Picture the scene: a published author sits down at a desk and knocks out a fully formed story with no prior planning. In 45 minutes. By hand.

It has all the components that make a story a story: interesting characterisation, rich and detailed description, a plausible plot.

It just wouldn’t happen. So why is it that we expect this of pupils?

At secondary school, the lower year groups have the luxury of immersing themselves in rich examples and then time to craft their narratives, honing their characterisation and playing with structure.

Ideas to boost GCSE English creative writing

In an ideal world, we would extend this to GCSE - but with 25 per cent of the final grade involving unseen story-writing or descriptive tasks, how can we best prepare students for success? Here are my favourite strategies:

1. Give students the steps in the story

Sending students into an assessment or exam in which they have no idea what they’re going to be faced with is counterproductive. As teachers, we know the structures required for success. In creative writing, the difference between a successful and an unsuccessful short story is a sense of a “complete” story - one that follows Freytag’s pyramid.

This is a good starting point for preparing students, as it lends itself to sections that can be included in a checklist or a structure strip. We can’t say what the topic or title of this story will be, but we can give students the bones of the story.

I like to ensure that students know that they need to write within a set of parameters: they need to describe a snapshot of a moment in time; there needs to be detailed description, a finite amount of characters and sparse dialogue (I suggest no more than three lines in the entire piece).

Writing to these “rules” is freeing, as it reduces the realm of possibilities and allows students to focus on the task at hand.

2. Steal a character from literature

JK Rowling is on the record as saying that Harry Potter “just sort of strolled into my head…fully formed”. This is not likely to be the case for students in the midst of an exam.

Authentic, sympathetic characterisation is difficult: we may identify character archetypes through the study of stories, but the creation of these under pressure, from scratch, is a big ask. We have to question what, realistically, the average 15- or 16-year-old can come up with.

Think of it like this: over their time at school, students have read, been taught or seen literally hundreds of stories, all with rich and varying characters whom they could incorporate into a story of their own.

By including or referring to a character from wider literature, they are showing the examiner that they can manipulate characters and events to create something new.

I have seen wonderful stories in which Jennet Humfrye from The Woman in Black has been transported to a modern-day black cab, her Gothic demeanour pervading the atmosphere around her, or a paranoid Macbeth has been seen, ranting to himself in an empty bus station.

3. Use film clips for inspiration

Another powerful way to stimulate story-writing is to get pupils writing from moving image. I have found that short clips in which there is no speech can often be the most powerful.

In the past, I have used the music video for City Girl from the Lost in Translation soundtrack. The rich visuals of the Tokyo cityscape and the relative ambiguity of the female protagonist mean there is a lot to write about.

In a similar vein, a clip from 28 Days Later, in which the male protagonist finds himself alone in a seemingly abandoned London, provides much food for thought. The repetition of a single word - “Hello” - provides a recurring motif for pupils to structure their words around.

Another powerful clip is taken from the TV series Lost and starts with the snapping open of a human eye - a fascinating place to start and play with structure for students of all writing abilities.

Whichever you use, you’ll find that students respond positively to the movie providing them with ideas, and allowing their focus to be on using their writing skills.

Laura May Rowlands is head of English in a secondary school in Hampshire