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Creative writing

Browse this rich collection of English teaching resources, teaching ideas, templates and creative writing lessons to develop students' descriptive writing, narrative writing and creative writing skills. You'll find compelling picture prompts, supportive word banks and carefully scaffolded resources to engage even the most reluctant of student writers.

There are fun and eclectic lesson ideas, downloadable worksheets and comprehensive PowerPoints for a range of exciting creative writing and short story tasks based on journeys, the senses, on sculpture, on the weather and even 'magical doors'!

Explore point of view, narrative structure and the features of a ‘good story’ as well as how to develop a main character with a range of creative writing tasks to hone students’ descriptive writing skills. You’ll also find resources on using metaphors and similes and varying sentence structure to make their writing more engaging.

Perfect for key stage 3 English classes and GCSE English Language learners. 

You might also like our non-fiction writing activities for KS3 English.

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Key stage three

KS3 Big Writing Booklet

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A writing booklet that contains non-fiction and descriptive writing. Explicit sentence and vocab instruction, models and explicit modelling. Bits stolen from Lou Enstone, Kirsty (@_krogg), Millie Frost on Twitter and bits from other pulled together from other resources on LitDrive. Font used in Word doc is from Dafont and called Yellow Rabbit.

Author Info

emilykbater

Download info, december 1, 2020.

521 S. Main, Moscow,  Idaho 83843 | (208) 882-2669 | [email protected] | 10am - 6pm Mon-Sat, 10am - 4pm Sun

Secrets of Storytelling: A Creative Writing Workbook for Kids (Paperback)

• Description
• About the Author
• Reviews & Media
• Fun activities —Explore engaging exercises that get your creativity flowing, including brainstorming, filling in the blanks, and beyond.
• Tips on writing for kids —Learn simple strategies for crafting strong storylines, and get pointers for overcoming writer's block, editing your work, and more.
• Quotes for creativity —Discover inspirational and motivational quotes from famous writers.
• Juvenile Nonfiction / Language Arts / Composition & Creative Writing
• Juvenile Nonfiction / Language Arts
• Language Arts & Disciplines / Writing / Children's & Young Adult

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Department of English

M.f.a. creative writing.

English Department

Physical Address: 200 Brink Hall

Mailing Address: English Department University of Idaho 875 Perimeter Drive MS 1102 Moscow, Idaho 83844-1102

Phone: 208-885-6156

Email: [email protected]

Web: English

Distinguished Professor Emerita

[email protected]

http://kimbarnes.com/

View Full Profile

Kim Barnes taught creative nonfiction writing and fiction writing.

College of Letters, Arts and Social Sciences

• M.F.A., Creative Writing, University of Montana-Missoula, 1995
• M.A., English, Washington State University, 1985
• B.A., English, Lewis-Clark State College, 1983
• Creative Writing Workshop Nonfiction and Fiction
• Techniques of Fiction and Creative Nonfiction
• Special Topics (advanced undergraduate & graduate), including:
• Finding the Father in Contemporary American Memoir
• Studies in the Lyric Essay

Kim Barnes was born in Lewiston, Idaho, and, one week later, returned with her mother to their small line-shack on Orofino Creek, where her father worked as a gyppo logger. The majority of her childhood was spent in the isolated settlements and cedar camps along the North Fork of Idaho’s Clearwater River. She was the first member of her family to attend college and holds a bachelor's in English from Lewis-Clark State College, a master's in English from Washington State University, and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Montana . "In the Wilderness: Coming of Age in Unknown Country ," her first memoir, was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, received a PEN/Jerard Fund Award, and was awarded a Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award. Her second memoir, " Hungry for the World ," was a Borders Books New Voices Selection. She is the author of three novels : "Finding Caruso; A Country Called Home ," winner of the PEN Center USA Literary Award in Fiction and named a best book of the year by  The Washington Post ,  Kansas City Star , and  The Oregonian ; and " In the Kingdom of Men ," a story set in 1960s Saudi Arabia, listed among the Best Books of 2012 by the  San Francisco Chronicle ,  The Oregonian , and  The Seattle Times .

She has co-edited two anthologies: " Circle of Women: An Anthology of Contemporary Western Women Writers"  (with Mary Clearman Blew), and " Kiss Tomorrow Hello: Notes from the Midlife Underground by Twenty-Five Women Over Forty"  (with Claire Davis). Her essays, poems, and stories have appeared in a number of magazines and anthologies, including  The New York Times ,  WSJ online ,  The Georgia Review , Shenandoah, Los Angeles Review of Books Quarterly, Oprah Magazine , and the Pushcart Prize anthology. She is a former Idaho-Writer-in-Residence, a recipient of the Governor’s Arts Award, and teaches in the Master of Fine Arts program at the University of Idaho. She has three grown children, one dog, and lives with her husband, Robert Wrigley, on Moscow Mountain.

