creative writing piece about war

28 Writing Prompts About War

So you wanna write about war, but… war already feels written about, right?

Yeah, it’s a heavy topic with a long history.

From epic poems to gritty modern novels, war’s been dissected a million times over. But fear not, fellow wordsmiths! There’s always a fresh angle, a unique story waiting to be told.

This post is here to spark that fire. We’re diving into war-themed writing prompts right now.

Let’s check them out.

Writing Prompts About War

In the throes of World War II, a soldier writes letters to his beloved. Fifty years later, a young woman stumbles upon these letters in an old trunk and feels an irresistible urge to respond, attempting to heal old wounds and bridge the chasm of time. What messages does she pen, and what mysteries unfold as she delves deeper into the soldier’s life and times?

The physical damages of war are evident, but the emotional and psychological scars are often hidden. Your protagonist returns home from the warfront only to find that the war has followed him in haunting memories and triggering situations. How does he cope, and what strategies does he employ to help heal himself and his relationships?

Twin siblings are caught in the turbulence of a civil war. While one chooses to join the rebels, believing in their cause, the other remains loyal to the ruling government. How do their paths intersect throughout the conflict, and what choices do they make when they come face to face?

Not all roles in the war are about fighting. A nurse in a military hospital faces the harrowing task of tending to the wounded, both allies and enemies alike. As she documents her experiences in a diary, she uncovers a secret about one of her patients. What revelations await her, and how do they reshape her understanding of the war?

A pacifist is conscripted into a raging conflict. On the battlefield, he discovers not only the grim realities of war but also his own latent potential for leadership and strategy. In a world painted in shades of grey, how does he reconcile his personal beliefs with the brutal necessities of war?

Amidst the din of war, a soldier hears a haunting melody being played from the enemy camp. Enchanted, he risks his life to meet the musician and learns about the stories and hopes that inspire such beautiful tunes amidst chaos. How does this shared love for music influence the choices they make in the midst of a brutal war?

Children growing up in a war-torn city develop an intricate game that mirrors the strategies and battles they witness daily. Through their innocent eyes, the reader gets a fresh perspective on the complexities of warfare. How does this game affect their understanding of right and wrong, and what lessons do they offer to the adults around them?

In a world recovering from a long and devastating war, a journalist is tasked with interviewing the last living veterans. As she collects their stories, she’s also grappling with the war’s impact on her own family’s history. What truths does she uncover, and how do they shape her understanding of peace, loss, and memory?

In a besieged city, a renowned violinist plays nightly from the remains of a shattered building. His music captivates both sides, eventually leading to a ceasefire during his performances. What power does this music hold, and can its notes forge a path to lasting peace amidst the war?

Soldiers from opposing factions find themselves abandoned by their units in a vast, unknown terrain. To survive the harsh environment, they must rely on each other. As they journey together, how do their perceptions of the enemy change, and what bond, if any, emerges between them?

A cartographer is tasked with mapping out territories in a rapidly shifting war zone. With each change in boundary, he realizes that his maps are inadvertently influencing the course of the war. Faced with the weight of his creations, does he remain neutral or try to change the tide of conflict?

Amidst the despair of trench warfare, soldiers from both sides secretly exchange letters, sharing stories, hopes, and dreams. Their clandestine correspondence builds a bridge of understanding in the middle of chaos. How do these written exchanges affect their view of the enemy and the decisions they make in battle?

An old, dusty journal surfaces in a second-hand bookstore, recounting tales of a mysterious soldier whose actions altered key events during the war. As a historian delves into the pages, they start to question previously held beliefs about the war. What truths lie hidden within the journal, and how do they challenge the established narrative?

A spy disguises themselves as an enemy officer to gather crucial intelligence. Living in daily peril, they form an unexpected connection with someone on the opposing side. How do they balance their duty to their homeland with the new relationships they’ve formed, and what sacrifices will they have to make?

In a city reduced to rubble, a librarian strives to protect a secret collection of books that hold the cultural and historical legacy of their nation. As enemy forces close in, a choice must be made. Will the librarian save the irreplaceable collection or prioritize the lives of the city’s remaining inhabitants?

Using newly developed technology, soldiers at the frontlines receive holographic messages from their families back home. While these messages offer a brief respite from the horrors of war, they also blur the lines between reality and longing. How do these glimpses of home shape a soldier’s resolve and their choices on the battlefield?

In a world inundated with propaganda, a radio operator begins intercepting cryptic broadcasts from an unknown source. These messages offer a starkly different perspective on the ongoing war. As the operator deciphers these broadcasts, how does this newfound knowledge influence his role in the war and his loyalty to his nation?

After a major battle, engineers from both warring factions are stranded in a no-man’s-land. They decide to cooperate and build a bridge to their respective sides. Through their collaborative effort, do they find common ground and perhaps a blueprint for peace?

A renowned war medic, committed to saving lives regardless of allegiance, is captured and is forced to serve the enemy. With limited resources and facing dilemmas daily, how does the medic prioritize, and can healing serve as a catalyst for broader understanding?

Years after the war, a curator designs an exhibit that showcases personal artifacts from soldiers, civilians, and others affected by the conflict. Each item tells a unique story. As visitors navigate the exhibit, how do these intimate glimpses into personal experiences reshape collective memories of the war?

A soldier, unable to speak the local language, is separated from his unit and taken in by a rural family. Through gestures, shared tasks, and unexpected moments, they communicate. In the heart of enemy territory, can genuine human connection transcend the barriers of language and war?

A submarine crew, cut off from the world due to a malfunctioning communication system, surfaces years after the war has ended. Unaware of the war’s outcome and the world’s current state, how does the crew navigate this unfamiliar reality, and what legacy do they carry from their time submerged?

In an occupied city, unknown artists use graffiti to communicate messages of hope, resistance, and unity. Their artwork becomes a beacon for the oppressed. When the identity of the artists is threatened with exposure, what choices will the community make to protect their symbols of hope?

In a region torn by conflict, a village decides to come together for their annual harvest festival, inviting even those from the opposing faction. The festival becomes a temporary truce, a momentary escape from the war’s realities. Can a shared cultural celebration sow the seeds of lasting reconciliation?

An acclaimed painter is commissioned to create a portrait of a high-ranking general from the opposing army as a gesture of tentative peace. Throughout the sessions, the two share stories, philosophies, and regrets. As brush meets canvas, can art capture the essence of a man beyond his uniform, revealing the complexities of the human soul?

A photojournalist embedded with a unit captures the raw and unfiltered moments of the war, focusing not on the battles, but on the quiet moments in-between – a shared meal, a tearful letter reading, a soldier’s introspection. With each snapshot, what untold stories emerge, offering a poignant commentary on the costs of war?

During an excavation for a wartime bunker, soldiers uncover an ancient battleground filled with relics and writings from a forgotten civilization that once faced a similar conflict. Can lessons from a long-lost civilization influence contemporary strategies and potentially provide a roadmap to peace?

A war-ravaged city operates a train that, legend says, leads to a sanctuary untouched by conflict. Desperate civilians and disillusioned soldiers alike seek passage. As they journey together, what stories unfold in each compartment, and does the train’s destination hold the promise they all yearn for?

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How to Write a Perfect Essay On/About War (A Complete Guide)

War is painful. It causes mass death and the destruction of infrastructure on an unimaginable scale. Unfortunately, as humans, we have not yet been able to prevent wars and conflicts from happening. Nevertheless, we are studying them to understand them and their causes better.

In this post, we will look at how to write a war essay. The information we will share here will help anyone craft a brilliant war essay, whatever their level of education.

Let’s commence.

What Is a War Essay?

A war essay is an essay on an armed conflict involving two states or one state and an armed group. You will be asked to write a war essay at some point if you are taking a history course, diplomacy course, international relations course, war studies course, or conflict management course.

When asked to write about a war, it is important to consider several things. These include the belligerents, the location of the conflict, the leading cause or causes of the conflict, the course of the event so far, and the possible solutions to the conflict.

The sections below will help you discover everything you need to know about how to write war essays.

An essay about war can take many forms, including:

• Expository essay – where you explore the timeline of the wars (conflicts), losses/consequences, significant battles, and notable dates.
• Argumentative essay . A war essay that debates an aspect of a certain war.
• Cause and Effect essay examines the events leading to war and its aftermath.
• Compare and contrast a war essay that pits one war or an aspect of the war against an
• Document-based question (DBQ) that analyzes the historical war documentation to answer a prompt.
• Creative writing pieces where you narrate or describe an experience of or with war.
• A persuasive essay where use ethos, pathos, and logos (rhetorical appeals) to convince your readers to adopt your points.

The Perfect Structure/Organization for a War Essay

To write a good essay about war, you must understand the war essay structure. The war essay structure is the typical 3-section essay structure. It starts with an introduction section, followed by a body section, and then a conclusion section. Find out what you need to include in each section below:

1. Introduction

In the introduction paragraph , you must introduce the reader to the war or conflict you are discussing. But before you do so, you need to hook the reader to your work. You can only do this by starting your introduction with an attention-grabbing statement . This can be a fact about the war, a quote, or a statistic.

Once you have grabbed the reader's attention, you should introduce the reader to the conflict your essay is focused on. You should do this by providing them with a brief background on the conflict.

Your thesis statement should follow the background information. This is the main argument your essay will be defending.

The introduction section of a war essay is typically one paragraph long. But it can be two paragraphs long for long war essays.

In the body section of your war essay, you need to provide information to support your thesis statement. A typical body section of a college essay will include three to four body paragraphs. Each body paragraph starts with a topic sentence and solely focuses on it. This is how your war essay should be.

Once you develop a thesis statement, you should think of the points you will use to defend it and then list them in terms of strength. The strongest of these points should be your topic sentences.

When developing the body section of your war essay, make sure your paragraphs flow nicely. This will make your essay coherent. One of the best ways to make your paragraphs flow is to use transition words, phrases, and sentences.

