace the word after it with a stronger word, which makes “Very” redundant.

“That,” is another common word used in creative writing which can often be deleted. Read a sentence as is, then reread it as if you deleted, “That”. If the meaning is the same, delete it.

Chapter Endings

When talking about chapter endings, James Patterson said, “At the end, something has to propel you into the next chapter.”

Read how each of your chapters finish and ask yourself does it either:

End on a cliff hanger? (R.L. Stine likes to finish every chapter in this method).
End on a natural pause (for example, you’re changing point of view or location).

Review how you wrap up each of your chapters. Do you end at the best point in your story? Can you add anticipation to cliff hangers? Will you leave your readers wanting more?

How to run the writing exercises

The editing exercises are designed to be completed individually.

With the others, I've always run them as part of a creative writing group, where there's no teacher and we're all equal participants, therefore I keep any 'teaching' aspect to a minimum, preferring them to be prompts to generate ideas before everyone settles down to do the silent writing. We've recently gone online and if you run a group yourself, whether online or in person, you're welcome to use these exercises for free!

The times given are suggestions only and I normally get a feel for how everyone's doing when time's up and if it's obvious that everyone's still in the middle of a discussion, then I give them longer. Where one group's in the middle of a discussion, but everyone else has finished, I sometimes have a 'soft start' to the silent writing, and say, "We're about to start the hour and a half of silent writing now, but if you're in the middle of a discussion, feel free to finish it first".

This way everyone gets to complete the discussion, but no-one's waiting for ages. It's also important to emphasise that there's no wrong answers when being creative.

Still looking for more? Check out these creative writing prompts or our dedicated Sci-Fi and Fantasy creative writing prompts

If you've enjoyed these creative writing exercises, please share them on social media, or link to them from your blog.

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30 Writing Topics and Writing Prompts For ESL Students

When learning a new language like English, developing writing skills is essential. Many beginner ESL students find it difficult to write essays, especially if they have to come up with the essay topic themselves.

Providing ESL students with writing topics and writing prompts can help students to focus and start writing. As a teacher, it can be quite challenging to come up with many ESL writing topics, so we have put together this list of ESL writing topics and writing prompts to help you out.

List Of ESL Writing Topics

Here is a list of ESL writing topics and writing prompts your students can write about.

Describe your dream house. Where is it? And What’s inside?
Talk about the best vacation you ever took.
What do you like to do in your spare time?
Write about three things you want to achieve this year.
What’s your earliest memory as a child?
What would you do if you had a million dollars?
What are you good at? What would you like to be good at in the future?
Write about the members of your family. What are they like? What do they do?
Write about how to cook your favorite food, step by step.
If you could meet anyone from history, who would you want to meet, and why?
Describe everything you did last weekend in as much detail as possible.
Write about something funny that happened to you this week.
What were the last three things you bought? Where did you buy them from?
Describe how you get ready for school every day.
Describe a famous person in as much detail as possible.
What is your favorite movie, and why?
What three things would you take to a desert island, and why?
Write about your happiest memory.
What makes a good friend?
If you could change anything about the world, what would it be?
If you could travel back in time, when and where would you go?
What’s your favorite game to play?
What is something you have done that you regret?
Describe what the world will be like in1000 years.
Write an essay about what you did this week.
Write about one of your memorable birthday celebrations.
Write about your exercise routine.
If you had three wishes, what would you wish for?
Describe a person you look up to.
What’s your opinion about social media?

Tips For Teaching ESL Writing

Error correction.

Writing in a foreign language is hard, especially for beginner ESL students. Students will likely make many mistakes in the beginning.

Although it is necessary to highlight and correct students’ errors, it can be quite demotivating for a student to only hear all the things they got wrong.

To ensure students stay motivated, be sure to praise them and tell them all the things they did well, as well as point out any grammatical mistakes.

After correcting errors, give students an opportunity to re-write their essays and correct their mistakes. Once students have completed their final draft, be sure to let them know what you liked about their essay, and you can even share this praise with other students, teachers, and even the student’s parents.

To master writing in English, students will need to write a lot of essays over time, and if students stay motivated, they are much more likely to succeed.