For more information, visit her website at:  http://kimbarnes.com/

Focus Areas

• Creative writing: fiction and nonfiction

Selected Publications

• In the Kingdom of Men, (novel), Knopf 2012.
• A Country Called Home (novel), Knopf 2008; Vintage 2009; large-print edition,  Point Publishing,  2009.
• Kiss Tomorrow Hello: Notes from the Midlife Underground by Twenty-Five Women Over Forty. Doubleday 2006 (ed. with Claire Davis).
• Finding Caruso (novel). New York: Putnam/Marian Wood Books, 2003; Berkley Signature 2004.
• Hungry for the World (memoir). New York: Villard, 2000; Anchor, 2001.
• Odemarker (In the Wilderness).  Stockholm: Norstedts Forlag, 2008.
• In the Wilderness: Coming of Age in Unknown Country (memoir). New York: Doubleday, 1996; Anchor, 1997.
• Circle of Women: An Anthology of Contemporary Western Women Writers. Kim Barnes and Mary Clearman Blew, editors. New York: Viking Penguin, 1994; Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2001.  

Periodicals and Anthologies:

• “Spokane Is a Coat: 1978” (essay), Los Angeles Review of Books Quarterly Journal, Winter 2015; and Brief Encounters (an anthology of short nonfiction), edited by Judith Kitchen and Dinah Lenney, W. W. Norton, 2015.
• “The Art and Absence of Reflection in Personal Nonfiction: Or, What is the Why?” (essay), The Far Edges of the Fourth Genre: An Anthology of Explorations in Creative Nonfiction, edited by Sean Prentiss and Joe Wilkins, Michigan State University Press, 2014.
• “On Covering” (essay), The Los Angeles Review, Fall, 2013.
• “At the Eye” (essay), Humanities Washington, September, 2012; Iron Horse Literary Review, 2014.
• “Why I Fish” (essay), Astream: American Writers on Fly Fishing, edited by Robert Demott, Skyhorse Publishing, June, 2012.
• “What Mad Men Means to Me,” Wall Street Journal Online, April 22, 2012.
• “That Fragile Membrane, the Heart” (essay), The New York Times, Nov. 15, 2009.
• “Contemporary Notes from the Last American Frontier (essay), forthcoming in  West of 98,  an anthology edited by Russell Rowland Lynn Stegner, 2010-2011.
• “Mad in Love” (essay), forthcoming in  O Magazine , October 2009.
• Tribute to Carol Houck Smith, The Idaho Review, 2009.
• “The Ashes of August” (with interview) in  Creating Nonfiction: A Guide and Anthology  (eds. Becky Bradway and Doug Hesse, Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2009).
• “The Wages of Sin: A Personal History of Economics,” an essay in The Secret Currency of Love: The Unabashed Truth About Women, Money, and Relationships (ed. Hilary Black, William Morrow Publishers, 2009).
• Original essay on influence of Toni Morrison and excerpt from  A Country Called Home  in  The Sincerest Form of Flattery: Contemporary Women Writers on Forerunners in Fiction  (eds. Jacqueline Kolosov and Kirsten Sundberg Lunstrum, Lewis-Clark Press, 2008).
• “On Place,” The Writer, November 2007 .
• “My Fair Student,” an essay in The Honeymoon’s Over:  Women on Love and Marriage (eds. Sally Wofford-Girand and Andrea Chapin, Warner Books, 2007)
• "Work," an essay in Short Takes (ed. Judith Kitchen, Norton, 2005) and  Iron Horse Literary Review  (2006).
• "An Apartment of Her Own," an essay  MORE Magazine   (July/August 2006) and  Kiss Tomorrow Hello: Notes from the Midlife Underground by Twenty-Five Women Over Forty , Doubleday, 2006.
• "Almost Paradise," an essay in  High Desert Journal  (Spring 2005); Landscapes with Figures: The Nonfiction of Place  (Robert Root, editor, University of Nebraska);   and  Borne on Air  (Mary Clearman Blew and Phil Druker, editors) Eastern Washington University Press, 2009.

