Part 4: How to Write a Year 6 Creative in 8 Steps | Free Short Story Planner

Creative writing can be hard, but it needn’t be. Many Year 6 students get overwhelmed by creative tasks. In this post, we’ll show you how to write a Year 6 creative in 8 steps as if you were in Year 7.

Get ready to rock your marker!

How do you write Year 6 creatives?

This is the process we teach students for writing high scoring creatives:

1. Design your character
2. Work out how your narrative ends
3. Decide what happens to them
4. Choose your structure
5. Write your draft
6. Edit!
7. Get feedback
8. Redraft for submission

Why do Year 6 students struggle with writing creatives?

Many High School students struggle with creative writing. So, it is no wonder that Year 6 students find creative writing difficult.

Year 6 students tend to get frustrated because they can come up with imaginative ideas, but then have difficulty developing them.

Do any of these sound like you?

• I can come up with a character, but I can’t make her believable
• I’ve got an idea for a plot, but I don’t know where it goes
• The narrative I’ve written is too short
• My dialogue is terrible
• I don’t know how to finish my story
• My story tells and doesn’t show
• I can’t use techniques in my narrative

These are common problems. And the good news is that they can be solved by following a process!

We’ve developed a method for writing compelling and exciting creatives that will work for Year 6 students all the way to Year 12!

What we’re going to do now is step you through the step-by-step process for writing fantastic creatives.

How to write a Year 6 creative in 8 steps!

The secret to doing anything well is following a process. Just because narratives are creative doesn’t mean they just pour out of you.

No. There’s a reason it’s called the creative PROCESS!

So, let’s go through the Matrix step-by-step process for writing creatives.

Step 1: Design your characters

Narratives require a character to be engaging. This is because we relate to people (or anthropomorphised creatures – like Simba from the Lion King or Groot from Guardians of the Galaxy.

One of the things that makes characters compelling is having qualities and flaws that are prominent and change over the course of the story.

So, the first thing you want to do is decide on who your character is.

You should use a table to plan out your character details.

Once you’ve created a character, you’re in a position to start figuring out what happens to them.

Step 2: Decide how your narrative ends

Sometimes it is hard to figure exactly how your story ends.

That’s okay. Writing endings, especially good endings, is the hardest part of writing a story.

Remember, you don’t need to produce a complete resolution. Farah doesn’t need to learn how to be a perfect bassist or acquire a taste for his Teta’s baking. You just need to show what the next logical step is in his development.

Here are some questions to ask when deciding on an appropriate ending:

• What are some negative traits that the protagonist has demonstrated? How can they change these?
• Does the protagonist have a damaged relationship that needs addressing or repairing?
• What likes or dislikes that the character has can shape what they need to overcome
• If the protagonist can’t solve their problem, what is the first thing they could do in trying to solve it?

It doesn’t matter if you can’t totally pin down the exact ending, you can always develop it further as you work through the second or 3rd draft

Once you’ve figured out a rough ending, you can plan out the structure in more detail.

Step 3: Decide what happens to get to the ending

Narratives work because they have characters we care about (like the one you just created!) that have interesting and relatable things happen to them.

When you are trying to figure out the broad elements of the narrative, it may help you to break it down into three parts:

1. Introduction: Where you introduce the protagonist (the main character), other characters and the setting
2. Complication: Something happens that disrupts the regular life of the protagonist, challenging them
3. Resolution: The protagonist works out how to solve their challenge and tries to solve it.

Step 4: Choose your Structure

When you plan structure you need to consider:

• The scaffold of events that occur in the text
• The tense that the story is told in (past/present/future)
• The perspective the narrative is told from (1st/ 2nd/ 3rd)

Step 4a: Choose your plot scaffold

A plot scaffold develops your plot in more detail and gives you the structure to tell it. Do you want to use a flashback as a narrative device or would you rather tell your story from start to finish?

Your choice here would shape your plot scaffold. Below is a pair of flowcharts illustrating the two most common scaffolds:

• Scaffold 1 is a linear narrative that runs from start to finish
• Scaffold 2 uses a flashback to develop the resolution

One scaffold is not better than the other. Flashbacks can be confusing, cliche or unnecessarily convoluted, similarly linear narratives can be predictable or a little plain.

You will need to play around to see which one works best for YOUR story.

You’ll notice that this is more detailed than the initial plot structure:

• The introduction has been split into ORIENTATION and TRIGGER
• The complication has been developed into FIRST and SECOND COMPLICATIONS

Let’s see what this might look like:

Step 4b: Choose your tense

Once, you’ve picked a scaffold, you need to decide if it is told in the present or the past tense.

Writing in the simple past is the most common. It is easy to read and relatively straight forward to write.

