Martin Griffin and Jon Mayhew’s Storycraft: How to teach narrative writing is an inspiring and practical resource to support secondary school teachers in developing their students’ creative writing.

This book is not a style manual. Authors Martin Griffin and Jon Mayhew think there are plenty of those about. Instead, it picks apart the craft of narrative writing and equips teachers with activities designed to help their students overcome the difficulties they experience when tasked with creating something from nothing.

Written by two fiction writers and English teachers with over forty years’ combined experience in education, Storycraft packs in expert guidance relating to idea generation and the nature of story and provides off-the-peg writing prompts that teachers can immediately adopt and adapt in the classroom.

The book breaks down the simple components that must be in place for a narrative to work – the crafting of character, setting, shape and structure – and shares fifty-one stimulating activities that will get students writing narratives regularly, more creatively and with greater confidence.

Martin and Jon also include helpful advice in a chapter dedicated to the process of editing in which they provide activities designed to help students diagnose and improve misfiring narratives, and they close the book with invaluable tips for GCSE exam preparation written directly for students and with an impending creative writing exam in mind.

Suitable for English teachers of students aged eleven to eighteen.