 Welcome to our lesson on creative writing. Now, if you're like me, you love a really, really good story, one which takes you through different settings which carries you along as a reader and you get really, really attached to the character. However, when it comes to writing creative story, this can feel really daunting and it sometimes might feel like there's some people who have a special skill or a gift that they were born with when it comes to creative story writing and writing these really beautiful novels. However, what I'm here to say is that actually it doesn't take a special set of skills. Creative writing and even reading really, really good stories and writing, most importantly, a very good story, you will find that it takes a certain structure and once you learn how to plan your story based on that structure and you follow through using that structure where you can create a build-up, introduce a problem and then create a climax and then a solution which really entices your reader, the more and more you practice these creative writing skills, the easier they come to you and also the more you expand your vocabulary, the easier the vocabulary comes to you. So as you can see behind me, essentially I've illustrated a story mountain and I will be explaining and giving you an example, a more detailed walkthrough of planning a story using the story mountain. However, I wanted to introduce what I mean by story mountain. Now, as I've mentioned before, a really good story actually shouldn't be very daunting and if you are able to plan through what you're going to write about, you will find the process of creative writing so much easier and after a while you're actually going to find that you really love and enjoy the process. So let's quickly go over the story mountain before I go into a task and how to use the story mountain in your planning of a creative story. Now, as you can see here, there's a mountain and really most stories and even when you think about films, they follow a specific type of structure which is really, really similar to the mountain, one where you begin at one point, you're taking through a journey and then you end at a slightly different place in the story. Now, in this case, essentially when you're planning, always consider you start off from here, the introduction. Now, this is where you introduce your characters, you introduce your setting and so on. So it's really good to put some bullet points in terms of what you would put in your first paragraph, introducing the stories and introducing us as the readers to the main people within your story but also to the setting of your story. Then it's really good to create a buildup. Now, if you have a main character in your story, maybe they get onto a journey, they get onto an adventure, what kind of buildup do you start beginning within your story which really takes us as readers along in your story? Then, every interesting story includes a problem. If the story just stays the same where the person just keeps on walking and walking, we get bored of the story and we lose interest. So you always want to introduce a problem or a twist that leads to the highest point in your story which is the climax, the thing that really keeps us tense on edge. And again, if you think about some of your favorite stories, some of your favorite films even, they always have some kind of problem and some kind of obstacle. And so this is why we're getting to the top of the mountain. This is where it gets the hardest as you can see here. It's really easy when you start for the introduction, then as you're building up, you're climbing the mountain. It gets harder and harder and more problematic. And then this is where your danger comes in, right? So this is now where you introduce a problem. Is it a villain that comes in and tries to stop your main narrator or the main protagonist of your story? Is it something really unexpected that happens? This is now what you need to include in your story. Then after you introduce a problem and the climax, you then find a solution. So what happens to the person? What happens to your main storyteller and how do they overcome this problem? And now this is of course, as you can see the mountain, it now starts getting easier and easier as they go down the mountain, right? And then you finish off with your ending. Is it a happy ending? Is it a sad ending? Or do you end with the cliffhanger? Something that leaves us on our edge. And then maybe there's a part two and a part three of this story. Now you'll notice an orange of written here setting, as well as on this side of written characters. This is part of your plan. So as you can see here for every single section, you just put quick bullet points. However, before you even dive into writing bullet points here, it's important to think about the setting or settings. So for example, maybe the story can start off in the house and then they go out onto the street. So you put your settings house and street and then you begin. But also don't forget, you want to consider the characters prior to starting. When I say prior to, I mean before starting. So you know, do you have one main character? Do you have a few main characters? Do you also have a villain as well? So you put that in here and then you include all of them as you're planning in your story mountain. So now let's look at a task relating to the story mountain and then I'll show you how you can plan your story and really start thinking about how to effectively create really, really good stories through planning. And it's really as simple as that because once you have a plan, you have a way to guide yourself as you're writing through the story. So now that you have seen what a story mountain is, I think it will be really, really good for us to practice writing a really basic story plan. It doesn't need to be too complicated. So as you can see here, this is the story mountain which I was talking about. As you can see, it starts off with introduction. You've got a build up and can you see the mountain in the background? Then you've got the problem which is also the climax, resolution and ending. So I've created a question up here. Create a story plan below. Just a plan, not the whole story, describing an adventure in the woods. And as you can see here, I would suggest starting off with the setting section, just describing where the story takes place. Think about some characters and then with that, you can create an introduction, build up, problem, resolution and ending. So let's try a very simple exercise and again, always remember that you can download all of these resources for your practice and I'm going to leave another practice plan which you can use to apply and to start practicing using a story mountain structure. So if we know that we're writing about an adventure in the woods, let's keep it really simple. So the setting would be the woods. So can you see here, you can just click in and fill it in. So the words maybe in the winter time or a forest, a dense forest or instead of the winter time, we can change it into the Amazon forest and the Amazon rainforest in the Amazon rainforest. So we can make it really, really interesting. This is just a plan. So it can be really, really brief as you can see here. And then in terms of characters, if it's an adventure, maybe you can have a main character. So I'll have a main character. We'll call her Millie and she is, we'll say she is 14 years old. Maybe to make the adventure more interesting, Millie could be in this adventure