The body section of a war essay is typically three to four paragraphs long, but it can be much longer.

3. Conclusion

In the conclusion section of your war essay, you must wrap up everything nicely. The recommended way to do this is to restate your thesis statement to remind the reader what your essay was about. You should follow this by restating the main points supporting your thesis statement.

Your thesis and the restatement of your main points should remind your reader of what your essay was all about. You should then end your essay with a food-for-thought, a recommendation, or a solution. Whatever you use to end your essay, make sure it is relevant to what you have just covered in your essay, and it shows that you have widely read on the topic.

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How to write a war Essay? – The Steps

Several wars have taken place on earth, including:

• World War I and II
• Russian Civil War
• Chinese Civil War
• Lebanese Civil War
• Syrian Civil War
• The Spanish Civil War
• The American Civil War
• Afghanistan War

The list of wars that have happened to date is endless.

Writing a war essay is never easy. You need to plan your work meticulously to develop a brilliant war essay. If you are assigned to write a war essay or paper, follow the steps below to develop a brilliant essay on any conflict.

1. Read The Assignment Instructions Carefully

You must know precisely what to do to write a brilliant war essay. College professors typically provide multiple instructions when they ask students to write college essays. Students must then read the instructions carefully to write precisely what their professors want to see.

Therefore, when you get a war essay assignment, you must read the instructions carefully to understand what is needed of you entirely. Know exactly what conflict your professor wants you to focus on, what aspect of the conflict (the origin, the chronology of events leading to the war, external factors, etc.), what sources they want you to use, and the number of pages they want.

Knowing what your professor needs will help you to develop it nicely.

2. Do Your Research

After reviewing the war assignment instructions, you should research the topic you’ve been asked to focus on. Do this by Googling the topic (and its variations), searching it in your college database, and searching it in scholarly databases. As you read more on the topic, take a lot of notes. This will help you to understand the topic better, plus its nuances.

Once you understand the topic well, you should start to think about what precisely your essay should focus on. If you like, this will be the foundation of your essay or the thesis statement.

Once you settle on the thesis statement, read more on the topic but focus on information that will help you defend your thesis statement.

3. Craft A Thesis Statement and Create an Outline

At this point, you should have a rough thesis statement . Once you have read more information on it as per the previous step, you should be able to refine it into a solid and argumentative statement at this point.

So refine your thesis statement to make it perfect. Your thesis statement can be one or two sentences long but never more. Once you have created it, you should create an outline.

An outline is like a treasure map – it details where you must go comprehensively. Creating an outline will give you an overview of what your essay will look like and whether it will defend your thesis statement. It will also make it easier for you to develop your essay.

Ensure your outline includes a striking title for your conflict essay, the topic sentence for each body paragraph, and the supporting evidence for each topic sentence.

Related Read:

• Writing a compelling claim in an essay
• How to write sound arguments and counterarguments

4. Start Writing the Introduction

When you finish writing your essay, you should start writing the introduction. This is where the rubber meets the road –the actual writing of your war essay begins.

Since you have already created a thesis statement and an outline, you should not find it challenging to write your introduction. Follow your outline to develop a friendly compact, and informative introduction to the conflict your essay will focus on.

Read your introduction twice to make sure it is as compact and as informative as it can be. It should also be straightforward to understand.

5. Write The Rest of Your Essay

Once you have created the introduction to your war essay, you should create the body section. The body section of your essay should follow your outline. Remember the outline you created in step 3 has the points you should focus on in each body paragraph. So follow it to make developing your essay’s body section easy.

As you develop your essay's body section, ensure you do everything nicely. By this, we mean you develop each topic sentence entirely using the sandwich paragraph writing method.

Also, make sure there is a nice flow between your sentences and between your paragraphs.

6. Conclude Your War Essay

After writing the rest of your essay, you should offer a robust conclusion. Your conclusion should also follow your outline. As usual, it should start with a thesis restatement and a restatement of all your main points.

It should then be followed by a concluding statement that provides the reader with food for thought. You should never include new information in your conclusion paragraph. This will make it feel like another body paragraph, yet the purpose of your conclusion should be to give your reader the feeling that your essay is ending or done.

7. Proofread and Edit Your Essay

This is the last step of writing a war essay or any other one. This step is final, but it is perhaps the most important step. This is because it distinguishes an ordinary essay from an extraordinary one.

You should proofread your essay at least thrice, especially if it is short. When you do it the first time, you should look for grammar errors and other basic mistakes. Eliminate all the errors and mistakes you find. When you do it the second time, you should do it to ensure the flow of your essay is perfect.

And when you do it the third and last time, you should use editing software like Grammarly.com to catch all the errors you might have missed.

When you proofread your war essay in this manner, you should be able to transform it from average to excellent. After completing this step, your war essay will be ready for submission.

Related Articles:

• How to write an essay from scratch
• Writing a reflection essay on any topic (including war)

Tips for Writing a Brilliant War Essay

Follow the tips below to develop a brilliant essay.

• A brilliant topic is always vital.

When you are assigned a war essay, you should do your best to choose or create a brilliant topic for your essay. A boring topic focusing on something discussed and debated a million times will never be brilliant.

• A strong thesis statement is essential.

Along with a brilliant topic, you need a strong thesis statement to make your war essay brilliant. This is because a strong thesis statement is like a lighthouse – it will guide safely to the harbor (conclusion).

• Do not be afraid to discuss the tragedy.

Sometimes war details can feel too graphic or gruesome, leading to hesitance on the part of students when they are writing articles. Do not hesitate or be afraid to discuss tragedy if discussing tragedy will add to the substance of your essay.

• Be impartial.

Sometimes it can be challenging to write an impartial essay, especially if you relate to or strongly support one side in a conflict. Well, this should never happen. As a researcher, you must be as impartial as you can be. You must inform your reader of all the facts available to you without bias so they have an accurate impression of whatever you are talking about.

• Ensure your work has flow.

This is one of the most important things you must do when writing a war essay. Since war essays sometimes discuss disparate issues, ending with a disjointed essay is straightforward. You should do all you can to ensure your workflows are well, including using transition words generously. 

• Proofread your work.

You should always proofread your essays before submission. This is what will always upgrade them from ordinary to extraordinary. If you don’t proofread your work, you will submit subpar work that will not get you a good grade.

• Explore unexplored angles.

Chances are, whatever war or conflict you write about has already been written on or reported on a million times. If you want your essay to be interesting, you should explore unexplored angles on conflicts. This will make your work very interesting.

War Essay Sample to Inspire your Writing

Here is a short sample of a war essay on the Russia-Ukraine War.

The most affected cities in the Russia-Ukraine War 2022

The Russia-Ukraine war has killed tens of thousands and displaced millions across Ukraine. It has also led to the destruction of civilian homes and infrastructure across Ukraine. The eastern cities of Bakhmut, Kharkiv, and Mariupol are the most affected cities in the Russia-Ukraine War 2022.

Bakhmut in southeastern Ukraine is the site of the bloodiest and longest-running battle between Russian and Ukrainian forces. The city is strategic as it is close to supply routes that the Russians use in the occupied territories of southern Ukraine. It is estimated that as much as 90% of Bakhmut has been destroyed in Russia’s bid to take over the city.

Mariupol is a Ukrainian port city between Russia and the Russian-occupied Crimea. Russia decided to take the city early on to deny Ukraine a foothold close to its border and operation areas in the south. Yet the city was defended by a fanatic Ukrainian military battalion that swore not to give it up. This led to Russia bombing much of the city to the ground. In the end, Russia won the battle for Mariupol and now controls the city and the surrounding area.

Kharkiv is Ukraine’s second biggest city. It is less than 45 minutes away from the Russian border. Taking the city was one of the top priorities for Russia at the start of the war because of its proximity to Russia. Nevertheless, Ukraine deployed much of its army to defend the city and has managed to do so. Nevertheless, this has come at a cost. Much of Kharkiv’s infrastructure is destroyed. Its power lines, highways, roads, railways, dams, and industries are destroyed.

The Russia-Ukraine conflict has affected much of Ukraine, especially the eastern cities of Bakhmut, Kharkiv, and Mariupol. All three cities have suffered tremendous infrastructure damage in the past few months. Efforts must be made by the two state parties and the international community to prevent further destruction of Ukrainian cities in this conflict.

War Essay Topic Ideas

Not sure what to write about in your war essay? Here are some ideas to get your creative juices flowing.

• Causes of Russia-Ukraine conflict in 2022
• What led to Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014?
• Causes of Tigray conflict in Ethiopia
• Somalia-Kenya border conflict
• Conflict in eastern DRC
• Secessionist movements in the UK
• Western Sahara versus Morocco
• Causes of the Libyan Civil War
• The American war of independence
• The American civil war
• The English civil war
• The Napoleonic wars
• The French invasion of Russia
• Causes of the crusader wars
• The German invasion of Poland and its consequences
• The battle of Stalingrad and its bearing on the cause of WWII
• The causes of World War I
• The Japanese invasion of Southeast Asia
• What caused America to end the Vietnam War
• The Cuban Missile Crisis
• The fall of the Berlin Wall
• The Arms Race
• Role of the cold world war in shaping the world we live today
• The causes and consequences of the Syrian Civil War
• The role of propaganda in the Iraq War
• Implications of the Syrian Civil War

As you Come to the End, …

An essay on war is not easy to write, but it can be written when you have the right information. This post provides you with all the vital information needed to write a brilliant war essay. We hope that this info makes it easy for you to write your war essay.

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First World War postcard published by ‘The Cairo Postcard Trust’ (© Lyn Edmonds)

We received entries from all over the world – Britain, Ireland, France, India, Pakistan, Serbia, Australia and New Zealand – and were struck by the multiple viewpoints and the wide range of styles, but also by the focus on the stories of individual people, which brought the wider history to life.