Ask About Students’ Interests

Another great way to keep students motivated while writing ESL essays is to encourage them to write about things that interest them.

A great way to encourage this is to ask about things students are interested in and then tailor the writing topic to them.

Students are much more likely to actively engage in a writing assignment if it is something they are interested in and passionate about.

Provide Enough Writing Prompts

ESL students often find it difficult to write long answers to essay questions. Ask an ESL student to write about their favorite restaurant, and they’ll likely give you a one-sentence answer.

To help students write longer essays, be sure to give them enough writing prompts to cover the different aspects they should cover in their writing.

For example, if students are to write about their favorite restaurant then you could give them several writing prompts such as ‘where is the restaurant’, ‘what kind of food do they serve’, ‘how much is a typical meal’, ‘what do you usually order’, etc.

Giving beginner ESL students plenty of writing prompts will help them to flesh out their essays and write longer answers.

Structure The Essay

To help ESL students become better at writing in English, teach them a particular structure you would like them to follow when writing their essays.

A typical writing structure with beginner ESL students would include an introduction, the main body of the text, and then a conclusion.

Providing students with an easy-to-follow structure will help them to plan out their essays and develop their writing skills over time.

Thanks for reading. I hope you found some useful ESL writing topics and writing prompts you can use in your next writing class.

Before you go, don’t forget to check out our FREE resources for teaching English, including Activity Videos , Board Games , Flashcards , PowerPoint Games , and Lesson Plans .

Professional development
Understanding learners

Creative writing for language learners (and teachers)

Creative writing normally refers to the production of texts which have an aesthetic rather than a purely informative, instrumental or pragmatic purpose.

Most often, such texts take the form of poems or stories, though they are not confined to these genres. (Letters, journal entries, blogs, essays, travelogues, etc. can also be more or less creative.) In fact, the line between creative writing (CW) and expository writing (ER) is not carved in stone. In general, however CW texts draw more heavily on intuition, close observation, imagination, and personal memories than ER texts.

One of the chief distinguishing characteristics of CW texts is a playful engagement with language, stretching and testing its rules to the limit in a guilt-free atmosphere, where risk is encouraged. Such writing combines cognitive with affective modes of thinking. As the poet, R.S. Thomas once wrote, ‘Poetry is that which arrives at the intellect by way of the heart.’ The playful element in CW should not, however be confused with a lax and unregulated use of language. On the contrary, CW requires a willing submission on the part of the writer to the ‘rules’ of the sub-genre being undertaken. If you want to write a Limerick, then you have to follow the rules governing limericks. If not, what you produce will be something other than a limerick: obvious, perhaps, but important too. The interesting thing is that the very constraints which the rules impose seem to foster rather than restrict the creativity of the writer. This apparent paradox is explained partly by the deeper processing of thought and language which the rules require.

What are the benefits of CW for learners?

