The complete guide to creative writing for the 11+

For most parts of the 11+, you can tell whether your child is on track. There are right and wrong answers for maths, verbal and non-verbal reasoning and English comprehension.

But for creative writing, there's no such thing as a "right" answer..

You might read what your child has written and think it's quite good. Or you think it isn't. But you're not sure why, in either direction. There's no mark scheme to print out that settles it.

This is the part of 11+ prep where most parents feel the most lost. Not because creative writing is harder than the other subjects (for most children, it's not) but because no one has ever told them what to look for.

This guide is meant to fix that. It covers what the assessment actually tests, what examiners reward and penalise, how to approach each kind of prompt, the specific writing skills that earn marks, the planning methods that work under exam conditions, the mistakes to avoid, and a long bank of practice prompts at the bottom.

This is a long, detailed guide. You don't have to read it in one go – so bookmark it and keep on coming back as often as you need.

What the 11+ creative writing test actually is

Creative writing isn't a standard part of the main exam boards. The big national tests – GL Assessment, ISEB Common Pre-Test, Quest – don't include it. They're computer-marked or multiple choice, and the closest they get to writing is a short comprehension answer.

So if your child's target school tests creative writing, the school is the one setting it. Either as part of a second-stage exam, in their own bespoke paper, or as a tiebreaker.

Three things to know about how this plays out in practice...

First, the weighting varies enormously. At some schools, creative writing is a tiebreaker only – it's read if a child is borderline on the other papers. At others, it's a third of the English score. At a few, it's effectively the whole point of the English paper. You need to check your school's admissions page, and if it isn't clear, ring the registrar and find out.

Second, time pressure is real. Most creative writing tasks are between 30 and 45 minutes. Some give a planning sheet, some don't. Children who haven't practised under timed conditions write a thin, unfinished piece because they spent too long thing – or conversely because they didn't plan enough and run out of steam.

Third, the prompts are unpredictable. The only way to prepare is to practise across the full range of prompt types so that whatever the paper throws up, your child has done something close to it before.

What examiners actually look for

Remember, unlike a multiple-choice question, creative writing is marked by hand. That means the examiner has multiple papers to get through – and often, there are more than one examiner.

To ensure consistency (and speed) in marking, they use a mark scheme that shows what to reward and penalise.

The mark schemes you'll find online tend to read like band descriptors: "vocabulary is competent", "characterisation is sustained", "figurative language is attempted with some success". Useful for examiners – not so much for parents.

This is what to look out for:

Examiners reward precision over ambition. A child who writes "the cat slunk along the fence" scores higher than one who writes "the magnificent feline traversed the wooden barrier". Your child should use specific, accurate language – they shouldn't sound like they've run every word through a thesaurus.

George Orwell's second rule from Politics and the English Language applies almost word-for-word:

"Never use a long word where a short one will do."

Examiners are Orwellians at heart.

Examiners reward control over volume. A tightly controlled 400-word piece almost always beats a sprawling 700-word one. Children think more is better. It isn't. What matters is whether every sentence is doing work.

Examiners reward variety: sentence length, sentence structure, vocabulary range and pace. A child who can vary their sentence rhythm – short for impact, long for description – is showing the examiner they're in control of their tools.

Examiners reward show over tell. "Sarah was scared" is telling. "Sarah's hand shook so badly she dropped the key" is showing. The mark scheme calls this "atmosphere" or "characterisation".

Examiners penalise carelessness. Not ambition – carelessness. A spelling mistake on an ambitious word costs less than the same mistake on "their"/"they're". Punctuation errors in dialogue are a particular giveaway. So is mixing up tenses halfway through.

The two things examiners absolutely don't reward, despite what your child might think: word count and big words. Stephen King put it well in On Writing:

"The road to hell is paved with adverbs."

A child sprinkling "loudly", "angrily", "quickly" through their writing is throwing marks away.

Mark schemes decoded

Most independent school mark schemes use two axes: content and style (the writing itself), and accuracy (spelling, punctuation and grammar). Typically out of 30, there are 20 marks for content and 10 for accuracy, though this varies.

Here's roughly what the bands mean in plain English.

The top band sounds like real writing. There's a controlled voice. Sentences vary deliberately. Vocabulary fits the moment rather than showing off. Imagery does work. Characters feel like people. The reader wants to keep reading.

Children may not write like F. Scott Fitzgerald's This Side of Paradise, but using a mix of sentence lengths is a great way to show control:

The silence of the theater behind him ended with a curious snapping sound, followed by the heavy roaring of a rising crowd and the interlaced clatter of many voices. The matinee was over.