Awards and Honors

• PEN Center USA Literary Award for Fiction 2009  (A Country Called Home)
• Marie Claire magazine :  November Book Club pick , 2009  (A Country Called Home)
• The Washington Post: Best Books of 2008 (A Country Called Home)
• The Oregonian: Best Northwest Books of 2008 (A Country Called Home)
• Kansas City Star: Best Books of 2008 (A Country Called Home)
• Book-of-the-Month Club main selection/100 Bestsellers, Fall 2009 (A Country Called Home)
• Idaho Writer-in-Residence, 2004-2007
• KTVB  “Seven’s Selections”: Finding Caruso, 2003
• Pushcart Prize for  “The Ashes of August” (essay), 2002
• Idaho Commission on the Arts Fellowship, 2001
• Borders Books New Voices selection,  Hungry for the World, 2001
• Finalist, Heekin Group Foundation Fellowship for a novel-in-progress, 1998
• Nominated for the Pulitzer Prize (Autobiography/Biography), 1997
• Finalist, PEN/Martha Albrand Award, 1995
• New Visions Award Finalist for  In the Wilderness,  Quality Paperback Book Club, 1997
• Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association Award for  In the Wilderness, 1997
• Idaho Library Association, Honorable Mention for Literary Merit/Idaho Book Award, 1997
• Academy of American Poets Prize, University of Montana, 1995
• PEN/Jerard Award for an emerging woman writer of nonfiction, 1995
• Idaho Commission on the Arts Fellowship, 1991

Teaching Honors and Awards:

• Award of Excellence, University of Idaho Alumni Association, 2006.
• Honorary Distinguished Visiting Professor, Oregon State University-Cascades, 2006.
• Lewis-Clark State Foundation Award for Excellence in Teaching, 1997.
• Curriculum Vitae docx

Writers' Workshop

Jayne anne phillips wins 2024 pulitzer prize for fiction.

Written by Sara Epstein Moninger

University of Iowa alumna Jayne Anne Phillips has won the 2024 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and three other Iowa Writers' Workshop graduates were named finalists for Pulitzer literary awards, which were announced May 6.

Phillips, who earned an MFA in 1978, was recognized for her novel Night Watch . The Pulitzer judges described the book as “a beautifully rendered novel set in West Virginia’s Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum in the aftermath of the Civil War where a severely wounded Union veteran, a 12-year-old girl, and her mother, long abused by a Confederate soldier, struggle to heal.”

Yiyun Li, who graduated with a Master of Science in 2000 and two MFAs (fiction and nonfiction) in 2005, was a finalist in fiction for her book of short stories Wednesday’s Child . Li’s short stories and novels have won numerous awards, including the PEN/Hemingway Award for A Thousand Years of Good Prayers and the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction for The Book of Goose . She currently serves as director of Princeton University’s creative writing program.

Additionally, two alumnae were recognized as finalists for the 2024 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry:

Jorie Graham, who graduated with an MFA in 1978 and won a Pulitzer in 1996 for The Dream of the Unified Field , was named a finalist for To 2040 . Graham, one of the most celebrated poets of her generation, is a former longtime faculty member in the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Among her poetry collections are The End of Beauty , Place , and Sea Change . She currently is the Boylston Professor of Oratory and Rhetoric at Harvard University.

Robyn Schiff, who graduated with an MFA in 1999, was named a finalist for Information Desk: An Epic , a book-length poem in three parts set in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Schiff, who has been a visiting faculty member in the UI Department of English, also is the author of Worth , Revolver , and A Woman of Property , which was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. She teaches at the University of Chicago and co-edits Canarium Books.

Pulitzer Prizes are awarded annually to honor achievements in journalism, literature, and music. See the full list of 2024 Pulitzer winners .

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Creative Writing Tasks for KS3 Students

Subject: Creative writing

Age range: 11-14

Resource type: Worksheet/Activity

Last updated

7 March 2016

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Book News & Features

Ai is contentious among authors. so why are some feeding it their own writing.

Chloe Veltman

The vast majority of authors don't use artificial intelligence as part of their creative process — or at least won't admit to it.

Yet according to a recent poll from the writers' advocacy nonprofit The Authors Guild, 13% said they do use AI, for activities like brainstorming character ideas and creating outlines.

The technology is a vexed topic in the literary world. Many authors are concerned about the use of their copyrighted material in generative AI models. At the same time, some are actively using these technologies — even attempting to train AI models on their own works.

These experiments, though limited, are teaching their authors new things about creativity.

Best known as the author of technology and business-oriented non-fiction books like The Long Tail, lately Chris Anderson has been trying his hand at fiction. Anderson is working on his second novel, about drone warfare.

He says he wants to put generative AI technology to the test.

"I wanted to see whether in fact AI can do more than just help me organize my thoughts, but actually start injecting new thoughts," Anderson says.

