KEY CREATIVE WRITING SKILLS
Creating an effective structure (fiction)
This guide deals with how to write a plan for fiction writing at GCSE. It is not a guide for how to write effective fiction. It’s just about how to plan, which is, in itself, both important and challenging. There are other guides which deal with how to actually write the different parts of a fiction piece.
This guide is currently being re-written to more fully include the new requirement at GCSE for students to write only the opening of a short story, instead of the whole story. Once the re-write is complete, we will remove this message.
Quick links - fiction version
Why planning is essential
Planning is essential for any creative writing task. You must think about the whole piece before you start writing. You need to have something engaging at the start, and you need to develop your plot and characters across your piece. You also need to bring your piece to some kind of satisfying resolution, ideally one which links back to your opening. This requires planning. It’s almost impossible to do this without at least some planning. This guide will take you through what it means to write a plan (and also what doesn’t count as a plan), before giving you some tips on how to plan fiction pieces.
Two key principles for planning fiction
A plan is not the same as some notes or a brainstorm or any similar writing down of ideas. A plan is about structure — you are outlining the order in which you will write your piece:
What will you write first?
What will you write next?
What will you write after that?
And so on, until you get to the end.
In order for a set of ideas to become an actual plan, they must:
Be put in order (key principle 1)
Go from the start to the end (key principle 2) — for fiction writing this may be the end of the opening of a longer story, but there should still be some kind of end point, even if it’s not the final resolution of the story
That’s what a plan is. One way to think about this is to ask yourself what would happen if you gave someone else your ‘plan’ and asked them to write it up in full. How similar would their piece be to what you have in your head? If the plan is an actual plan, then their piece should be quite similar, at least in terms of overall content.
Exam planning vs. non-exam planning
Time constraints matter a lot when it comes to writing a plan. In an exam you will typically have about 45 minutes to plan and write your piece, whether it’s fiction or non-fiction. You should spend 5-10 minutes planning, leaving you 35-40 minutes to write. This means your plan will necessarily be slightly less detailed than it might be if you were planning without time constraints.
That said, this guide will still take you through the ideal approach to planning. Depending on how quickly you are able to think and write, you may need to plan in slightly less detail than we outline here, though the two principles above still hold: your plan must be in order and it must go from the start to the end. It just might need to be a bit less detailed than the examples in this guide.
In an exam, the plan only needs to make sense to you, so you can include fewer small details than we do in the examples in this guide — as long as you plan in your head and know what you want to do, then the plan you write down should be fine.
Planning fiction
The first thing you need to understand when planning fiction is the difference between plot structure and narrative structure. Plot structure is the order in which the actual events of a story take place. Narrative structure is the order in which the writer tells the reader about the events in the story. These two structures may be very similar, but they are unlikely to be exactly the same, especially if the story is well structured. You need to plan your narrative structure, not your plot structure, with timeshifts signalled.
The second important thing to bear in mind when planning a short story is the concept of conflict and resolution.
[UPDATE FOR NEW REQUIREMENT OF ONLY PLANNING OPENINGS]
The final thing you need to include in your plan is what you, as the writer, will do in the story. You need to plan how you will tell the story, not just what happens in it. So, you might include things like “describe the café in detail” or “show don’t tell her reaction to the dinosaur” or “increase the tension here”. There are many ways you could plan these kind of directions to yourself, but some common ones are included in the list below:
Description (e.g. describe the man’s elegant hat)
Characterisation (e.g. convey Peter’s awkwardness and insecurity)
Direct speech vs indirect speech (e.g. use indirect speech to convey conversation)
Slow time vs. fast time (e.g. slow-time down – convey Sally’s fear with thoughts)
Show don’t tell (e.g. show don’t tell Grandpa’s frustration)
Timeshift (e.g. timeshift back to the funeral)
Intended effect on the reader (e.g. create suspense with ambiguous threat)
To make all of this a bit clearer, let’s look at two fiction plans, one bad and one good.
Bad fiction plan - not really a plan
Peter is feeling insecure about his new hair cut on his way to school
Thought it was good at first but now he’s worried people will make comments
When he arrives at school people are nice about it
He feels relieved
There’s nothing wrong with the plot here. It is simple, clear and has some conflict (Peter’s fear about his hair cut) and a resolution (people are nice). But as a plan, this is very poor. It doesn’t go into any detail about how the story will be told. It just has the basic plot structure, with very little sense of narrative structure and no sense whatsoever of how the writer will tell the story effectively. If we asked two different people to write this story, two things would happen: first, they would each have to do a lot of work figuring out what to write; second, in the end, they would write the story in very different ways. This means the plan is not clear or specific enough. It is a bad plan.
Good fiction plan - a proper plan
Peter is frowning as he gets out of mum’s car outside school — thinks a Year 7 is looking at him funny — don’t say why (mystery)
Describe setting — busy — many people to judge and laugh
Runs fingers through hair — it’s so short
Spots boy from his year going through gate — doesn’t see P — relief
Timeshift — tell hair cut episode — tell fears through thought
Fast-time — P rushes through school — summarise fears — continues to frown
Slow-time — walks towards friends — create tension — describe their faces and P’s paranoia — still frowning
Direct speech — greeting and reply (no mention of hair) — include P’s thoughts
Enter form — b/f leans over and says “The hair looks good, mate.”
P is smiling
This is a much better plan. It’s the same plot as the bad plan, but it actually explains how the story will be told; it’s not just a rough summary of what happens. If two people were given this plan then they would have a good foundation on which to build and they would both write roughly the same story, albeit with different specific details. This is what you want from your plans. It has lots of directions for the writer (direct speech, timeshift, slow and fast time, etc) and it includes enough specifics for the structure of the story to be clear. It makes use of some abbreviations too (P for Peter, b/f for best friend) and uses fragments rather than full sentences to make it more concise. There is a lot that still needs to be decided in order to actually write the story, but that’s perfectly fine: you’re only writing a plan. This is a good plan.
Summing up - key things to remember when planning fiction
Planning is not an optional extra — you must plan every piece of writing you produce
A plan conveys the structure of the piece: it must be in order and it must go from the start to the end, even if the end if the end of the opening of your fiction piece
When planning fiction, you need to plan the narrative structure of your piece (how you will tell the story, including directions to yourself on what to write) and not the plot structure (the order in which things happen)