The strong band has clear focus, consistent control and considered vocabulary. The piece has a shape. The reader follows it without effort. Imagery and figurative language are present and mostly work.

The competent band does what was asked. Structure is there, vocabulary is reasonable. Some moments work, others don't. The characterisation feels generic. Imagery is attempted but uneven.

The limited band exists but doesn't add up to much. There may be repetitive vocabulary, basic sentence structures and no real imagery. It's more plot summary rather than story.

Below that, pieces are incomplete, off-task or very short.

The leap that gets children from competent to strong is usually a single thing: stopping the rush. Slowing down to write one really good sentence rather than six adequate ones.

The eight prompt types and how to approach each

Schools draw from a fairly stable set of prompt types. Knowing the type tells your child what kind of piece they're meant to be writing, and what shape it should take.

1. Continue a given story

The paper gives an opening paragraph and asks your child to carry on.

The trap: ignoring the voice and tone of the given paragraph and writing something completely different. If the opening is gently spooky, what follows shouldn't be slapstick.

What works: re-read the paragraph twice before writing anything. Note the tense (usually past), the person (usually third or first), the mood, any character names. Then plan a small event that fits. Don't try to resolve everything – just write the next chapter, not the whole novel.

A good skeleton: hint at a complication in the first new sentence, develop it for two paragraphs, end on a moment that suggests where the story is going.

2. Write a story from a title

The paper gives a title – "The Visitor", "Lost", "The Door" – and asks for a complete short story.

The trap: ignoring the title after the first paragraph. The title has to earn its place. By the end, the reader should understand why the piece is called what it's called.

What works: choose one main event, one main character and a single change. The change is what makes it a story. A small event with a clear emotional arc beats a globe-trotting plot every time.

3. Describe a place

"Imagine you are alone in your school just before anyone arrives." "Describe a visit to a very cold place."

The trap: writing a postcard – here is what is here, then here is what else is here. But with no movement, no perspective, no voice.

What works: ground the description in a person who's experiencing it. What can they see, hear, touch, smell and taste? What can they not see? What's surprising? A description with a perspective is a description with a pulse.

4. Describe a person or object

The trap: piling up adjectives. "She had bright blue eyes, long brown hair, a small nose, a kind smile." This bores the examiner by sentence three.

What works: a few specific details that imply the rest. A character's hands tell you more than her face. The objects she carries tell you more than her clothes. Pick three details that suggest who she is, not twelve that describe how she looks.

5. Recount a real or imagined experience

"Write about a time you were scared." "Write about a frustrating moment."

The trap: a flat chronology – first this happened, then this happened, then this happened, the end.

What works: pick the moment when the experience changed. Start close to it. Use the rest to give context. First person works well here. Be specific about emotion – not "I felt sad" but the actual physical sense of sadness.

6. Write a letter or article to persuade

"Write a letter to your MP about litter." "Write an article on whether children should have smartphones."

The trap: forgetting it's persuasive and just describing the problem.

What works: take a position in the first sentence. Build three reasons. Acknowledge the other side briefly, then knock it down. Close with a call to action. Use a more formal register than fiction – this is a different kind of writing and examiners notice.

7. Write from a picture

The paper shows an image and asks for either a story or a description.

The trap: describing only what's in the picture. A strong piece uses the picture as a starting point and goes somewhere.

What works: spend a minute reading the image. What's outside the frame? What just happened? What's about to happen? What would the person in the picture say? The examiners aren't testing observation – they're testing imagination triggered by observation.

8. Discursive piece

"Should children have access to social media?" "Is it better to live in the city or the countryside?"

The trap: only arguing one side.

What works: structure is everything. Introduction stating the question. Two paragraphs for one side. Two for the other. Conclusion taking a balanced position. The mark goes to the child who can hold both sides in mind without losing focus.

The writer's toolkit

This is the section to come back to. Each tool below is something a child can practise in five minutes a day.

Vocabulary that gets used

Word lists kept in a bedroom drawer don't work. The child reads them, doesn't use them, forgets them.

What works is collecting words by category, with one example sentence per word. Verbs, sensory adjectives, abstract nouns, mood-words, weather-words. A small notebook divided into sections. When your child reads a book and finds a word they like, in it goes. The act of writing it down with a sentence is what makes it stick.

The categories that pay back the most for 11+ writing: verbs of movement (slunk, lurched, bolted, shuffled, crept), verbs of speech beyond "said" (used sparingly – examiners notice both their absence and their overuse), weather words, words for emotion that aren't just "happy" and "sad", and texture words for sensory description.