Narratives written in the present continuous (-ing) are not uncommon but are a little harder to write. They can become hard to follow when characters in the present are remembering events in the past or they can seem overly simple and childish.

Blake Crouch’s Dark matter (2017) is a good example of an engaging and well-written present continuous narrative. You can read a sample on this page.

You should think about whether the events in the narrative are being narrated as they happen to the protagonist or if they are being remembered later on:

• Use the present tense if events are being narrated in real-time
• Use the past tense if they are being remembered later on

Step 4c: Choose your perspective

You have three choices when choosing the perspective your story is narrated from:

1. First-person: Events are told from a character’s perspective. the narrator uses “I”, “me”, and “we” to describe their actions
2. Second-person: Events are told from the reader’s perspective. This means that you use “you” to describe the narrator’s actions. This is a difficult perspective to write and can be quite jarring
3. Third-person: Events are told from an omniscient (god’s eye-view) perspective. The common pronouns used to describe the protagonist’s actions are “they”, “he”, “she”, “it”, etc.

if you’re just getting confidence writing narratives, you’ll find it easiest to start off with a third-person perspective. As you develop confidence and skill, you should start practising first-person narration.

As a rule, second-person narration should be avoided intially as it is to get wrong and can seem quite gimmicky.

To help you choose, here are some pros and cons for each tense:

Okay, now you’ve done your planning, you’re ready to… write your 1st draft!

Step 5: Write your draft

First things first,

It’s okay for your first draft to suck!

Like, really really suck. That’s okay. That’s the point of a first draft. it is a starting point for something much much better.

Be prepared to produce something terrible and then rebuild it into something great!

Now grab your plan and we’ll develop a first draft.

Let’s see how you should do that:

Step 5a: Compose the orientation

Your narrative needs a compelling hook. It also needs to introduce the characters and setting.

Don’t worry too much about getting the hook right in the first draft.

Introduce the setting and prominent characters by providing brief descriptions rather than detailed ones. Stories are more effective when the reader gets to paint the picture of characters.

For example, compare these two openings:

1. Farah was hunched over his controller focused on clearing the map with his teammates when the door to his room nearly blew off the hinges. His mother hulked in through the frame, eyes glaring.
2. Farah was a fourteen-year boy with blue eyes and black hair. He was playing Fortnite Season 9 with his friends. His mum knocked on the door, but Farah couldn’t hear her. His mum opened the door and walked in. She was wearing a green dress and had her hair in a ponytail. She was unhappy with Farah.

See the difference between the two? The first is more concise and only gives the reader as much information as they need. The second is much too detailed and in the process of being detailed loses any tension.

When writing your orientation, aim to only introduce the setting and key characters. You can start developing things further when you introduce the trigger.

Step 5b: Write your trigger

The trigger is an incident that sets the course of events in the narrative in motion. It could be something small like something said in a conversation. Or it could be something huge like an alien invasion.

You should make it clear that your trigger is important. You do this by describing the protagonist’s (and other characters’) response to it.

Step 5c: Write the 1st complication

The first complication is an obstacle that a character or characters encounter

Remember, complications are meant to provoke the character to find a solution to something and to have an emotional response.

For example, in Farah’s story, the first complication is being told by his Mum that he needs to go with the family to see his Teta and Gido at the hospital. He doesn’t want to go he has band practise with his friends, but has no choice but to go to the hospital.

When you write your complication, be sure to explain what the character’s response to it is. Describe their physical response and consider how they speak to people about it.

Ask yourself:

• How does this make the character feel?
• What will my character do in response?
• Does this change the character’s environment or the story’s setting?
• Is there an impact on the character’s relationships because of this complication?

Then you can describe what the characters do in response to the first complication.

Step 5d: Write the 2nd complication

The second complication occurs while the character(s) is overcoming the first one.

As in the first one, you need to describe:

• What the complication is
• How it affects the character
• If it affects their emotions
• Whether it changes their relationships
• What the character(s) will do in response to it

For example, in Farah’s case, the second complication occurs when his Grandma gives him a hard time about not playing the cello and challenging him to play them some music. It doesn’t go well, Farah isn’t as good a bass player as a cellist.

Once you’ve written the complication and its consequences, you can finish the story by writing the resolution.

Step 5e: Write the resolution

A resolution is where you conclude the narrative.

When you resolve a narrative, you don’t need to write the complete ending!

What does this mean? When you write a creative, you are only relating a short series of events that happen to a character or group fo people. You don’t need to tell their whole life stories!

Instead, you need to think about what part of their lives you want to relate and focus on that.

For example, in Farah’s story, we don’t need to see him go to his band practice after the hospital trip. Instead, we can focus on a smaller resolution. Farah’s Gido reveals he was in a punk band, plays some really good music, and explains why he left Lebanon in the 80s. He agrees to teach Farah how to play bass. The end.