Congratulations to our winners! We hope you enjoy reading their work. Click on the PDF page next to the citations below to open the short story or poem. Here you can read all the shortlisted entries . Copyright remains with the authors.

11-18 category

Winner: ‘heat’ by constance cottrell.

Runners up: ‘The Long Road East’ by William Bowden-Ritchie and ‘Welcome to East Africa’ by Charlotte Lee

Highly Commended (in alphabetical order)

‘Lest We Forget’ by Matthew Gittleson.  The central idea of this story, that the actions of humans on the battlefield seem inexplicable and contrary to nature, is very well expressed. Using a tree as the voice of the author allows us to step back from the human experience and become more objective. The action is placed in the East African campaign and the writer picks out the extraordinary valour of the colonial soldiers who fought for the British and German empires.

‘Long Live War’ by Ishaabyha Tripathi.  As a piece of creative writing this entry focusses on one simple idea and uses this to epitomise the writer’s experience of the war away from the Western Front, where the majority of troops on both sides were colonial, and many of them – as described – not English speakers. The entry also manages to convey something of the contradictions of war, along the lines of ‘Oh What  A Lovely War’, where soldiers become ironic and fatalistic about their situation. This is all the more poignant in the choice of writer, who cannot appreciate the irony due solely to lack of knowledge of the language.

Over 18 category

Winner: ‘buried letters’ by helen parker-drabble.

An audio version of ‘Buried Letters’

Right click here to download it as an MP3 file

Runners-up: ‘The Princess Beatrice’ by Antony Dunford and ‘The Cheecha’ by Peter Susa

‘The Syrian’ by Patty Lafferty.   The simple idea that history is repeating itself in Syria is well expressed. The poem uses short lines and vivid images to take the reader through the experience of waking up after being wounded in war. The historical context is clear and the references to T E Lawrence and Feisal place the action in its time.

Our competition originally had three age categories – ’10 and under’, ’11-18′ and ‘Over 18′. Unfortunately in the ’10 and under’ category we received no entries which complied with the rules so we took the decision to transfer the value of the prizes to the other categories, and were therefore able to offer book tokens to two runners-up as well as the winning entry.

Creative Writing Prompts Inspired by Historical Events

by Melissa Donovan | Oct 24, 2023 | Creative Writing Prompts | 12 comments

Creative writing prompts inspired by historical events.

Today’s prompts include selections from the book 1200 Creative Writing Prompts . Enjoy!

Nonfiction writers are obviously inspired by the real world, but fiction writers and poets also take inspiration from real people and events.

Wars, scandals, scientific advances, and famous figures in history have all been represented in every form of writing.

Works of fiction that resonate best with readers contain a kind of truth, a reflection of our own real experiences. That’s why looking to the events of history for story ideas is a great way to inspire a writing session. And of course, poetry takes inspiration from everything in the universe. While personal experiences may be more popular sources of inspiration, some incredible poems and stories have been triggered by real events throughout history.

Today’s writing prompts come from major historical events. These prompts are for writing inspiration only and are not meant to be a comprehensive list of big events from history. They were chosen at random for their potential for igniting creative writing ideas.

Writing Prompts

You can use these creative writing prompts to write anything you want — a poem, a short story, a blog post, or a journal entry. The idea is to find the prompt that speaks to you and then start writing.

• In a country that rants and raves about freedom, the government decides that its people should not be allowed to drink liquor. Write a story set during Prohibition in the United States.
• The Great Depression filled the space between America’s Prohibition (which was still in effect during the Depression) and World War II. The Depression affected the entire world. Well-to-do people lost everything and found themselves standing in food lines. Ordinary people went to extraordinary measures to get a meager meal. Meanwhile, someone, somewhere profited.
• World War II gave rise to what journalist Tom Brokaw called “the greatest generation.” Create a cast of compelling characters and write a story showing how circumstances forced them to become great.
• The entertainment industry boomed in the twentieth century. Technology changed entertainment from an attraction you paid to see in a theater or other public setting to something you could enjoy from the comfort of your home. Every home had a radio. Black-and-white silent films evolved into Technicolor talkies. Now we have the Internet. Write a story centered on entertainment technologies of the past.
• Spaceships, planes, and men on the moon: We started out traveling around on foot. Then some clever Neanderthal invented the wheel. Now, we soar through the skies and tear through space. Write a story about a long journey set in an era when planes, trains, and automobiles weren’t readily available.
• The 1960s gave us Civil Rights, Woodstock, and the space race. What happens when a nation’s people are divided? What happens when minorities of people are oppressed? What happens when ordinary kids decide they don’t want to grow up and become just like their parents? Mix in the fact that there’s a war nobody understands and most people don’t believe in. Add drugs, flowers, and peace signs, and you’ve got the sixties. Write a story set during this iconic decade.
• Write a story that is set around the assassination of an important, benevolent, historical figure: for example, Gandhi, Martin Luther King, JFK, or John Lennon.
• Revolution could be defined as a war between a state and its people. Revolution often occurs when people are oppressed to the point of mass suffering. Choose one such revolution from history and write a story about the people who launched it.
• Throughout history, people have emigrated across land and ocean. Choose a time period of heavy human migration. Then choose a starting place and a destination and write the story of a character or group of characters who take the voyage. Focus on the journey, not the place of origin or the destination.
• The 1950s are often painted as a simple and idealistic time in American history. One income could support an entire family. Jobs were plentiful. Moms stayed home with their kids. Divorce was scandalous. Write about a protagonist who didn’t fit the mold, whose life was difficult because of the cultural and societal conventions of the time.

Good luck with these creative writing prompts! Have fun and don’t forget to come back and tell us how they worked for you.

Got any writing prompts of your own to share or add to this list? Leave a comment.

12 Comments

Great ideas for prompts. I’ll be stealing these for my Creative Writing class. Here’s one I came up with for a poetry class I’m teaching this summer. Feel free to try it and give it a more thorough explanation here, if you like it. essentially, the writer goes through his or her twitter feed or Facebook status updates and writes a list of the interesting verbs and nouns, then puts them together in interesting ways to form found poetry or story ideas. Here’s the list I came up with:

http://unapologetic-conjecture.blogspot.com/2011/06/fun-with-words-from-twitter.html

Hi Benjamin. I like the idea of getting word lists from Twitter and using them to prompt a writing session. Thanks for sharing!

Almost every time when I read scientific news I get ideas for my book set in far future. Or when I look at space pictures from Hubble. Sometimes I simply can’t enjoy reading the articles itself – ideas, ideas are coming! 🙂

I know the feeling! I was researching outer space just this weekend. Sometimes, I get so many ideas, it takes me a few days to work out which ones I should use!

I found this very interesting. Woodstock caught my eye because although I was not there the music is from my generation. My mind is overflowing with possibilities………….

Ooh, cool. Woodstock was before my time, but I’m fascinated by the Woodstock culture. There are definitely stories to be told there! Good luck with yours!

And isn’t it convenient that history just repeats itself? 😉

I suppose it could include events in one’s own life? Pretty potent events inspired my entry into fiction.

Of course. Some of the best inspiration comes from real-life experiences.

Speaking of cultural movements, does it seem to anyone else that America has entered a sort of post-Romantic era?

This is from Britannica : “Introspection was inevitable in the literature of an immediately Post-Romantic period, and the age itself was as prone to self-analysis as were its individual authors.”

I don’t think I’d use that description to describe what is happening in America right now. I would call this a divisive era. Dark, dystopian works seem to be popular juxtaposed against commercial art that could be construed as shallow or meaningless ( Hunger Games v. Fifty Shades ). In fact, one might say that there is a struggle between materialism and meaning. We could also call it the post-technology age, where we are challenged to adjust to a new system in which we rely heavily on technology and it has cost lots of jobs.

What a great question, Jesse. It’s given me much to think about. I do believe we are on the cusp of some new era. We live in fascinating times!

Great ideas. Many thanks. I’m filing this.

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Contemporary Writing on War and Conflict

• World War One: Projects to Mark the Centenary
• September 2014 - December 2018

This project examines the contemporary war experience as reflected by writers, poets, journalists and bloggers, and interrogate how we write about war and conflict today in contrast to the writing that was written on WW1.

Thought pieces from leading contemporary UK writers are a starting point for international public discussions. Looking at questions such as: What is the role of the writer in responding to conflict? What feels like an appropriate amount of time before creating an artistic response to war? Who do we trust to write about war? What we accept as war literature today, and how this is influenced by its context and changing global situations. How do we capture the human experience of war?

Caroline Wyatt on reportage

Patrick Hennessey on memoir 

Helen Dunmore   on fiction,

Owen Sheers  on poetry

Ben Hammersley   on digital writing

Helen Dunmore was the first winner of the Orange Prize and is also an acclaimed children's author and poet. She has published twelve novels including  Zennor In Darkness , winner of the Mckitterick Prize; A Spell Of Winter , winner of the first Orange Prize; The Betrayal , longlisted for the Man Booker prize, shortlisted for the Orwell Prize and the Commonwealth Writers Prize; The Greatcoat (2012) and The Lie (2014). Helen Dunmore has also published three collections of stories, Love Of Fat Men, Ice Cream and Rose 1944 , and her stories have been widely broadcast and anthologised. Her children's novels include the INGO series, published by harpercollins and shortlisted for the Nestlé Smarties Book Prize. Her ten poetry collections include The Raw Garden, Out Of The Blue and The Malarkey , all published by Bloodaxe Books. She spoke on the theme of war in her work at events in Russia at the Krasnoyarsk Book Fair 1-4 November 2014 along with Nigel Farndale (who spoke about the research he undertook on the First World War for his novel The Blasphemer ) and Imtiaz Dharker (who talked about her response to Wilfred Owen’s Anthem of Doomed Youth in the collection of poems 1914 Remembers ).