CW aids language development at all levels: grammar, vocabulary, phonology and discourse. It requires learners to manipulate the language in interesting and demanding ways in attempting to express uniquely personal meanings. In doing so, they necessarily engage with the language at a deeper level of processing than with most expository texts. (Craik and Lockhart 1972) The gains in grammatical accuracy and range, in the appropriacy and originality of lexical choice, in sensitivity to rhyme, rhythm, stress and intonation, and in the way texts hang together are significant.
As mentioned above, a key characteristic of CW is a willingness to play with the language. In recent years there has been a resurgence of interest in the role of play in language acquisition. (Carter 2004, Cook 2000, Crystal 1998) In some ways, the tsunami of the Communicative Approach has done a disservice to language teaching by its insistence on the purely communicative functions of language. Proponents of ‘play’ point out, rightly, that in L1 acquisition, much of the language encountered by and used by children is in the form of rhythmical chants and rhymes, word games, jokes and the like. Furthermore, such playfulness survives into adulthood, so that many social encounters are characterized by language play (punning, spontaneous jokes, ‘funny voices’, metathesis, and a discourse which is shaped by quasi-poetic repetition (Tannen 1989)). These are precisely the kinds of things L2 learners are encouraged to do in CW activities. This playful element encourages them to play creatively with the language, and in so doing, to take the risks without which learning cannot take place in any profound sense. As Crystal (1998) states, ‘Reading and writing do not have to be a prison house. Release is possible. And maybe language play can provide the key.’
Much of the teaching we do tends to focus on the left side of the brain, where our logical faculties are said to reside. CW puts the emphasis on the right side of the brain, with a focus on feelings, physical sensations, intuition and musicality. This is a healthy restoration of the balance between logical and intuitive faculties. It also affords scope for learners whose hemisphere dominance or learning-style preferences may not be intellectual or left brain dominant, and who, in the normal process of teaching are therefore at a disadvantage.
Perhaps most notable is the dramatic increase in self-confidence and self-esteem which CW tends to develop among learners. Learners also tend to discover things for themselves about the language… and about themselves too, thus promoting personal as well as linguistic growth. Inevitably, these gains are reflected in a corresponding growth in positive motivation. Among the conditions for promoting motivation, Dornyei (2001: 138-144) cites:
“5. Create a pleasant and supportive atmosphere.
6. Promote the development of group cohesiveness.
13. Increase the students’ expectation of success in particular tasks and in learning in general.
17. Make learning more stimulating and enjoyable by breaking the monotony of classroom events.
18. Make learning stimulating and enjoyable by increasing the attractiveness of tasks.
19. Make learning stimulating and enjoyable for learners by enlisting them as active task participants.
20. Present and administer tasks in a motivating way.
23. Provide students with regular experiences of success.
24. Build your learners’ confidence by providing regular encouragement.
28. Increase student motivation by promoting cooperation among the learners.
29. Increase student motivation by actively promoting learner autonomy.
33. Increase learner satisfaction.
34. Offer rewards in a motivational manner.”
All these conditions are met in a well-run CW class. The exponential increase in motivation is certainly supported by my own experience in teaching CW. Learners suddenly realize that they can write something in a foreign language that has never been written by anyone else before, and which others find interesting to read. (Hence the importance of ‘publishing’ students’ work in some form.) And they experience not only a pride in their own products but also a joy in the ‘flow’ of the process. (Czsikszentmihaly 1997).
Finally, CW feeds into more creative reading. It is as if, by getting inside the process of creating the texts, learners come to understand intuitively how such texts function, and this makes similar texts easier to read. Likewise, the development of aesthetic reading skills ( Kramsch 1993, Rosenblatt 1978), provides the learner with a better understanding of textual construction, and this feeds into their writing.

And teachers? I argued in the first article that teachers, as well as learners, should engage with extensive reading. In the same spirit, I would argue that there are significant benefits to teachers if they participate in CW.

There is little point in exhorting learners to engage in CW unless we do so too. The power of the teacher as model, and as co-writer is inestimable.
CW is one way of keeping teachers’ English fresh and vibrant. For much of our professional lives we are in thrall to the controlled language of textbook English and the repeated low level error-laden English of our students. As teachers of language, we surely have a responsibility to keep our primary resource alive and well.
CW seems to have an effect on the writer’s level of energy in general. This tends to make teachers who use CW more interesting to be around, and this inevitably impacts on their relationships with students.
The experimental stance with regard to writing in general appears to fee back into the teaching of writing. Teachers of CW tend also to be better teachers of writing in general

My evidence for these assertions is largely anecdotal, backed by a survey of writing teachers I conducted in 2006. One of the interesting facts to emerge was a widespread belief among teachers of writing that CW had a positive effect on students’ writing of Expository texts and helped them develop that much- desired but rarely-delivered ‘authentic voice’. Space does not allow me to expand on these findings, nor on some of the possible activities teachers might try. I will attempt to make good these omissions in some of my blogs during the month of December. I will also make reference there to ways in which CW intersects with some of our major current concerns. Meantime, anyone interested could sample some of the books from the list below: Fry (2007), Koch (1990), Matthews (1994), Spiro (2004, 2007), Whitworth (2001) and Wright and Hill (2009)

