WHO – are my characters?
WHERE – will my story take place?
WHAT – problem or difficult choice does my main character face?
WHEN – at what moment in my character’s life will I start the story?
WHY – does my character feel as he/she does?
HOW – will he/she try to solve the problem?

Here are some ways of asking those questions that will start a story growing in your imagination:

1. Stories are everywhere: Keep your eyes and ears open and you’ll find story ideas no matter where you are. If you overhear a quarrel, ask yourself: Why these two people? How might it have started? What might happen to resolve the problem? Interesting answers to those questions will give you the central scene of a story.

    Some people make the mistake of thinking that exciting stories only happen somewhere else—in a faraway country or in outer space, for example. It isn’t the place that makes a story exciting; it’s what happens between the characters. So think about summer camp, hockey practice, the schoolyard and your own backyard when you’re looking for a good story.

2. How to get started: Three questions will help you gather up the pieces of a story: Who are my characters? Where will this story take place? What difficult choice will my main character have? Or what problem does my main character face?

    Once you have interesting answers to those questions, your characters will start walking around in your imagination. Watch them and listen to them. You’re waiting until they show you a good place to start writing your story.

3. Tackling that first sentence: You’ve worked out interesting answers to those three key questions, your characters are walking around in your imagination, but how do you actually get the story going? First ask yourself the fourth key question: When? At what moment in the characters’ lives are you going to plunge into the story? And the answer is: in the middle of action. You need to let the reader see and hear the main character caught in the middle of a problem. Opening with a piece of dialogue often gets things going. Try writing a story with this first line: “Hey, where do you think you’re going?”

4. Get your characters talking: Dialogue is one of your most useful writing tools. Let your characters give away what they’re thinking about and what kind of people they are by the way they talk. Dialogue brightens the story and moves the plot along in an interesting way. Readers like to figure out for themselves the how and why of stories. Let them “eavesdrop” as your characters reveal themselves through dialogue.

5. Brighten the story with interesting words: Painters have colour and shape to capture the audience’s attention but the writer has only words. Make your writing captivating by choosing vivid verbs (action words) and adjectives (descriptive words).

VERBS: Try to capture what your character is doing and how your character is feeling in one word. If your character is running down the street, ask yourself why she’s running—from fear or from happiness? Then change your verb to streaking or dancing. Read the sentence out loud and listen to how much more alive the picture is with a strong verb.

ADJECTIVES: What does a beautiful flower look like? Stumped? I don’t know either, because the writer didn’t tell me anything about its colour, shape or scent. When you describe something, let your five senses help you. Tell something interesting about the:
1. look (colour, size, shape)
2. sound
3. feel
4. smell OR
5. taste

6. Polish your writing skills: How do you learn to be a better writer than you already are? The best way to learn to write is by reading. Inside a well-written story, you get a sense of how dialogue and action help you to see a character as a real, living, breathing person. You also meet new words and see how they work together to make sentences that are easy to read and easy to listen to.

    Writers who read all the time find that when they come to write their own stories they just naturally create energetic sentences that make their story come alive.