Patrick Hennessey was born in 1982 and educated at Berkhamsted School and Balliol College, Oxford, where he read English. On leaving university he joined the Army and served from 2004 to 2009 as an officer in The Grenadier Guards. In between guarding towers, castles and palaces he worked in the Balkans, Africa, South East Asia, the Falkland Islands and deployed on operational tours of Iraq and Afghanistan. On leaving the Army he wrote his first book, The Junior Officers’ Reading Club , a memoir of a brief but eventful stint in uniform; followed by Kandak an account of how unlikely alliances can be forged in the intensity of battle. Patrick is now a barrister.

Owen Sheers has written two collections of poetry, The Blue Book and Skirrid Hill , which won a Somerset Maugham award. His verse drama Pink Mist won Wales Book of the Year and the Hay Festival Poetry Medal. Non-fiction includes The Dust Diaries and Calon: A Journey to the Heart of Welsh Rugby . His first novel Resistance has been translated into ten languages and was made into a film in 2011. His plays include The Passion, The Two Worlds of Charlie F and Mametz , which has been longlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize 2014. His second novel, I Saw A Man , is published by Faber & Faber in 2015. 

Ben Hammersley is an author, futurist and technologist specialising in the effects of the internet and the ubiquitous digital network on the world’s political, cultural and social spheres. He enjoys an international career as a trends and digital guru, explaining complex technological and sociological topics to lay audiences, and as a high-level advisor on these matters to governments and business. Ben Hammersley is a Fellow at The Brookings Institute in Washington DC, a fellow at the Robert Schuman School of Advanced Study at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy, and Innovator-in-Residence at the Centre for Creative and Social Technologies, Goldsmiths, University of London. He is contributing editor of WIRED Magazine and writes regularly for the international media including The Financial Times .

Caroline Wyatt became the BBC’s Religious Affairs Correspondent in August 2014, having been a BBC Defence Correspondent from 2007. Prior to that, she covered UK operations in Iraq from 2003 and in Afghanistan from 2001. From 2003 - 2007, Caroline was BBC Paris correspondent, and before that spent three years as Moscow Correspondent, charting Vladimir Putin's first term as Russian President. She also covered NATO in Kosovo in 1999, and Russian operations in Chechnya, as well as working in Gaza and the wider Middle East for the BBC in the late 1990s and early 2000s. She is also an occasional presenter for R4 The World Tonight and Saturday R4 PM. She contributed to 'The Oxford Handbook of War', R4’s ‘More from Our Own Correspondent’ and ‘Only Remembered’, a children’s anthology edited by Michael Morpurgo looking at the literature of WW1.

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At War With Writing About War

Gabe hudson.

‘Perhaps a more precise and academicish moniker for War Literature would be, Suicide Averted In Favour of Writing.’

When it comes to writing about war, I’ve always felt there are three basic approaches you can take:

1. The Gritty Realism Technique – as in Tim O’Brien’s Slaughter-House Five , or Michael Herr’s The Iliad . 2. The Surreal And/Or Absurdist Technique – as in Homer’s, The Things They Carried , or, Kurt Vonnegut’s, Dispatches . 3. The Sure Shot Technique – wherein the author just shoots himself in the face (because writing about war is, let’s be honest, pretty much impossible). This is what Hemingway was going for, but not being a very good shot, he miscalculated and just blew his brains out. His autopsy report suggested his face was, eerily, left intact.

Pretty much everything I’ve written so far is completely wrong, or a bold-faced lie. Except this part: I bet you one million dollars that the authors of all the masterpieces of war literature cited above have one thing in common: at some point in their life, each of these authors seriously considered using a gun to blow their brains out. This is a fundamental axiom of war writers: to blow or not to blow. The main difference being that if the war writer decides not to blow, then he or she gets to continue being a war writer. So Academics, take note! Perhaps a more precise and academic ish moniker for War Literature would be, Suicide Averted In Favour of Writing. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve woken up and asked myself the following multiple choice question – Should I?

A. Kill myself B. Write some war fiction C. Eat and/or have sex D. All of the above

Reader beware: Phil Klay, author of the short story, ‘Redeployment’, which features in the latest edition of  Granta , writes like the illegitimate offspring of all those blurbers who use the phrase ‘illegitimate offspring’, and the noir writer, James M. Cain. Quick aside: did you know that the French writer, Albert Camus, winner of the 1957 Nobel Prize in Literature, was a big fan of James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice and modeled his novel The Stranger , after it? In fact, Mr. Klays’ opening sentence, ‘We shot dogs’, has a similar acoustical and temperamental resonance to Mr. Camus’ opening sentence, ‘Maman died today’. Mr. Klays’ sentences are precision-guided, and each sentence arrives downrange, as if it were a bullet, or perhaps more accurately, a killer bee. These sentences are hard-boiled, and freighted with menace, pathos, and a palpable derangement. And when Mr. Klay stacks sentence on top of sentence like that, page upon page, the cumulative effect for the reader is that of being chased by a swarm of angry killer bees.

I would say Mr. Klay has got himself working within the genre of what you might call Noir War. The lazy among us will want to compare Mr. Klay to Hemingway, and to them I say: history suggests that Hemingway copped his style from the writers who came up in The Pulps: James M. Cain, Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and my personal favorite, Jim Thompson. So to my mind, Mr. Klay is operating squarely in the mode of those bad-ass pulp writers. Another great title for Mr. Klay’s story would’ve been, The Killer Inside Me. Or Darkly Dreaming Dexter .

If I had to describe Mr. Klay’s story in 140 characters or less, I would go with this: War du jour, going full bore, with a smattering of gore, which soars, with elements of classic horror. There are these jagged, nightmarish shards of memory shrapnel lying all over the mental landscape of our narrator, Sergeant Price: ‘You try to think about home, then you’re in the torture house. You see the body parts in the locker and the retarded guy in the cage. He squawked like a chicken. His head was shrunk down to a coconut. It takes you a while to remember Doc saying they’d shot mercury into his skull, and then it still doesn’t make any sense.’ Is this Iraq, or the island of Doctor Moreau?! One can almost imagine Stephen King perking up his ears as those creepy sentences entered the world through Mr. Klay’s keyboard. And of course this taps into our collective, primal fear, which we try to keep at bay, by hoping if we pretend these horror stories in Iraq don’t exist, then they will go away. But when all the soldiers are finally home from Iraq, we’ll have thousands of shards of memory shrapnel among us: in the heads of the vets who teach our children, or who work behind the register, or who, finding themselves unemployable in our dying empire, resort to conducting their own ad hoc science experiments down in the basement. I just hope I get a cage with a view. And no mercury please. Thank you.

I have taught in the Creative Writing Program at Princeton University, and currently I am Chair of Korea’s first Creative Writing Program, at Yonsei University’s Underwood International College, in Seoul. People pay big bucks for me to give them writing advice. So I would like to offer the following free advice to all aspiring war writers out there in the world – a three-step ritual (also known as the A-B-C’s of War Writing) to get yourself jacked up and smelling of napalm:

A. Swallow a bullet. Get a glass of water, and just like you would a vitamin, swallow a bullet. Take it from me, nothing gets you feeling totally indestructible like swallowing a bullet.

B. Get naked and then put on a Gulf War Condom®, which is a condom that has an actual, tiny rubber gas mask at the tip. Fun fact: Gulf War Condoms® can be worn by men or women, because instead of wearing them on your genitals, you wear them on your nose. Once you’re wearing your Gulf War Condom® on your nose, go to your iTunes and crank up the Air Raid Siren Soundtrack on full volume (you may want to wear ear plugs for this).

C. This is make or break time. This is what separates the war writers from the snore writers. So here you are, alone in your room: you’ve swallowed the bullet, and you’re wearing your Gulf War Condom®. The Air Raid Siren Soundtrack is screaming at full volume, but your focus is indestructible, and now all you have to do is…. pretend to die like you’re Willem Dafoe! You know how in the movie, Platoon , there’s that amazing scene where we see Sergeant Elias, played by Dafoe, heroically outrunning the Viet Cong, until he is cut down from behind by what seem like a gazillion bullets, but then Dafoe keeps on running, until another swarm of bullets slice into his back?! And the whole scene cuts to slow-mo, and the soundtrack goes to Adagio for Strings?! And still Dafoe keeps on running and stumbling, and he must have like a million bullets in him by now, so he finally drops to his knees and throws his arms to the sky, and just for good measure, another hundred bullets cut right into him!

Well, that’s what you have to do, which is die like that in your room, dramatically – with your arms to the sky – twitchily, and in slowmotion! And for the parts in the scene where Dafoe is running and stumbling, you should just jog in place, fall to the ground, then get back up and jog in place, fall to the ground, etc. And once you’re finally dead, you’ve officially completed the A-B-Cs of War Writing. Then all you have to do is sit down at your computer and watch the award-winning prose fly right off your fingertips!

Going forward, I would say to Mr. Klay: a lot of Marines come home with a bunch of heat in their head, so make sure you let that heat work for you, not against you. Obi-Wan Kenobi was not blowing smoke. And when it comes to writing about war don’t make the same mistake I made, which is thinking your head is a George Foreman Grill, designed to cook your brain into a greaseless, edible paddy. Because not even zombies eat their own brains.

Kurt Vonnegut, probably my favorite war writer, once said, ‘I think jokes are a perfectly viable form of literature’. He also said, ‘The best jokes are dangerous, and dangerous because they are in some way truthful’. Honestly, I have no idea what that dude was talking about. Toward the end of his life, he sounded just plain crazy! But because most of what I’ve written here has been so serious and somber, I’d like to end with a joke, in honour of Vonnegut:

Little Yoko in Tokyo loved the sight of her parents running in fright, whenever she flew her Atomic Bomb Kite.

Photo by Jayel Aheram

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Granta 167: Extraction Online

You Are the Product

‘The anglophone world, we have to infer, has run out of words for its own feelings.’ Daisy Hildyard on the wisdom of scarecrows.

‘What is the read receipt for?’ Lillian Fishman on texting, power and the ethics of leaving a friend on read.