Figurative language

Four devices to know:

A simile compares using "like" or "as". The bad ones are clichés – "as bright as the sun", "like a flash of lightning". The good ones surprise. "Her hand shook like a leaf in a fan." The simile should show you something you hadn't seen before.

A metaphor compares without "like" or "as" – it just declares one thing is another. "The classroom was a cage." Metaphors are stronger than similes when they land. They're also harder to do well.

Personification gives human qualities to things that aren't human. "The wind whispered." "The shadows reached for him." Used sparingly, this is one of the highest-leverage techniques a child can learn.

Pathetic fallacy is personification specifically applied to weather and landscape, used to mirror a character's emotion. A scared character walks home through dark, watching clouds. A happy character runs through a sunlit field. It feels obvious to a parent. Examiners reward it because few children at this age have learned to use it on purpose.

Writing through the senses

Most child writing is sight-only. The reader sees what's there. They don't hear, smell, touch or taste it.

The five senses test: as your child writes a description, they should ask, what does this place sound like? What's the smell? Can you taste anything in the air? What's the temperature on the skin? Even one extra sense beyond sight lifts a piece a band.

Roald Dahl was a master of this. His descriptions of food in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory work because he gives texture, smell, temperature, the way the chocolate sounds when it cracks. It isn't just brown.

Show, don't tell

The single most-quoted piece of writing advice. It means: don't tell the reader what someone feels. Show them, through action or detail, so the reader works it out.

"James was nervous" is telling. "James pressed his hands flat against his knees so they couldn't see him shaking" is showing.

The fix is almost always to delete the abstract emotion-word and replace it with a physical action that implies it. Children resist this because they think the reader needs to be told. They don't. The reader prefers to work it out.

Sentence variety

This is one of the highest-leverage skills, and most children never learn to do it deliberately.

Three things to vary.

Length. Long sentences for description and atmosphere. Short ones for impact. The contrast is what creates rhythm.

Opening. Most child sentences begin with "He" or "She" or "Then". Variety means starting some with a subordinate clause ("Although it was raining, she..."), some with an adverb ("Slowly, the door opened"), some with a present participle ("Crouching low, he listened").

Structure. Simple sentences (one idea), compound (two ideas joined), complex (a main and a subordinate clause). A piece that uses all three feels controlled. A piece that uses only one feels flat.

A useful drill: take a paragraph your child has written. Underline the first three words of each sentence. If they're all the same kind of opening, rewrite half of them.

Dialogue

Dialogue is where children either pick up easy marks or lose them carelessly.

The rules. Speech inside double quotes in British conventions. A new line for each new speaker. Punctuation inside the quotes: "I'm leaving," she said. Not "I'm leaving" she said. Lower case for the speech tag if the speech ends in a comma. Capital if it ends in a question mark.

What good dialogue does: reveals character, advances the story, creates tension. Bad dialogue is small talk, or characters telling each other things they both already know.

A useful test: if you delete the dialogue from a scene, does anything change? If not, it isn't doing work.

Building tension

Tension is a child's favourite mode and the one they overcook fastest. Six techniques to use sparingly:

Withhold information. The reader knows something is wrong but not what. The character knows less than they should.

Use short sentences. She froze. She listened. Nothing.

Use the senses out of order. Hearing before seeing. A sound described before its source is revealed.

Slow time down. Lengthen the moment. Describe the slow turn of the door handle in three sentences.

Repeat a small detail. The ticking clock. The dripping tap. Repetition builds dread.

Use the weather. Pathetic fallacy again. A storm gathering. Wind picking up. The mood reflected outside the window.

The thing that stops tension working is overuse of the panic conjunction "suddenly". Once per piece. After that, find another way: abruptly, without warning, all at once, a moment later.

Beginnings, middles, ends

Five ways to open: a moment of action, a piece of dialogue, a description of setting, a description of character, a question. An opening in medias res (Latin for "into the middle of things") is effective: start in the middle of the action, then fill in the background later through flashbacks or dialogue.

What to avoid: starting at the moment your character wakes up. Starting with "Hi, my name is...". Starting with the date and the weather, unless the weather is doing work.

The middle is where most children panic and abandon the plan. It's where the main event happens. The middle should change something – a relationship, a situation, a character's understanding. If nothing changes, you don't have a story.

The ending is where weak pieces collapse. Two endings to avoid forever: "and then I woke up and it was all a dream" and "and then everyone died". Both are signs the writer ran out of ideas (or is writing Game of Thrones).

Strong endings either resolve the main tension – the character solves the problem, or fails to in a meaningful way – or leave the reader on a small image that reflects the whole piece. A door closing. A light going out. A character looking back.

