About Me

It’s good to know that you like writing stories.

Here are a few pointers that I hope might help you.

1.  Create really strong, interesting characters.

2.  Get your story off to a good start – don’t spend too much time on setting things up or

writing descriptions of place – get the action going as soon as possible.

3.  Look carefully at the stories you like to read. What do you like about them? How has

the writer made the story interesting for you? Try and write a similar story.

You can learn by copying others, and soon you will be writing in your own style.

4.  Don’t give up trying. Always try and make your next story better than any story

you have written before.  (I am still learning how to write stories. It’s one of those

things that you can always get better at, like learning to play a musical instrument.)

5.   Read your story through to yourself, out loud. It’s a good way of noticing where you

have repeated yourself without realising, and also you can hear if your story makes

sense. You can see which bits need more action, or more description, and you can

get rid of the boring bits.

6.   Ask others what they think of your story and listen to what they say – even if you

don’t like what they say! Their criticism can be very useful, and you must be

prepared to do some re-writing.

7.   Avoid putting too many characters into your story. The more characters you have

the more work you have trying to keep track of them all.

8.   Always go for the unexpected. In other words don’t write things that the reader will

expect to read. Try and put in something a bit different, odd, unusual or unexpected.

Here’s a simple example. “I went to the zoo. I saw a monkey.”

You can see that that is not very interesting. What about this?

“I went to the zoo. I saw a monkey. It was wearing underpants.”

Get the idea?!