‘Like pretty much everyone who uses the internet, I have seen many terrible things that I did not search for and that I cannot unsee.’ Rosanna McLaughlin on what the internet thinks she wants.

‘I have a pathological addiction to the internet, which I indulge with the excuse of making art. It rarely translates to anything good and mostly leaves me overstimulated and afraid.’ Paul Dalla Rosa on excess and the internet.

‘rumors of bees on speedwell, / no oxidative stress just / effortless pollination’ Two poems by Sylvia Legris.

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Gabe Hudson is an American writer who currently lives in Seoul, Korea, where he is Chair of the Creative Writing Program at Yonsei University’s Underwood International College.   Before moving to Seoul, he taught in the Creative Writing Program at Princeton University from 2004-2007. His short story collection, Dear Mr President , has been translated into seven languages, was a Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award finalist, and has received the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He is an editor-at-large for McSweeney’s .

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Kilinochchi, himali mcinnes.

‘Parents should not have to bury their children. I will come to you , she whispers.’ Fiction by Himali McInnes.

The Book of Goose

‘Just follow me, she had said, you do nothing but what I tell you to.’ An extract from Yiyun Li’s new novel.

Essays & Memoir | Issue 160

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‘While Fateha is fleeing westward with her children, another woman is trying to save herself from the city on the shore of the Sea of Azov.’ Memoir by Sana Valiulina, translated by Polly Gannon.

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Kirill kobrin.

Kirill Kobrin on living through war and the conflict in Ukraine. Translated from the Russian by Veronika Zitta.

The Sarong-Man in the Old House, and an Incubus for a Rainy Night

Michael mendis.

‘I say his fingers are dying because he is old. Because he is and alone. On that sloping armchair. But more because there is no turning back for him.’

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7 Ways to Get Students Writing about the War in Ukraine

Between this post and my last, a war began. And we shouldn’t be surprised. Like the rise of Nazi Germany after WWI, the conflict in Ukraine has been building for more than twenty years. Putin and his post-Soviet ancestors have been playing a game of Hungry Hippos with the Ukraine and former Soviet satellite states since the fall of the Berlin Wall. Now, Europe is facing its biggest crisis since WWII.

My students are obsessed with the War in Ukraine. I’m not sure if it’s the heartbreaking Tik Tok content, the surreal threat of nuclear war, the fact that Zelensky has us all ready to write a new Taylor Swift album, or that this is the most televised war in human history. Regardless, they are invested; they want to talk about it. So, let’s let them. 

Here are seven ways for students to write about the War in Ukraine in your class tomorrow:

#1 Map Analysis

An understanding of Eastern European geography is integral to understanding what’s going on in Ukraine. In addition to illuminating the historic geographic ties between Russia and Ukraine, it also provides crucial context for NATO, the UN, the European Union, and the United State’s reactions to the Russian invasion.

The plan: Grab one, two, or all of the maps from this Washington Post article and put them on a slideshow. Project the maps to the class, and ask them to write their answers the following questions:

• What do you notice?
• What do you wonder?
• What historical events/context would be helpful to understand in order to interpret this map?
• What does this map reveal about the war in Ukraine?

Discuss afterwards as a class. Stop there, or use this as a building block to more complex analysis of the crisis.

#2 Editorial Essay

This one needs little to no explanation for all of you ELA teachers!

The plan: Choose an editorial relating to the Ukrainian crisis– The Atlantic has been knocking it out of the park– and assign it as a flipped classroom reading. Create questions for students to answer questions that analyze the writer’s moves, argumentation, and ideas. As a class or in reading circles, ask students to discuss their answers and generate noticings about the mentor text

These are some of my favorite reads about the war so far:

• Scarily predictive editorial: The U.S. Is Naive About Russia. Ukraine Can’t Afford to Be.
• Cultural editorial: SNL Serves up a Disgusting Highlight ( https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2022/03/snl-changes-subject-war-meatballs/626572/?utm_source=feed )
• Historical editorial: Russia’s at war with Ukraine. Here’s how we got here
• Philosophical editorial: How War Became a Crime ( https://www.vox.com/22959938/crime-war-kellogg-briand-ukraine-conquest )

Students can write their own editorials in response to a specific aspect of the War in Ukraine using the mentor text as their guide. If they can complete their essay in 450 words or less, students can even submit their writing to the NYT Student Editorial Contest !

#3 Reflection Warm-up

My students are not just interested in the War in Ukraine, they are stressed about it. Though located on another continent, the internet makes the conflict feel close. The Ukrainian Crisis along with the pandemic are shaping up to be the 9/11 of this generation. They need space to express their concerns and fears.

The plan: Consider assigning this Vox mini-documentary , which provides primary-source footage and well-summarized facts about the War in Ukraine in less than 10 minutes, as a flipped classroom assignment. Then, ask students to write their answers to the following questions:

• What do you know about the War in Ukraine?
• What media have you been exposed to so far that has covered the War in Ukraine?
• How does the War in Ukraine make you feel? Frustrated? Sad? Scared? Explain.
• Do you feel connected to the War? If so, how?
• What are some ways you might help people affected by the War?

Stop there, or ask students to discuss their answers in small groups.

#4 Primary Source Found Poem

As a social studies teacher, I didn’t learn about found poems until a couple of years into my teaching career. Essentially, students take a piece of writing and pull words or short phrases (30-100) from it to rearrange into a poem of their own creation. It’s a great way to analyze a text for ideas and themes. It also bolsters students’ creativity. I use found poems in my social studies classes exclusively with primary sources.

The plan: Ask students to read a speech by Ukrainian President, Volodymyr Zelensky. (Here’s one from the Munich Security Conference and one to the European Parliament .) Students will then identify a theme from the speech that they wish to create a poem about (e.g., international solidarity or Ukrainian resilience). Ask the students to read back through the speech, circling or writing down words or phrases that connect to their chosen theme. Students will create a poem about their chosen theme using the words they selected. (My students will write their final poems on Ukrainian flags that we will make out of construction paper. We’ll hang the final poems all over my room. Pics soon to come!)

#5 An Editorial Cartoon

Anyone who’s ever taught with me knows I love getting my students to create editorial cartoons to study current events. Editorial cartoons encourage students to be creative, make clear arguments, understand historical context, and to be clever. It also encourages them to evaluate current events for themselves.

The plan: Students should find a news article relating to the War in Ukraine from an accredited news organization of their choosing. After reading the article, they should create an editorial cartoon providing their opinion on what the author discussed. The cartoon should have one, central image and a caption.

#6 Use “We Lived Happily During the War” as a Mentor Text

In his viral poem, “We Lived Happily During the War” , Ukrainian poet Ilya Kaminsky grapples with the discomfort of being an onlooker to conflict and crisis.

The plan: Give students Kaminsky’s poem to annotate. Encourage them to look for moves that relate to style, diction, and sentence structure. Students might notice that Kaminsky plays with personal pronouns to create distance or intimacy and that he uses repetition to broaden the geographic scope of his point of view.

Feel free to stop here or use this as a starting point for students to create their own poems with Kaminsky’s as a model.

#7 Thesis Statement Practice

If I feel crunched for time, I like to use current events as practice topics for writing claim statements. It is such a great way to kill two birds with one stone– current event study and thesis development. Use this as a quick warm-up activity for your students.

The plan: Choose an article or video on the War in Ukraine to give students as a flipped classroom assignment (or no need, if you have already brought them up to speed on the crisis). Then, as a class or as part of the flipped assignment, watch this video on how to create a Big Idea Claim:

Ask students to write their own Big Idea Claims in response to what they have learned, read, or watched about the War in Ukraine. Have students switch their claim statements with one another and provide feedback based on the techniques and strategies highlighted in the Mini Moves video.

As a social studies teacher, I can find myself sticking so rigidly to my curriculum that I forget that history is not just the study of the past– history is actively creating itself around us in this very moment. I need to remind myself to give students space to write, discuss, and create in response to current events, because in this way, too, they can be historians.

I hope that by my next post the War in Ukraine has ended and Ukrainians can safely return to an independent, democratic nation.

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Several links on this page don’t work, like the Vox documentary.

Thanks for letting me know! I think there is an issue with hyperlinking to Vox. It is now updated and both Vox links should work 🙂

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War Creative Writings Samples For Students

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Segregation was a common vice that to place in most of the social amenities. The fact that the available public facilitates were used separately by the white and black due to the concern of superiority and inferiority that existed between the two races. Although the separate facilitate did attribute to the segregation it also had benefits on the fight against the segregation practice (Brinkley, 2007 p.34).

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Writing War, Writing Peace

‘Writing War, Writing Peace’ is a creative writing anthology written by students who spent a week at The National Archives, learning from our records about the experiences of Nurses in the First World War. Mentored by Melvin Burgess and Sara Robinson, the students were encouraged to explore service records, diaries and photographs to put together their own creative pieces inspired by real events. These stories and poems are the result.

Many thanks to Melvin and Sara for their support.

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Creative writing involving war

Tom Burgess Yr 10 set 1                English Coursework

                                         Creative Writing

The wailing sirens struck fear into the struggling crowd of panicking civilians. The adrenaline rush filled me as I barged passed all the strangers and knocked an old man off his feet, he tripped into the puddle beneath him launching muddy water into the others surrounding. Nobody cared, I could not help unless I wanted the same to happen to me, but as I turned around an aircraft shot past, a thundering rumble followed and shook the ground. As the old man searched for his walking stick in the marshy ground something caused an explosion; obliterating the helpless man and propelling rock and mud towards me at unbelievable speeds. Everything went black as a heavy rock belted into my face, I lay unconscious between two mangled bodies.

I woke up to the same noise; aircraft shaking the earth, bombs breaking the earth and incessant screaming that sends a chilling sensation to your bones and then is silenced by an explosion. Only now the average volume was quieter, the loudest noise was two men shouting at each other. I kept my eyes closed to try and understand exactly what was going on and listened intently.