Planning when time is tight

Most children skip planning because they think it costs them writing time. The opposite is true. A planned piece writes itself faster.

In a 30-minute exam, plan for five minutes. In a 45-minute exam, plan for eight to ten.

Here are three planning methods. Pick one your child likes and stick with it.

The bullet plan. Three to five bullet points covering opening, key event, climax, resolution. Each bullet is a paragraph. Quick, clean, hard to mess up.

The story mountain. A simple drawing of a hill – rising action up the slope, climax at the peak, falling action and resolution down the other side. This is a visual children take to it quickly.

The snowflake. Originally a novelist's tool from Randy Ingermanson – one sentence summarising the whole story, then ideas branching out from it, each branch becoming a paragraph. Good for children who think in connections rather than lines.

Here's a useful checklist before writing the first sentence: who is the main character, what do they want, what's stopping them, what changes by the end? If your child can't answer those four questions in one breath, the plan isn't tight enough.

Common mistakes and how to fix them

1. Cliché openings. "It was a dark and stormy night." "Once upon a time." "My name is..." Replace with a specific moment.
2. Over-reliance on "suddenly". Once per piece, maximum.
3. Trying to be funny when it doesn't fit. Examiners are forgiving of failed jokes only when the rest of the piece is strong.
4. Big words used wrongly. "She perambulated to the door" loses marks faster than "she walked to the door". The right word always beats the impressive one.
5. The wake-up ending. The piece becomes a dream. The examiner's pen goes through every word above.
6. Adverb stuffing. "She said angrily." "He ran quickly." Replace with stronger verbs – "she snapped", "he sprinted".
7. Repetition. "Then... then... then..." A piece can survive almost any flaw except this one. (But remember some repetition can be used deliberately for stylistic effect.)
8. Forgetting to check. The last three minutes of an exam are for re-reading. Most children skip this and lose marks they shouldn't.
9. Over-ambition. The piece tries to cover three plot lines in 400 words. Pick one. Develop it. Stop.

A worked example

Here's a sample prompt, a child-level plan and a finished piece. The plan and the piece are written to roughly Year 6 standard – pitched at the strong band.

Prompt

Write a story called "The Letter".

Plan

• Maya finds a letter on her doormat addressed to someone who doesn't live there.
• Setting: an autumn morning before school.
• She opens it and reads it.
• The letter mentions something in a garden that needs to be seen.
• It triggers a memory of her grandmother's unopened letters.
• She decides to find the address. She'll be late for school. She doesn't turn back.

Sample piece

The letter was lying face-up on the doormat when Maya came down for breakfast. She nearly stepped on it.

The envelope was thick, the kind of paper that crinkles, with a name written in green ink: Mrs E. Holloway, 47 Albany Road. Maya had never heard of any Mrs Holloway.

She turned it over. No return address.

Outside, the wind was nudging the leaves into the gutter. Mum was upstairs, banging the airing cupboard shut. Maya could hear the radio on in the kitchen.

She knew she shouldn't. She did anyway.

The seal lifted easily, as if the glue had given up months ago. Inside, a single sheet, folded twice, in the same green ink:

Dear Mrs Holloway, I have been trying to reach you for some weeks. There is something in the garden that you need to see, and I think it may not wait much longer. Please come.

That was all. No signature. No phone number. Just an address scrawled along the bottom: 14 Westmount Lane.

Maya read it twice, her cereal forgotten.

Westmount Lane wasn't far. Ten minutes if she ran. School started in twenty.

Something in the garden. The phrase sat on her chest. She thought of her grandmother's garden, the one they'd cleared the year she died, and the pile of letters they'd found in the shed – bundles of them, all unopened. The way her mother had cried, very quietly, in the kitchen.

She put the letter back in its envelope. Then she put the envelope in her coat pocket. Then she pulled on her shoes, the laces still tied from the day before.

"Mum," she called up the stairs, "I'm going early."

The door clicked shut behind her. The wind took the smell of her toast and pulled it away down the road.

Maya walked, then ran. The envelope against her ribs. Behind her, somewhere, she could hear the school bell starting to ring.

She didn't turn back.

What works

A specific opening. The letter is the central object – mentioned in the title, present in scene one, driving the plot.

Sensory detail. The crinkly paper, the wind, the toast smell, the envelope against her ribs.

Show-don't-tell on emotion. "The phrase sat on her chest" rather than "she felt worried".

Sentence variety. Short ("She nearly stepped on it.") next to longer descriptive ones. The triple repetition – "Then she put... Then she put... Then she pulled" – mimics the rhythm of someone making a decision in pieces.