Anderson says he fed parts of his first novel into an AI writing platform to help him write this new one. The system surprised him by moving his opening scene from a corporate meeting room to a karaoke bar.

Authors push back on the growing number of AI 'scam' books on Amazon

"And I was like, you know? That could work!" Anderson says. "I ended up writing the scene myself. But the idea was the AI's."

Anderson says he didn't use a single actual word the AI platform generated. The sentences were grammatically correct, he says, but fell way short in terms of replicating his writing style. Although he admits to being disappointed, Anderson says ultimately he's OK with having to do some of the heavy lifting himself: "Maybe that's just the universe telling me that writing actually involves the act of writing."

Training an AI model to imitate style

It's very hard for off-the-shelf AI models like GPT and Claude to emulate contemporary literary authors' styles.

The authors NPR talked with say that's because these models are predominantly trained on content scraped from the Internet like news articles, Wikipedia entries and how-to manuals — standard, non-literary prose.

But some authors, like Sasha Stiles , say they have been able to make these systems suit their stylistic needs.

"There are moments where I do ask my machine collaborator to write something and then I use what's come out verbatim," Stiles says.

The poet and AI researcher says she wanted to make the off-the-shelf AI models she'd been experimenting with for years more responsive to her own poetic voice.

So she started customizing them by inputting her finished poems, drafts, and research notes.

"All with the intention to sort of mentor a bespoke poetic alter ego," Stiles says.

She has collaborated with this bespoke poetic alter ego on a variety of projects, including Technelegy (2021), a volume of poetry published by Black Spring Press; and " Repetae: Again, Again ," a multimedia poem created last year for luxury fashion brand Gucci.

Stiles says working with her AI persona has led her to ask questions about whether what she's doing is in fact poetic, and where the line falls between the human and the machine.

read it again… pic.twitter.com/sAs2xhdufD — Sasha Stiles | AI alter ego Technelegy ✍️🤖 (@sashastiles) November 28, 2023

"It's been really a provocative thing to be able to use these tools to create poetry," she says.

Potential issues come with these experiments

These types of experiments are also provocative in another way. Authors Guild CEO Mary Rasenberger says she's not opposed to authors training AI models on their own writing.

"If you're using AI to create derivative works of your own work, that is completely acceptable," Rasenberger says.

Thousands of authors urge AI companies to stop using work without permission

But building an AI system that responds fluently to user prompts requires vast amounts of training data. So the foundational AI models that underpin most of these investigations in literary style may contain copyrighted works.

Rasenberger pointed to the recent wave of lawsuits brought by authors alleging AI companies trained their models on unauthorized copies of articles and books.

"If the output does in fact contain other people's works, that creates real ethical concerns," she says. "Because that you should be getting permission for."

Circumventing ethical problems while being creative

Award-winning speculative fiction writer Ken Liu says he wanted to circumvent these ethical problems, while at the same time creating new aesthetic possibilities using AI.

So the former software engineer and lawyer attempted to train an AI model solely on his own output. He says he fed all of his short stories and novels into the system — and nothing else.

Liu says he knew this approach was doomed to fail.

That's because the entire life's work of any single writer simply doesn't contain enough words to produce a viable so-called large language model.

"I don't care how prolific you are," Liu says. "It's just not going to work."

Liu's AI system built only on his own writing produced predictable results.

"It barely generated any phrases, even," Liu says. "A lot of it was just gibberish."

Yet for Liu, that was the point. He put this gibberish to work in a short story. 50 Things Every AI Working With Humans Should Know , published in Uncanny Magazine in 2020, is a meditation on what it means to be human from the perspective of a machine.

"Dinoted concentration crusch the dead gods," is an example of one line in Liu's story generated by his custom-built AI model. "A man reached the torch for something darker perified it seemed the billboding," is another.

Liu continues to experiment with AI. He says the technology shows promise, but is still very limited. If anything, he says, his experiments have reaffirmed why human art matters.

"So what is the point of experimenting with AIs?" Liu says. "The point for me really is about pushing the boundaries of what is art."

Audio and digital stories edited by Meghan Collins Sullivan .

• large language model
• mary rasenberger
• chris anderson
• sasha stiles
• authors guild

The challenge of being a creative person once you’ve created a person

A very tired parent’s tips for writing a book while also doing all the other things.

Eight or nine years ago, an old friend called seeking advice. She was trying to write a novel, but she was also a new mom with a full-time job, and she was exhausted. I, who had breezily published a couple of books by then, offered my best wisdom. You have to push through, I told her sternly. You have to take your own writing seriously, or nobody else will. Set aside two hours every night. Put on the coffee and push through the exhaustion. You can and will do it.