        “Open the door what are you doing!?” yells an Arabian man,

The other person responded calmly, “We have enough people in here and we don’t need anymore blood around the place.”

        “What you’re just going to let them die!?”

        “It looks like it doesn’t it?” their quarrelling was silenced from a ground shuddering detonation. The screams outside were silenced for longer than normal and everybody stayed quiet listening for any life outside this mysterious room.

I stopped pretending to be asleep and opened my eyes slowly. In front of me stood a beautiful woman, leaning against the wall in silence but not depressed, there were four people other than me in this room. I watched the women and she caught my eye before the others and walked towards me, her dark hair swayed gently and she knelt beside me looking at me with those shockingly blue eyes, her face was strangely untouched, no bruises or scratches from the bedlam and had no sign of discontent from these catastrophic events.

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        “Are you alright?” she asked but I ignored the question and said,

        “What’s your name?” she giggled and replied,

        “I’m Sally, what’s yours?” I didn’t answer I just thought about what was happening, how could she be so happy at times like this? Who are these people? Where am I and what hell is going on?

My back clicked several times as I sat up next to Sally against the cold stone wall, I looked around and realised the obvious; I‘m in a bomb shelter. I saw the two men still arguing about seven metres away and asked with a croaky voice,

        “Why are they fighting?” Sally looked at them and explained,

        “The tall blonde man is John”, she gazed at him the same way I did to her. “He did something terrible…” Sally told me what happened; that John had closed the bomb shelter door on a crowd of people escaping the carnage and left them to die outside the shelter. I was shocked by what John had done but at that moment I didn’t really care; the main problem was my difficulty in breathing and the throbbing pain in my face and chest. As Sally explained the details of the event I looked around the room. There wasn’t much to look at except the women sitting in the dark area of the room crying, her tears rested on her cheeks glistening in the dim light, Sally realised I was ignoring her and stopped talking.. The girl’s weeping seemed to pollute the room, causing others to feel the same. I hadn’t noticed the women in the corner before and felt as though I should do something, her name was Felicity; I heard someone mention her name. I always felt uncomfortable in front of crying women. I left her alone and stared hopelessly at the blank ceiling.

I never thought about how I got here, all I remember was the adrenaline rush, the running for my life and the old man receive a direct hit from a missile. Somebody must have carried me here, whoever it was saved my life and must have risked theirs.

My thoughts were interrupted by a feeling of warm liquid running up my throat, I coughed loudly and everyone turned towards me as I spurted thick blood out of my aching nose and mouth. I could feel everybody looking at me and kept spitting the oozing liquid into the ground beneath me. On my hands and knees I bent over the small pool of blood and saw my reflection. There were grazes all over my cheeks; blood was seeping out of the gaping wound beside my eye. My face was battered; my left eye was bulbous and stuck out of my head like a tennis ball. I looked at my bruised lip as red saliva dripped out of a deep cut. It didn’t feel so bad; it felt like I had been thumped in the face but looked like I’d been hit by a lorry. I shifted my hands back towards the stone wall and felt a cold liquid pour between my fingers, I was lying in a puddle of my own blood, I had only just realised how severe my injuries were. I was struggling to keep conscious and couldn’t stand the shock and pain, cold ran down my body and I felt another liquid rush up my throat.

We spent hours in the putrid bomb shelter, luckily there were enough rations for at least ten people but medication was becoming scarce. Everybody knew that we would need the medicines for later and I felt like I was being greedy. I looked around the room, hoping someone would break the silence, I caught the eye of Felicity but she looked away, she seemed disgusted by my wounds and blood. I felt like a living dead body.

I could tell my wounds had healed slightly and I tried to stand up, people watched me with the corner of their eyes; obviously not trying to be rude. I pushed my hands against the walls, and felt the large scab on my armpit reopen and I let out a restrained cry. Everybody turned around feeling sorry and Sahid strolled towards me as I struggled to rise, his arm reached out in front of me offering aid. I accepted, lifted my wrist from the ground and grabbed his arm, the pressure moved to my legs as we both pulled in opposite directions, my knees stretched painfully as I rose to my feet. I looked towards Sahid with an uneasy grin on my face, he grinned back and I realised who it was that must have risked his life for mine during the bombings.

In the past seven hours I had thought and talked a lot, mainly to Sahid and Sally as John and Felicity were very quiet. My thoughts about Sally had changed, she was clearly fond of John and he seems very dangerous to be involved with.

We hadn’t heard any explosions in hours and Felicity had finally stopped crying, my wounds seemed to have healed unbelievably fast and everybody appeared to be slightly happier, I felt as though it was time to get out of this room and return to the surface. I glanced at John as he rose to his feet; he was studying the giant, thick door and reached towards it. He rested his chubby wrist on the handle for a while; probably thinking about what he had done before. The handle let out a moan as he pushed it down, he tugged at the door and it opened with a loud sucking noise from the compressed air. Everybody faced him as the strong wind from the outdoors brought a giant gust into the shelter; my nose froze momentarily from the wintry rush of air. It brought a foul smoky smell along with it, we all rose to our feet and stared at the narrow corridor, it was a relief to see an exit. John was the first to step out, he sauntered straight past the battered door, the fat metal hinges were almost completely ripped, the other side of the door was dented and black. Suddenly the door caused a thunderous groan, it toppled forward and John yelled as it came towards him. His shout was silenced and bones were crushed when the huge door landed on him; there was no chance of survival. I turned to face everyone, the walls started to cave in and floor rumbled, I fell on the ground and gazed towards the corridor, giant plates of rock fell from its ceiling burying the exit. Along with the exit our hope was buried too.

While I was lying on the cold ground the shaking finished and I analysed the room. We were completely entombed.

Teacher Reviews

Here's what a teacher thought of this essay.

Laura Gater

There are sentences within this piece that are very imaginative and successfully create very strong imagery for the reader. At times the communication isn't as clear as it could be and the structure needs to be more cohesive. 4 Stars

Document Details

• Word Count 1524
• Page Count 3
• Subject English

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Teaching War Poetry through Creative Writing

2017, New Methodological Approaches to Foreign Language Teaching

The present chapter focuses on the teaching of British poetry from the First World War. Rather than following a traditional approach, in which students are introduced to the historical context of the First World War and are later on asked to read and analyse some of the poems written by representative authors such as Owen or Sassoon, it is my intention to present a proposal in which creative writing is used as a means to teach war poetry to students of literature whose L1 is other than English.

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10 Types of Creative Writing (with Examples You’ll Love)

About the author.

Reedsy's editorial team is a diverse group of industry experts devoted to helping authors write and publish beautiful books.

About Savannah Cordova

Savannah is a senior editor with Reedsy and a published writer whose work has appeared on Slate, Kirkus, and BookTrib. Her short fiction has appeared in the Owl Canyon Press anthology, "No Bars and a Dead Battery". 

About Rebecca van Laer

Rebecca van Laer is a writer, editor, and the author of two books, including the novella How to Adjust to the Dark. Her work has been featured in literary magazines such as AGNI, Breadcrumbs, and TriQuarterly.

A lot falls under the term ‘creative writing’: poetry, short fiction, plays, novels, personal essays, and songs, to name just a few. By virtue of the creativity that characterizes it, creative writing is an extremely versatile art. So instead of defining what creative writing is , it may be easier to understand what it does by looking at examples that demonstrate the sheer range of styles and genres under its vast umbrella.

To that end, we’ve collected a non-exhaustive list of works across multiple formats that have inspired the writers here at Reedsy. With 20 different works to explore, we hope they will inspire you, too. 

People have been writing creatively for almost as long as we have been able to hold pens. Just think of long-form epic poems like The Odyssey or, later, the Cantar de Mio Cid — some of the earliest recorded writings of their kind. 

Poetry is also a great place to start if you want to dip your own pen into the inkwell of creative writing. It can be as short or long as you want (you don’t have to write an epic of Homeric proportions), encourages you to build your observation skills, and often speaks from a single point of view . 

Here are a few examples:

“Ozymandias” by Percy Bysshe Shelley

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away.

This classic poem by Romantic poet Percy Shelley (also known as Mary Shelley’s husband) is all about legacy. What do we leave behind? How will we be remembered? The great king Ozymandias built himself a massive statue, proclaiming his might, but the irony is that his statue doesn’t survive the ravages of time. By framing this poem as told to him by a “traveller from an antique land,” Shelley effectively turns this into a story. Along with the careful use of juxtaposition to create irony, this poem accomplishes a lot in just a few lines. 

“Trying to Raise the Dead” by Dorianne Laux

 A direction. An object. My love, it needs a place to rest. Say anything. I’m listening. I’m ready to believe. Even lies, I don’t care.

Poetry is cherished for its ability to evoke strong emotions from the reader using very few words which is exactly what Dorianne Laux does in “ Trying to Raise the Dead .” With vivid imagery that underscores the painful yearning of the narrator, she transports us to a private nighttime scene as the narrator sneaks away from a party to pray to someone they’ve lost. We ache for their loss and how badly they want their lost loved one to acknowledge them in some way. It’s truly a masterclass on how writing can be used to portray emotions. 

If you find yourself inspired to try out some poetry — and maybe even get it published — check out these poetry layouts that can elevate your verse!

Song Lyrics

Poetry’s closely related cousin, song lyrics are another great way to flex your creative writing muscles. You not only have to find the perfect rhyme scheme but also match it to the rhythm of the music. This can be a great challenge for an experienced poet or the musically inclined. 

To see how music can add something extra to your poetry, check out these two examples:

“Hallelujah” by Leonard Cohen

 You say I took the name in vain I don't even know the name But if I did, well, really, what's it to ya? There's a blaze of light in every word It doesn't matter which you heard The holy or the broken Hallelujah 

Metaphors are commonplace in almost every kind of creative writing, but will often take center stage in shorter works like poetry and songs. At the slightest mention, they invite the listener to bring their emotional or cultural experience to the piece, allowing the writer to express more with fewer words while also giving it a deeper meaning. If a whole song is couched in metaphor, you might even be able to find multiple meanings to it, like in Leonard Cohen’s “ Hallelujah .” While Cohen’s Biblical references create a song that, on the surface, seems like it’s about a struggle with religion, the ambiguity of the lyrics has allowed it to be seen as a song about a complicated romantic relationship. 