The grandmother memory adds depth without taking over. It explains, without explaining, why the letter feels urgent.

The ending leaves the reader wanting to know what happens next without resolving everything.

What could be lifted further

The dialogue is minimal – one strong line of speech-from-character is enough, but a second exchange would push it further.

The simile bank is light – "as if the glue had given up months ago" is the only one. One more, well-placed, would help.

This is roughly a 24/30 piece. Strong band. The leap to top band would be one or two more controlled images and a moment of dialogue that reveals character.

Building the skill at home

Creative writing isn't a skill you cram in the last three months. It's built up by reading and small, regular practice.

Read, then read more

The single biggest determinant of how well a child writes is how widely they read. Children who read absorb sentence rhythm, vocabulary range, story structure and the basic mechanics of how a paragraph holds together. Children who don't can't easily fake it.

A reading list for Year 5 and 6, chosen because each book teaches something specific by example:

Northern Lights by Philip Pullman – for ambitious vocabulary and pace.

Rooftoppers by Katherine Rundell – for sensory description and unusual perspective.

The Lie Tree by Frances Hardinge – for atmosphere and moral complexity.

Goodnight Mister Tom by Michelle Magorian – for emotional realism in a child's voice.

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl – for sensory writing and rhythm.

Skellig by David Almond – for first-person voice and ambiguity.

Holes by Louis Sachar – for plot construction and tight chapter endings.

The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas by John Boyne – for first-person naivety used to powerful effect.

Wonder by R.J. Palacio – for multiple perspectives.

Coraline by Neil Gaiman – for tension and pacing.

You don't need to make children read all of these. But reading three or four, properly, with their parent talking about them at bedtime, does more than any worksheet.

Write little, often

Fifteen minutes, five days a week, beats two hours on a Sunday. Write one paragraph a day, not a whole story. A description of the kitchen. A moment of dialogue. A small piece of action. The point is to keep the writing muscle warm.

Read aloud

The single fastest way to spot a clunky sentence is to read it out loud. Children resist this. Parents should insist on it. Anything that doesn't sound right when spoken won't read right on the page.

Write from prompts

Try a prompt a week, under timed conditions, in the year before the exam. The prompts at the bottom of this guide are sorted by type. Pick one each weekend.

Practice prompts

Use these in rotation. Aim for one a week. Time them properly – 30 minutes, no phone, no help (and remember to allow time to plan).

Continue a story

Continue: The cardboard box on the doorstep was too quiet.

Continue: Pushing the door, his hand shook as the ground opened to reveal a staircase winding into the dark.

Continue: No one had been into the attic for forty years. Today, that was about to change.

Continue: The phone rang at 3am, which is when Anna knew something had finally happened.

Continue: The letter said only one word, and it was her own name.

Write a story from a title

The Visitor.

Lost.

The Door.

The Last Day.

Alone.

The Mistake.

The Promise.

The Stranger on the Train.

Taught a Lesson.

The Fire.

Describe a place

You are alone in your school just before anyone else arrives. Describe what you see, hear and feel.

Describe a visit to a very cold place.

Your train stops in a tunnel for half an hour. Describe what you see and how you feel.

Describe a market you visited in another country.

Describe the inside of an old house that hasn't been lived in for years.

Describe a person

Describe someone you'll never forget and explain why.

Describe a stranger you saw once and have thought about since.

Describe a teacher who changed something about how you see the world.

Describe a relative you don't remember properly, only through photographs.

Recount a real or imagined experience

Write about a time you had to do something that scared you.

Write about a moment you got something badly wrong.

Write about a time you or someone else became frustrated.

Write about a journey that didn't go as planned.

Write about a time you found something you weren't meant to find.

Persuasive writing

Write a letter to your local MP about litter in your area.

Write an article persuading parents that children should be allowed phones at school. Or that they shouldn't.

Write a letter to your headteacher proposing a change to school uniform.

Write an article on whether zoos should still exist.

Discursive writing

Should children have access to smartphones?

Is it better to live in a city or the countryside?

Are video games good or bad for children?

Should homework be banned?

From a picture

For these, find an image – a photograph, a painting, a press image – and use it as a prompt. Try a Banksy. A landscape photograph from a magazine. A historical photo from an old newspaper.

Write a story based on the picture.

Describe the picture.

Continue: imagine what happens five minutes after the picture was taken.

Short writing tasks

Write six sentences describing an animal.

Write seven sentences explaining how to do something familiar.

Write your favourite time of year in seven sentences.

Write a recipe in the style of a story.