What Do You Need For a Story? For most stories, you need a place, you need a time, you need a main character. Your main character needs to have some kind of problem or issue, or dilemma, or needs to solve something or find something out – this can come from the character or it can be because something happens ...read more

Workshop Ideas First up, one of my students was looking into what kinds of ‘games’ could teachers play with pupils when it comes to books? I put that up as a question on Facebook, and here are the answers: Then, a teacher said on twitter that she was having difficulty getting her students to be interested in writing so I ...read more

I was listening to the radio and I heard about a woman who lived on the island of Monserrat in the Caribbean. Monserrat is a really one big volcano and a few years ago it erupted and people had to run away from the island. A few years later people started going back to the island. They didn’t want to ...read more

For teachers wondering about how to shake things up in the writing, reading, talking, listening field: How about a whole school writing project? I’ve seen these work really well in several schools. So, the staff get together and choose a ‘big’ or ‘important’ text or a single author. You each work out how you can work with some part of ...read more

The simplest, easiest and most painless way to write is to be stimulated or inspired by another piece of writing. Writers do this, without self-consciousness or shame! We read something and it triggers something off in our minds. What kinds of ‘something’ might this be? And how do we allow ourselves to be triggered by other people’s writing? In one ...read more

I used to scribble all my ideas down in a notebook but now that we’ve got phones and tablets I use the ‘Notes’ page on my phone. If you like writing and want to write more, you could do that. You don’t need an internet connection for it and every time you have a new idea you can create a new ‘page’ ...read more