“I Will Follow You into the Dark” by Death Cab for Cutie

 ​​If Heaven and Hell decide that they both are satisfied Illuminate the no's on their vacancy signs If there's no one beside you when your soul embarks Then I'll follow you into the dark

You can think of song lyrics as poetry set to music. They manage to do many of the same things their literary counterparts do — including tugging on your heartstrings. Death Cab for Cutie’s incredibly popular indie rock ballad is about the singer’s deep devotion to his lover. While some might find the song a bit too dark and macabre, its melancholy tune and poignant lyrics remind us that love can endure beyond death.

Plays and Screenplays

From the short form of poetry, we move into the world of drama — also known as the play. This form is as old as the poem, stretching back to the works of ancient Greek playwrights like Sophocles, who adapted the myths of their day into dramatic form. The stage play (and the more modern screenplay) gives the words on the page a literal human voice, bringing life to a story and its characters entirely through dialogue. 

Interested to see what that looks like? Take a look at these examples:

All My Sons by Arthur Miller

“I know you're no worse than most men but I thought you were better. I never saw you as a man. I saw you as my father.” 

Arthur Miller acts as a bridge between the classic and the new, creating 20th century tragedies that take place in living rooms and backyard instead of royal courts, so we had to include his breakout hit on this list. Set in the backyard of an all-American family in the summer of 1946, this tragedy manages to communicate family tensions in an unimaginable scale, building up to an intense climax reminiscent of classical drama. 

💡 Read more about Arthur Miller and classical influences in our breakdown of Freytag’s pyramid . 

“Everything is Fine” by Michael Schur ( The Good Place )

“Well, then this system sucks. What...one in a million gets to live in paradise and everyone else is tortured for eternity? Come on! I mean, I wasn't freaking Gandhi, but I was okay. I was a medium person. I should get to spend eternity in a medium place! Like Cincinnati. Everyone who wasn't perfect but wasn't terrible should get to spend eternity in Cincinnati.” 

A screenplay, especially a TV pilot, is like a mini-play, but with the extra job of convincing an audience that they want to watch a hundred more episodes of the show. Blending moral philosophy with comedy, The Good Place is a fun hang-out show set in the afterlife that asks some big questions about what it means to be good. 

It follows Eleanor Shellstrop, an incredibly imperfect woman from Arizona who wakes up in ‘The Good Place’ and realizes that there’s been a cosmic mixup. Determined not to lose her place in paradise, she recruits her “soulmate,” a former ethics professor, to teach her philosophy with the hope that she can learn to be a good person and keep up her charade of being an upstanding citizen. The pilot does a superb job of setting up the stakes, the story, and the characters, while smuggling in deep philosophical ideas.

Personal essays

Our first foray into nonfiction on this list is the personal essay. As its name suggests, these stories are in some way autobiographical — concerned with the author’s life and experiences. But don’t be fooled by the realistic component. These essays can take any shape or form, from comics to diary entries to recipes and anything else you can imagine. Typically zeroing in on a single issue, they allow you to explore your life and prove that the personal can be universal.

Here are a couple of fantastic examples:

“On Selling Your First Novel After 11 Years” by Min Jin Lee (Literary Hub)

There was so much to learn and practice, but I began to see the prose in verse and the verse in prose. Patterns surfaced in poems, stories, and plays. There was music in sentences and paragraphs. I could hear the silences in a sentence. All this schooling was like getting x-ray vision and animal-like hearing. 

This deeply honest personal essay by Pachinko author Min Jin Lee is an account of her eleven-year struggle to publish her first novel . Like all good writing, it is intensely focused on personal emotional details. While grounded in the specifics of the author's personal journey, it embodies an experience that is absolutely universal: that of difficulty and adversity met by eventual success. 

“A Cyclist on the English Landscape” by Roff Smith (New York Times)

These images, though, aren’t meant to be about me. They’re meant to represent a cyclist on the landscape, anybody — you, perhaps. 

Roff Smith’s gorgeous photo essay for the NYT is a testament to the power of creatively combining visuals with text. Here, photographs of Smith atop a bike are far from simply ornamental. They’re integral to the ruminative mood of the essay, as essential as the writing. Though Smith places his work at the crosscurrents of various aesthetic influences (such as the painter Edward Hopper), what stands out the most in this taciturn, thoughtful piece of writing is his use of the second person to address the reader directly. Suddenly, the writer steps out of the body of the essay and makes eye contact with the reader. The reader is now part of the story as a second character, finally entering the picture.

Short Fiction

The short story is the happy medium of fiction writing. These bite-sized narratives can be devoured in a single sitting and still leave you reeling. Sometimes viewed as a stepping stone to novel writing, that couldn’t be further from the truth. Short story writing is an art all its own. The limited length means every word counts and there’s no better way to see that than with these two examples:

“An MFA Story” by Paul Dalla Rosa (Electric Literature)

At Starbucks, I remembered a reading Zhen had given, a reading organized by the program’s faculty. I had not wanted to go but did. In the bar, he read, "I wrote this in a Starbucks in Shanghai. On the bank of the Huangpu." It wasn’t an aside or introduction. It was two lines of the poem. I was in a Starbucks and I wasn’t writing any poems. I wasn’t writing anything. 

This short story is a delightfully metafictional tale about the struggles of being a writer in New York. From paying the bills to facing criticism in a writing workshop and envying more productive writers, Paul Dalla Rosa’s story is a clever satire of the tribulations involved in the writing profession, and all the contradictions embodied by systemic creativity (as famously laid out in Mark McGurl’s The Program Era ). What’s more, this story is an excellent example of something that often happens in creative writing: a writer casting light on the private thoughts or moments of doubt we don’t admit to or openly talk about. 

“Flowering Walrus” by Scott Skinner (Reedsy)

I tell him they’d been there a month at least, and he looks concerned. He has my tongue on a tissue paper and is gripping its sides with his pointer and thumb. My tongue has never spent much time outside of my mouth, and I imagine it as a walrus basking in the rays of the dental light. My walrus is not well. 

A winner of Reedsy’s weekly Prompts writing contest, ‘ Flowering Walrus ’ is a story that balances the trivial and the serious well. In the pauses between its excellent, natural dialogue , the story manages to scatter the fear and sadness of bad medical news, as the protagonist hides his worries from his wife and daughter. Rich in subtext, these silences grow and resonate with the readers.

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Perhaps the thing that first comes to mind when talking about creative writing, novels are a form of fiction that many people know and love but writers sometimes find intimidating. The good news is that novels are nothing but one word put after another, like any other piece of writing, but expanded and put into a flowing narrative. Piece of cake, right?

To get an idea of the format’s breadth of scope, take a look at these two (very different) satirical novels: 

Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata

I wished I was back in the convenience store where I was valued as a working member of staff and things weren’t as complicated as this. Once we donned our uniforms, we were all equals regardless of gender, age, or nationality — all simply store workers. 

Keiko, a thirty-six-year-old convenience store employee, finds comfort and happiness in the strict, uneventful routine of the shop’s daily operations. A funny, satirical, but simultaneously unnerving examination of the social structures we take for granted, Sayaka Murata’s Convenience Store Woman is deeply original and lingers with the reader long after they’ve put it down.

Erasure by Percival Everett

The hard, gritty truth of the matter is that I hardly ever think about race. Those times when I did think about it a lot I did so because of my guilt for not thinking about it.  

Erasure is a truly accomplished satire of the publishing industry’s tendency to essentialize African American authors and their writing. Everett’s protagonist is a writer whose work doesn’t fit with what publishers expect from him — work that describes the “African American experience” — so he writes a parody novel about life in the ghetto. The publishers go crazy for it and, to the protagonist’s horror, it becomes the next big thing. This sophisticated novel is both ironic and tender, leaving its readers with much food for thought.

Creative Nonfiction

Creative nonfiction is pretty broad: it applies to anything that does not claim to be fictional (although the rise of autofiction has definitely blurred the boundaries between fiction and nonfiction). It encompasses everything from personal essays and memoirs to humor writing, and they range in length from blog posts to full-length books. The defining characteristic of this massive genre is that it takes the world or the author’s experience and turns it into a narrative that a reader can follow along with.

Here, we want to focus on novel-length works that dig deep into their respective topics. While very different, these two examples truly show the breadth and depth of possibility of creative nonfiction:

Men We Reaped by Jesmyn Ward

Men’s bodies litter my family history. The pain of the women they left behind pulls them from the beyond, makes them appear as ghosts. In death, they transcend the circumstances of this place that I love and hate all at once and become supernatural. 

Writer Jesmyn Ward recounts the deaths of five men from her rural Mississippi community in as many years. In her award-winning memoir , she delves into the lives of the friends and family she lost and tries to find some sense among the tragedy. Working backwards across five years, she questions why this had to happen over and over again, and slowly unveils the long history of racism and poverty that rules rural Black communities. Moving and emotionally raw, Men We Reaped is an indictment of a cruel system and the story of a woman's grief and rage as she tries to navigate it.

Cork Dork by Bianca Bosker

He believed that wine could reshape someone’s life. That’s why he preferred buying bottles to splurging on sweaters. Sweaters were things. Bottles of wine, said Morgan, “are ways that my humanity will be changed.” 

In this work of immersive journalism , Bianca Bosker leaves behind her life as a tech journalist to explore the world of wine. Becoming a “cork dork” takes her everywhere from New York’s most refined restaurants to science labs while she learns what it takes to be a sommelier and a true wine obsessive. This funny and entertaining trip through the past and present of wine-making and tasting is sure to leave you better informed and wishing you, too, could leave your life behind for one devoted to wine. 