Carter, Ronald. (2004) Language and creativity: the art of common talk. London: Routledge.
Cszikszentmihalyi. M. ( 1997) Creativity: Flow and the psychology of discovery and invention. New York: Harper Perennial
Cook, Guy (2000) Language Play: Language Learning. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Craik, F.I.M and R.S Lockhart (1972) ‘Levels of processing: a framework for memory research’ Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behaviour. 11. 671-685
Crystal, David (1998) Language Play. London: Penguin
Dornyei, Zoltan (2001) Motivational Strategies in the Language Classroom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Fry, Stephen (2007) The Ode Less Travelled. London: Arrow Books.
Koch, Kenneth. (1990) Rose, where did you get that red? New York: Vintage Books.
Kramsch, Claire (1993) Context and Culture in Language Teaching. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Matthews, Paul (1994) Sing Me the Creation. Stroud: Hawthorne Press.
Rosenblatt, Louise (1978) The Reader, the Text, the Poem. Carbondale, Illinois: Southern Illinois University Press.
Spiro, Jane (2004) Creative Poetry Writing. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Spiro, Jane (2007) Storybuilding. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Tannen, Deborah. (1989) Talking Voices: Repetition, dialogue, and imagery in conversational discourse. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Whitworth, John. (2001) Writing Poetry. London: A and C Black.
Wright, Andrew and David S.Hill. (2009) Writing Stories. Innsbruck: Helbling

By Alan Maley

Please note Alan's now finished writing on the site and will not be able to reply personally to your comments.

CW- not an easy task

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Angara village , an open-air museum in some distance from Bratsk featuring Russian houses, the church and utensils of XVII—XX centuries as well as Evenk chums .