Step 6: Edit your creative

When you edit a piece of work you want to break it down into two types of editing:

1. Macro edits: This is where you consider bigger picture things like structure, plot holes or characterisation, symbols and leitmotifs
2. Micro edits: Where you work on correct grammar, tense consistency, incorporating techniques, making your writing concise

To edit your creative, you want to tick off the items on the following checklist.

✔ Macro: Check for plot holes

Read through your story, make sure all of the events make sense.

Ensure there are no logical flaws.

✔ Macro: Look for consistency

Make sure you’ve used the correct tenses throughout.

Ensure sure you haven’t confused tenses.

Make sure the perspective is consistent throughout.

✔ Macro: Choose a symbol/ leitmotif and develop it

You need to develop a symbol, symbols, or leitmotif (a recurrent symbol) throughout.

For example, instruments in Farah’s narrative show his passion and come to be a leitmotif showing his renewed connection to his Gido

✔ Micro: Develop your dialogue

Dialogue is important. It shows the reader how characters relate to one another.

Dialogue is hard to write right.

It takes practice. When learning how to write dialogue, focus on keeping it tight by only including dialogue that:

• Shows a relation to another character
• Develops character
• Moves the plot along
• Is only related to the plot!

If it doesn’t do any of the above, then it is unnecessary.

✔ Micro: Incorporate techniques

You need to include techniques in your writing to help represent things.

This is how you SHOW and don’t tell.

Look for parts of your narrative where you only describe things in plain language and change them to using techniques like rhetorical questions, metaphors, similes, or symbols to convey your meaning.

For example, consider the following statements:

• “In the backseat of the car, Farah sat silently but inside he was very upset”
• “Silence engulfed the car, Farah’s cold burning resentment in the backseat was a black hole that compressed the small talk to nothing.’

The second statement might be longer but, clearly, it is more evocative because it compares Farah’s mood to a black hole.

✔ Micro: Edit for grammar

Read your narrative aloud. This will help you find grammatical mistakes and other errors.

You should:

• Look for sentences that aren’t complete sentences
• Make sure you’ve used the correct form of verbs
• Ensure you’ve used possessive apostrophes
• Check you’ve spelled things correctly
• Look to see that you’ve employed paragraphing.

if you want help learning about grammar. You must read our English grammar Toolkit.

✔ Micro: Edit for concision

Finally, you want to get rid of all of the rambling and fluff from your story.

Short stories are meant to be concise. You don’t want to waste a reader’s time. Instead, you want to make sure that the action is moving along throughout.

Read through your narrative and consistently ask yourself:

Does my reader need to know this?

If the answer is no, then you should consider removing or rewriting it.

Once this is done, you’ve finished your first draft!

WELL DONE!

That’s the hardest bit done.

Now you need feedback.

Step 7: Get Feedback and incorporate

Once you’ve got the first draft and tidied it up, you’re ready to get some feedback.

Feedback is important, as it will tell you what works in your narrative and what doesn’t.

When we write, it is often very easy to write for ourselves:

• Writing big flowery sentences
• Making assumptions about events or characters in the text that a reader needs to make sense of things
• Indulge certain techniques or phrases we like that don’t work for other readers

Feedback is a way of identifying these issues.

It can be hard receiving criticism on our work. Sometimes we don’t like hearing that our work isn’t fantastic.

It’s really important that you separate criticism of your work from criticism of you. The two are not the same (take note, parents!)

To get effective feedback, it will help if you give your reader a feedback form so they can tell you what they like and don’t like.

Step 7a: Give your reader a feedback form:

Once you get the feedback, you want to review it and take on board what the reader says.

You don’t need to follow all of their suggestions, but you should pay attention to those things that the reader says affect the readability of the piece.

Step 7b: Plan your changes

Before you redraft, make a plan outlining the changes you need to make to the story to make it better:

Now you can redraft.

Step 8: Redraft

This is where you redraft your story.

Some of the pieces may need only one redraft, other times they may need to go through several drafts.

The main rule of redrafting is that you

Rewrite the story in full and don’t just cut and paster or drag and drop.

At Matrix, we prefer students to write their first and second drafts by hand. When you rewrite a second or third draft by hand, you are more willing to make drastic changes (which are really great improvements). When you use a word processor, you tend to make things that are bad work, rather than letting them go.

Make sure that after you’ve redrafted the story you give it a final proofread before you…

Submit!

Now you’ve done all the hard work, you’re ready to submit it.

Remember, writing good narratives won’t happen overnight. Good writers become good through practice AND WIDE READING they weren’t born as good writers.

Don’t be afraid to write fan-fiction or try and imitate your favourite writers.

The best High School English Students try and write in a range of styles for fun and not just for school assessment tasks.