Illustrated Narratives (Comics, graphic novels)

Once relegated to the “funny pages”, the past forty years of comics history have proven it to be a serious medium. Comics have transformed from the early days of Jack Kirby’s superheroes into a medium where almost every genre is represented. Humorous one-shots in the Sunday papers stand alongside illustrated memoirs, horror, fantasy, and just about anything else you can imagine. This type of visual storytelling lets the writer and artist get creative with perspective, tone, and so much more. For two very different, though equally entertaining, examples, check these out:

Calvin & Hobbes by Bill Watterson

"Life is like topography, Hobbes. There are summits of happiness and success, flat stretches of boring routine and valleys of frustration and failure." 

This beloved comic strip follows Calvin, a rambunctious six-year-old boy, and his stuffed tiger/imaginary friend, Hobbes. They get into all kinds of hijinks at school and at home, and muse on the world in the way only a six-year-old and an anthropomorphic tiger can. As laugh-out-loud funny as it is, Calvin & Hobbes ’ popularity persists as much for its whimsy as its use of humor to comment on life, childhood, adulthood, and everything in between. 

From Hell by Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell 

"I shall tell you where we are. We're in the most extreme and utter region of the human mind. A dim, subconscious underworld. A radiant abyss where men meet themselves. Hell, Netley. We're in Hell." 

Comics aren't just the realm of superheroes and one-joke strips, as Alan Moore proves in this serialized graphic novel released between 1989 and 1998. A meticulously researched alternative history of Victorian London’s Ripper killings, this macabre story pulls no punches. Fact and fiction blend into a world where the Royal Family is involved in a dark conspiracy and Freemasons lurk on the sidelines. It’s a surreal mad-cap adventure that’s unsettling in the best way possible. 

Video Games and RPGs

Probably the least expected entry on this list, we thought that video games and RPGs also deserved a mention — and some well-earned recognition for the intricate storytelling that goes into creating them. 

Essentially gamified adventure stories, without attention to plot, characters, and a narrative arc, these games would lose a lot of their charm, so let’s look at two examples where the creative writing really shines through: 

80 Days by inkle studios

"It was a triumph of invention over nature, and will almost certainly disappear into the dust once more in the next fifty years." 

Named Time Magazine ’s game of the year in 2014, this narrative adventure is based on Around the World in 80 Days by Jules Verne. The player is cast as the novel’s narrator, Passpartout, and tasked with circumnavigating the globe in service of their employer, Phileas Fogg. Set in an alternate steampunk Victorian era, the game uses its globe-trotting to comment on the colonialist fantasies inherent in the original novel and its time period. On a storytelling level, the choose-your-own-adventure style means no two players’ journeys will be the same. This innovative approach to a classic novel shows the potential of video games as a storytelling medium, truly making the player part of the story. 

What Remains of Edith Finch by Giant Sparrow

"If we lived forever, maybe we'd have time to understand things. But as it is, I think the best we can do is try to open our eyes, and appreciate how strange and brief all of this is." 

This video game casts the player as 17-year-old Edith Finch. Returning to her family’s home on an island in the Pacific northwest, Edith explores the vast house and tries to figure out why she’s the only one of her family left alive. The story of each family member is revealed as you make your way through the house, slowly unpacking the tragic fate of the Finches. Eerie and immersive, this first-person exploration game uses the medium to tell a series of truly unique tales. 

Fun and breezy on the surface, humor is often recognized as one of the trickiest forms of creative writing. After all, while you can see the artistic value in a piece of prose that you don’t necessarily enjoy, if a joke isn’t funny, you could say that it’s objectively failed.

With that said, it’s far from an impossible task, and many have succeeded in bringing smiles to their readers’ faces through their writing. Here are two examples:

‘How You Hope Your Extended Family Will React When You Explain Your Job to Them’ by Mike Lacher (McSweeney’s Internet Tendency)

“Is it true you don’t have desks?” your grandmother will ask. You will nod again and crack open a can of Country Time Lemonade. “My stars,” she will say, “it must be so wonderful to not have a traditional office and instead share a bistro-esque coworking space.” 

Satire and parody make up a whole subgenre of creative writing, and websites like McSweeney’s Internet Tendency and The Onion consistently hit the mark with their parodies of magazine publishing and news media. This particular example finds humor in the divide between traditional family expectations and contemporary, ‘trendy’ work cultures. Playing on the inherent silliness of today’s tech-forward middle-class jobs, this witty piece imagines a scenario where the writer’s family fully understands what they do — and are enthralled to hear more. “‘Now is it true,’ your uncle will whisper, ‘that you’ve got a potential investment from one of the founders of I Can Haz Cheezburger?’”

‘Not a Foodie’ by Hilary Fitzgerald Campbell (Electric Literature)

I’m not a foodie, I never have been, and I know, in my heart, I never will be. 

Highlighting what she sees as an unbearable social obsession with food , in this comic Hilary Fitzgerald Campbell takes a hilarious stand against the importance of food. From the writer’s courageous thesis (“I think there are more exciting things to talk about, and focus on in life, than what’s for dinner”) to the amusing appearance of family members and the narrator’s partner, ‘Not a Foodie’ demonstrates that even a seemingly mundane pet peeve can be approached creatively — and even reveal something profound about life.

We hope this list inspires you with your own writing. If there’s one thing you take away from this post, let it be that there is no limit to what you can write about or how you can write about it. 

In the next part of this guide, we'll drill down into the fascinating world of creative nonfiction.

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Creative Writing- war

Subject: Creative writing

Age range: 11-14

Resource type: Worksheet/Activity

Last updated

22 February 2018

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How to Give and Receive Feedback on Creative Writing

When you’ve finished a novel or short story, it’s helpful to get feedback from people you trust. You may also have a critique partner, or be part of a writing group that offers reciprocal feedback. Here’s how to make feedback useful.

When someone asks for your feedback on a piece of writing, whether it is a short story or a novel, remember that the writer requesting feedback has spent a lot of time laboring over their words, and respect the fact that they are choosing you for your opinion.

When you seek feedback for a piece of writing, it’s important that the feedback you receive is helpful. Telling your beta reader what sort of feedback you expect can ensure that the feedback is pertinent. Here’s how to give and receive feedback on your novel or short story.

The importance of feedback

While part of the writing journey is discovering the story that is within the writer, it’s only when stories resonate with readers that a piece of writing is successful. While you may not intentionally write to please others, the goal of telling a story is to engage the people who read it. The best way to know if your story or novel works is to find out what readers think.

There are many ways to find beta readers, people who read your work to give feedback before you send it out to an agent, editor, or publication. You may ask friends, family members, fellow authors, or you may  seek out beta readers in other ways .

As a writer, you may be asked to give feedback on the work of other writers, especially if you are in a writing group where people exchange feedback, or you work with a critique partner. When different people read your manuscript, they may see things that you don’t notice, because you’ve been seeing them for so long. It’s always useful to get opinions on your writing, even if you may not agree with the feedback.

How to request feedback

When you request feedback for a novel or story, you shouldn’t just send it to someone without giving some guidelines. Here are some elements you might wish the feedback to address:

• Is the work enjoyable, and did the reader feel the urge to keep reading? Did they want to turn the pages and get to the end?
• Are the characters believable, and are the main characters’ motivations clear?
• Do the settings feel real?
• Is anything over-described?
• Does the dialog feel authentic?
• Is the plot believable and does the resolution make sense?
• Are sentences, paragraphs, or chapters too long or too short? Does the prose flow, or does it feel choppy?

Also, ask your reader to mention any specific points that stand out that you haven’t covered.

It’s best to ask your reader not to say anything about typos unless they interfere with the story. You will have to do several editing passes of your manuscript, and you should be able to find these yourself.  You may even want to use an online grammar checker , chapter by chapter, to spot this sort of mistake. It’s not a good idea for your beta reader to get bogged down in minor details. What’s more important is hearing what they think about the story, the characters, the flow, the pacing, and all the elements that make a story or novel flow.

Remember to not take any feedback personally. Your reader may praise some things and criticize others, and their criticism is about the work, not about you as a writer. Feedback is a valuable tool for learning more about your writing, so use it wisely.

How to give useful feedback

When someone asks you to give feedback on their work, they may not have enough experience to know what to ask for. The most useful type of feedback is that described above, but the type of feedback they need may depend on whether you’re reading a work by a new writer or someone who has published already.

The first thing to do when giving feedback is to start by saying what you like about the manuscript. Highlight what works well in the piece, whether it’s plot, character, dialogue, description, or anything else. Remember that you’re giving feedback to a person who may be sensitive about the months or years they spent writing, and it’s important to reassure them that their work is valid. Think about how you would like to receive feedback and apply that to the feedback you give to others.

Make sure your feedback is balanced; for every critical point, include a positive point. Don’t shy away from criticizing elements that stand out, but do this in a constructive way. Offer suggestions for points that seem weak, but don’t rewrite entire paragraphs to show how you would have written something.

It’s important that you understand the writer’s intent, and that you are aware of how their work fits in a specific genre. For example, a friend may ask you to read a novel that is not a genre that you generally read. In this case, you may not be able to give appropriate feedback on genre-specific conventions.

When giving feedback, it’s useful to ask questions if you don’t understand something, such as a character’s motivation or a plot point. This may be more useful than criticism, as the writer, in thinking about the question, may discover something they need to improve on their own.

Giving and receiving feedback for creative writing can be sensitive, because writers are often personally attached to their work. Doing this with care and sensitivity can help writers improve their work and move ahead toward publication.

Kirk McElhearn is a  writer ,  podcaster , and  photographer . He is the author of  Take Control of Scrivener , and host of the podcast  Write Now with Scrivener .

Write Now with Scrivener, Episode no. 38: Veronica G. Henry, Fantasy and Mystery Author

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