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PDF Creativity in the English language classroom
14 Practising creative writing in high school foreign language classes ... in drama and creative writing activities that will lead to greater linguistic, personal and social development. ... Alan Maley has been involved with English language teaching for over 50 years. He worked with the British Council in Yugoslavia, Ghana, Italy, France, ...
Creative Writing Activity Ideas For The Teen & Adult Classroom
Creative writing activity ideas. 1. Group stories. This creative writing activity encourages learners to work together and use their imaginations to come up with unique and creative stories. Put students into small groups of 4 or 5 and have them arrange themselves into a circle. They each need a pen and a piece of paper.
Activities and ideas to get teens writing creatively
For an interesting exercise, try using song lyrics, poems, or short online stories and pasting them into a word cloud creator, like Wordle.net. Have students try to write something that features as many of the words as possible. Instead of a word cloud, you could use print outs of complete song lyrics, look at them as a class, and have students ...
Being creative in the ELT classroom: newspaper headlines activity
Below is a stage-by-stage activity from Alan Maley's 50 Creative Activities, using newspaper headlines as a stimulus. As Alan Maley explains: "Headlines have to fit into a defined space on the page, catch the attention of readers, and convey the essence of the article which follows. In this activity, students are invited to have fun ...
7 ways to bring Creative Writing into the #EFL classroom
Student One will pick the location, say library, then Student Two pick the object, say books. That gives us the sentence: "Tim is going to the library because he wants to eat books .". The grammar is correct, the vocabulary is in its correct place but the meaning is silly, so everyone gets a laugh. 5. Shared Writing.
Creative writing activities Archives
Tag: Creative writing activities. 4 Christmas ELT Activities For Your Classroom. Oxford University Press ELT-1 December 2016 16. 7 ways to bring Creative Writing into the #EFL classroom. Oxford University Press ELT-6 October 2016 2. 7 ways Creative Writing can help your EFL students.
Writing activities
Creating a framework for writing. A perfect story. Note writing. A creative writing activity: A dark and stormy night. Eliciting vocabulary before writing narratives. Improving paragraph writing. Songs and storytelling. Freeze the writing - A way to make writing tasks a group activity. Helping students organise argument essays.
Collaborative writing activities
Collaborative writing has been shown to lower anxiety and foster self-confidence, compared with completing tasks individually ( Johnson and Johnson 1998) Research by Storch , found that texts produced by pairs were shorter than those produced individually, but that they were better 'in terms of task fulfilment, grammatical accuracy and ...
Communicative writing for the ELT classroom
She has an MA in Creative Writing and a PGDip in TESOL. She has written for clients including CUP, the British Council, Pearson, OUP and York Press. Jo's special interests in ELT include creative writing, project based learning, teaching writing skills and developing critical and creative thinking.
EFLSensei
Fun ESL Writing Activities. There are many kinds of ESL Writing tasks, such as free writing, creative writing, and guided writing (i.e., an essay). Jump to ESL Writing Activities. I like to get my students started with free writing at the beginning of each class to encourage creativity and relieve pressure of making mistakes.
PDF Developing young writers in ELT
Regardless of the writing activity, writing is always about writers thinking and about their interactions with readers through their texts and through collaboration. Writers have something to say and someone to say it to and receive a response from. Readers can be known: a teacher, a friend, a parent; or unknown: readers of a blog, a newspaper,
7 steps Towards Creative Thinking in the ELT Classroom
"Students make a new product by mentally reorganizing some elements or parts into a pattern or structure not clearly present before." (Anderson & Krathwohl, 2001, p.84) In the ELT classroom, this means that the student creates something new by drawing from all the language they have at their disposal and - perhaps writing a poem, making a ...
Fun Skills Reading and Writing Lesson Ideas
Word/sentence level: for accuracy and confidence. Familiarity with vocabulary and spelling. Text level: (anything above the sentence level) for meaning, communication, content. Good readers are often good writers and the benefits of developing these skills in a second language help build learners' language base.
Creative Writing in the ESL Classroom
In a creative writing class, it's typical for ESL students to want more grammar handouts and tangible things. Students often need to be taught that education doesn't only exist in gap fill exercises, it can exist in authentic texts and other realia. Here are some suggestions to combat this sort of thinking:
43 Creative Writing Exercises & Games For Adults
A selection of fun creative writing exercises that can be completed solo, or with a group. Some are prompts to help inspire you to come up with story ideas, others focus on learning specific writing skills. Intro. I run a Creative Writing Meetup for adults and teens in Montpellier or online every week. We start with a 5 to 20 minute exercise ...
30 Writing Topics and Writing Prompts For ESL Students
Providing ESL students with writing topics and writing prompts can help students to focus and start writing. As a teacher, it can be quite challenging to come up with many ESL writing topics, so we have put together this list of ESL writing topics and writing prompts to help you out. You May Also Be Interested In: 30 Funny Topics For Debate
Creative writing for language learners (and teachers)
Most often, such texts take the form of poems or stories, though they are not confined to these genres. (Letters, journal entries, blogs, essays, travelogues, etc. can also be more or less creative.) In fact, the line between creative writing (CW) and expository writing (ER) is not carved in stone. In general, however CW texts draw more heavily on intuition, close observation, imagination, and ...
Creative Writing
The students were asked to write imaginative endings for the story they received from their instructor. Each of them engaged with their creative faculties to...
Bratsk
Eat. Drink. Sleep. Go next. Bratsk ( Russian: Братск brahtsk) is a large city in Irkutsk Oblast on the Baikal-Amur Mainline . Angara River at Bratsk.
A simple blueprint for making creative ESL worksheets
Robert Dobie is an ELT teacher and owner of the popular ESL resource site, All Things Grammar. This article follows on from Three ways to get the most out of speaking activities and is the final in the series. In this post, Robert talks about how to create effective ESL worksheets. As language teachers, we are all very familiar with worksheets.
Bratsk
The city's rapid development commenced with the announcement in 1952 that a dam and hydroelectric plant would be built at Bratsk on the Angara River. Town status was granted to Bratsk in 1955. [4] The city of Bratsk was formed from separate villages, industrial and residential areas according to a 1958-61 masterplan.
Bratsk
Bratsk (Russian: Братск brahtsk) is a large city in Irkutsk Oblast on the Baikal-Amur Mainline.
PDF Supply Base Report: INCOM LLC
The Supply base of INCOM LLC is the area of the forest fund of the Irkutsk region. The total area of the Supply base is 69,4 million ha. Forest lands comprise 64,7 million ha and non-forest land 4,7 million ha. Production forests make up 50% of the Supply base area, buffer forests - 23%, reserve forests - 27%.