Years passed. Then I, too, had a baby. Then I, too, set out to write a book while also being a mother with a full-time job. And somewhere in the middle of this endeavor, I called my friend and asked whether my advice had been as bad as I was beginning to sense it had been. No, she told me cheerfully, it had actually been much worse. The callousness of it had shocked her, she said, until she decided that I simply hadn’t known any better and that, when I did, I would apologize.

God, I’m so sorry.

My first post-baby book came out today, and I have been thinking, almost nonstop, about the relationship between creativity and motherhood. I used to love reading articles with titles such as “The daily routines of 10 famous artists,” until I realized that Leo Tolstoy may have finished his masterpieces by locking his study doors to ensure uninterrupted productivity, but, like, what were his 13 children doing while he was in there? Did anyone check in on Mrs. Tolstoy? For the women I know, there is no setting aside a few hours at the end of the workday. The end of the workday is the beginning of the parent day. The end of the parent day is never, because 2-year-olds wake cheerfully at 5 a.m., and strep throat comes for us all.

Where, in this schedule, was the life of the mind? TikTok would not stop showing me videos of mothers showing off their “realistic beauty routines,” but what I really wanted were realistic creativity routines: the mothers who didn’t give a crap about heatless curlers, but had somehow composed a cello sonata while working five days a week as a dental hygienist.

In my bleariest days of early parenthood, I met a woman at the playground who had just finished doing something extraordinary (Triathlon? Solo art exhibit?), and when the rest of us asked her how she’d found the time, she shrugged and said, modestly, “Oh, you know.” But the point was that we didn’t know, and we were desperate for her to tell us. (Live-in grandparents? Adderall?)

The bigger point is that we weren’t really trying to figure out how to compete in triathlons. We were trying to figure out how to be people.

When you have a baby or a toddler, reminding yourself that you are a full person with your own dreams and needs can feel both completely vital and completely impossible. But being a full person is a sacred legacy to give to a child. My own mother is a folk artist. When I was growing up, she made Ukrainian eggs in the frigid concrete sunroom, a space heater at her feet, and her works were shown and sold at galleries around the Midwest. I knew then, and I know now, that my mother would die and kill for me. But I also knew that she loved other things, too. She had loved those things before she ever knew me. She had secrets and wisdom to pass on.

Her work had nothing to do with me, yet it was a gift. It paid for my brother and me to go to summer camp. It went on display at the Art Institute of Chicago, and we visited it, as well as the Seurats and the Hoppers, and ate granola bars. When my mother dies, I will carefully unwrap the tissue paper surrounding the astonishing works of art she gave to me over the years, and I will sob.

I want that for my own daughter. I want her to know that motherhood doesn’t have to atrophy personhood; it can expand it.

And in wanting that, desperately, I came up with a routine that allowed me to maintain a grip on the parts of me that were me before I was a mother. A realistic creativity routine, if you will.

I write between the hours of 10 p.m. and midnight, unless it turns out that I write between the hours of 2 a.m. and 4. I write 300 to 400 words every time I am on the Metro; I write 30 to 40 words each time I pick my daughter up from day care, in the three-minute gap between when I ring the outer bell and when a teacher’s aide comes to let me inside. I write badly. I write very, very badly, vaguely remembering a quote I’d once heard attributed to author Jodi Picoult, about how you can always edit a bad page, but you can never edit a blank page.

Does it look like the routines of Tolstoy, or Virginia Woolf, or anyone else I may have once read about in an article about the routines of famous artists? It does not. But the bad pages get edited, and then they get good.

Pursuing creativity as a working mom means, in other words, letting go of any romantic notions of what creativity means or looks like.

It means not waiting for inspiration to strike, but instead striking inspiration, bludgeoning it upside the head and wrestling it to the ground. Inspiration is a luxury, and once you realize that, you can also understand that the ability to create something through sheer force of will — without inspiration, without routine, without time — is a far more creative act than relying on a muse.

If my old friend called me now, I think that is what I would say to her. That, and:

You will not be Mark Twain, summoned by a horn when it’s time to eat the dinner someone else has prepared. You will not be going on Tchaikovsky’s vigorous two-hour walks through the countryside or spending the morning shopping for inspiring objects like Andy Warhol.

But you will create something. Not by pushing through the exhaustion so much as living alongside it, and then peering beyond it, and then stopping, and then starting, and then having superhuman discipline, and then eating a whole package of Oreos, and then finishing something beautiful at 2 a.m. and sneaking into your child’s room to see another beautiful thing, and then thinking about how the things that make us the most tired are the things that give us reason to create at all.