in the woods with her younger brother. We will call him Tom and maybe he is nine years old. I've written the words or rather the numbers 14 and nine, but do remember this is English. So when you're actually writing the story itself and we're going to do some more creative writing practice later on, but when you're writing the story itself, do spell out the numbers. But this is a plan. So you can keep it very brief, okay? So we've got two characters here. They've gone in a dense forest in the Amazon rainforest, okay? And then now we'll start with our introduction. So the introduction is essentially, how do they even get there? What are they doing in the dense forest? They live there. Maybe not. Perhaps they are on holiday and we know that the Amazonian rainforest is in Brazil. And so maybe they go on holiday, the parents go to the woods and then Millie and Tom decide to sneak out and go for an adventure, okay? So in our introduction, we'll add all of that, okay? So Millie and Tom are in the Amazon rainforest. They are in Brazil on holiday with parents so we're writing in short form and they, so now we'll shorten this and we'll maybe reduce the size of this so that it can also fit in. There we go. They decide they get bored staying in a cabin and sneak out for an adventure, okay? So this is the introduction. If they get really bored, that's what causes them to go on an adventure, right? So now let's add the build up. So we could say Millie and Tom lie to their parents that they are going to pick some fruits nearby. They run off and run deeper and deeper into the jungle and they are extremely excited, okay? So they run deeper and deeper. So can you see here, introduction? Millie and Tom are in the Amazon rainforest. They're in Brazil on holiday with parents. They get bored staying in a cabin and sneak out for an adventure. So they get bored staying in a cabin and sneak out for an adventure. So now this is a build up. How do they get out? Millie and Tom lie to their parents that they're going to pick up some fruits nearby or rather to pick some fruits nearby from trees, maybe. Nearby as they're excused to get out. Once they're out, they run off and run deeper and deeper into the jungle and they're extremely excited. So can you see here, you're building up the story, making it more and more interesting. However, every interesting story must have a problem. Millie and Tom come to a clearing in the dense woods and see a group of tall, fearful men around standing. And staring at them. Millie and Tom try to run away. They could be kidnapped, right? So they come across these men, perhaps tall, fearful men, and these men are staring at them. They might be kidnapped. So Millie and Tom try to run away. Oh, so this is now the unexpected twist. So they're running, they're really excited and then suddenly they come into a clearing. They've run too far. They find these scary men and these men are trying to kidnap them. So now it's become an adventure because they've started getting really scared. You're now adding some tension, some unexpected twist. So now how do they get out of it? So here you could add the men and we can even say how many men. So we could say a group of four tall, fearful men. So the four men chase them, speaking in a language. Millie and Tom don't understand because with the men perhaps live in that forest but the Millie and Tom are not from there. So they don't understand what they're saying. Millie and Tom are crying and running. The men are getting closer and closer, right? However, so now the resolution which ties into the ending. So they're running, running and crying and running. The ending could be now, this is how, what happens? Is this a cliffhanger? Does everything go dark to get caught? I want it to have a nice ending, okay? So Millie and Tom get to a familiar place and see the path and see their home. Mother and father are standing by the cabin. They shout at the men who stop chasing them. Okay, so that will have a happy ending, okay? And we'll stop it there. So they stop chasing. So as you can see here, I started off with describing a setting. So we've made it interesting, a dense forest and the Amazon rainforest. Try and make your setting unexpected. Don't just, don't make it too broad. Don't just say the woods. Make it more specific. Could it be the English countryside? Here I've chosen the Amazon rainforest just to make it interesting. Then the characters here are Millie and Tom. Now, as you can see here, so these are the main characters. Of course, there are other characters. We can add maybe mom and dad. Mother, so we'll also reduce the size of this text. Father and the men, so the bad men, okay? Now in the introduction, as you can see here, Millie and Tom are in the Amazon rainforest. They're in Brazil on holiday with parents. They get bored staying in cabin and sneak out for an adventure. So as you can see here, these sentences are short. This is a plan. This is not the story itself. So you want to keep the plan short, but you want to still have a plan just to show you where you're going and also now for each paragraph. So for example, for the introduction paragraph, you have something to use to begin your story with, okay? So Millie and Tom are the rainforest in Brazil. They get bored staying in a cabin and sneak out for an adventure. Now there's a buildup, create excitement. Millie and Tom lie to the parents that they're going to pick some fruits from a tree nearby. They run off and run deeper and deeper into the jungle and are extremely excited. What's the problem that they face? Millie and Tom come to the clearing in the dense woods and see a group of four fearful men standing and staring at them, okay? And I made it specific to give you a more visual image, okay? And even when you're writing this, you can even add adjectives or they tall, broad, with long, dark bids, that kind of thing, okay? But that one goes straight into your writing. Millie and Tom try to run away, kidnapped. So these men are trying to kidnap them and then the resolution. So the men chase them speaking in language or even we can say they're chasing them and shouting in a language. Millie and Tom don't understand. Millie and Tom are running and crying. So now they're really, really scared. And the men are getting closer and closer to them, okay? So this is resolution, not complete resolution because obviously it's still happening but now it's the twist has happened, the plot twist has happened in the problem. The resolution is now about to finish and now we've got the ending here. Millie and Tom get to a familiar path and see their home. And it's not necessarily their home, it's their cabin. The mother and father standing by the cabin. They shouted the men who stopped chasing them, okay? So we can even change this. Their parents are standing at the cabin. They shouted the men who stopped chasing them, okay? So I will leave this for you to download but also I will give you a question to try and create a story plan just like this for yourself. And of course, if your writing doesn't fit in you can just reduce the size of the text so that it can fit in. But the whole point of the plan is to not actually write a story inside this band. It should be brief, it should be short and just give you a clear guidance on how to develop your story. The most writing will take place when you actually write your story, okay? So that's it when it comes to understanding story plans. I hope you found this useful and please make sure you apply this now and practice.