Often, creative writing prompts come with a hook at the end: a question, a challenge, or a request for more information. These are known as “hooks,” and they make the writing exercise more fun for both you and your students. Consider using hooks in your creative writing exercises – they can be a great way to get additional points across, and inspire your students to write a novel in the process.
The Anatomy of a Good Hook
A good hook should always lead into the next part of the writing exercise – it is not an end in itself. Therefore, it should always be a question, a challenge, or a request for more information. A good question will open up all sorts of possibilities for your students to explore in their writing. A good challenge will get your students to step out of their comfort zones and produce something new. A good request for more information provides your students with the chance to apply their knowledge in a real-world scenario and prove that they can be creative and innovative while following the rules and guidelines of a task. When you use a good hook in your writing exercise, you are ensuring that your students will be motivated to continue writing after completing the exercise. In other words, the writing exercise will be fun and beneficial to their creative and critical thinking skills.
How to Use Hooks in Your Writing Activities
While the above suggests that you should use hooks in your creative writing activities, you do not necessarily have to set out challenges or tasks for your students. Consider using open-ended writing exercises – any type of writing exercise where the students are free to explore any topic or theme they wish. Students can be given a topic for an essay, or they can be asked to write a short story about a specific theme (e.g., ‘family’, ‘friendship’, or ‘adventure’). In the process of writing the story, the students will naturally explore the theme and develop ideas on how to tackle the task. From there, you can guide the writing process by asking specific questions about the topic (e.g., “How does this idea of ‘family’ influence your story?”) or providing some type of guidance on how to approach the task (“Make sure to use character development and conflict to pull the reader into the story…”).
When choosing a topic for your essays or short stories, there are several things to keep in mind. First, make sure that the topic is specific and relevant to your students’ experience – if they have not yet discovered the theme or topic, it may be difficult for them to understand and apply the concepts and ideas behind it. Second, make sure that you are both challenging and engaging your students. A good topic for creative writing is one that is open to interpretation and requires the students to think outside of the box. Finally, if you want to incorporate a hook at the end of your exercise, consider using a question or a challenge – these are great because they usually lead into the next part of the exercise with an indicator of what is to come. For example, if you are using the family theme as the basis of your story, you can end it with a question such as “Does this story end with a question?” This will engage your students and get them thinking about the task at hand.
Making Creative Writing More Valuable
One important element of a good creative writing exercise is making sure that the students understand the value that their work holds. In other words, why is this exercise relevant to them? While it is important to give the students a sense of accomplishment as they are developing their critical and creative thinking skills, it is also important to highlight the applications of these skills in the real world (e.g., “This family history project will not only teach you how to research and write, but you will also learn how to interview relatives and obtain the important details necessary to write a compelling family history.”).
The Benefits of Using Creative Writing
In addition to providing your students with a new set of skills, using creative writing in your lessons can also benefit your students in several ways. First, let them explore their creative side and allow them to be as imaginative as they can be – whether through writing or drawing, or even performing, it is important to allow your students to find their creative outlets. Second, let them develop their reasoning and critical thinking skills – not only will this make them better problem solvers, but it will also help them become more independent thinkers who are capable of analyzing situations and coming up with their own solutions. Last, but not least, let them develop their communication skills – using creative writing in the process of communication tasks will not only allow them to express themselves in a different way, but it will also give them the opportunity to communicate their ideas and thoughts to another person. Through all of this, they will not only become better writers, but they will also become better students.
Choosing a topic for your creative writing exercise is not easy – it can be quite daunting to think about what to write about. However, once you have found a topic that is both engaging and relevant to your students’ experience, the rest is much easier. From there, you can start to develop stories, proposals, and essays on how to solve problems, or on how to improve a place – all with a twist of creativity.