ELA 7 · Writing a story
A story is something that changes
A good story is not a list of things that happened. It is one character, one problem and a change, shown in scenes the reader can see and hear. This page covers planning the problem, showing instead of telling, and writing dialogue that is set out right and earns its place.
The words, first
The idea: Showing and telling are the pair the whole page turns on.
| Word | What it means |
|---|---|
| Narrative | A story, true or made up, in which something happens and something changes. |
| Hook | An opening that makes the reader want to keep going. |
| Telling | Naming a feeling or quality straight out: She was nervous. |
| Showing | Giving the actions, words and details that let the reader work the feeling out: She read the same line three times. |
| Sensory detail | What a character sees, hears, smells, tastes or feels. |
| Dialogue | The exact words characters say, in quotation marks. |
| Dialogue tag | The words that say who is speaking: she said, Theo asked. |
| Action beat | A short action placed beside dialogue instead of a tag: Theo grinned. |
Planning a story
The idea: Plan the problem and the change before you write the first sentence. A story with no problem is a list of events.
A weak plan: “Our trip to Jasper: we drove, we hiked, we saw elk, we drove home.” Nobody wants anything, so nothing can go wrong.
| A stronger plan asks | Answer |
|---|---|
| Who is the main character? | Ava, 12, who is afraid of heights |
| What do they want? | To keep up with her older cousins on a hike to a lookout |
| What is in the way? | The last part of the trail runs along a narrow ledge |
| What is the turn? | Halfway across, her little cousin freezes, and Ava has to talk him through it |
| What has changed at the end? | Ava finds out she is braver when someone needs her |
Keep it small. One afternoon and one problem is plenty. A story that covers a whole summer has no room to show anything.
Start close to the problem. “One day my family went on a trip” could start any story. “The sign said Lookout 0.5 km. It did not mention the ledge.” starts this one. It is a hook: the reader already wants to know about the ledge.
Showing, not telling
The idea: Telling names the feeling. Showing gives the reader the evidence and lets them reach it — the same inference you make when you read, done in reverse.
Telling: Ava was scared of the ledge.
Showing: Ava kept her right hand flat on the rock and her eyes on her boots. When a pebble rolled off the edge, she counted — one, two, three — before she heard it land.
A model reading. The word scared never appears, and the reader feels it more. The hand on the rock is holding on. The eyes on her boots will not look down. Counting the pebble's fall shows how high the ledge is — and that she is measuring it too.
| Telling | Showing |
|---|---|
| He was angry. | He shoved his chair in so hard the table jumped. |
| It was really cold. | The snow squeaked under our boots, and my eyelashes stuck together when I blinked. |
The cold one works through sensory details — a sound and a feeling — instead of a number on a thermometer.
Telling has a job too. “Two hours later, we reached the top” skips what does not matter. Show the moments that matter; tell the time in between.
Do not do both. In “He shoved his chair in so hard the table jumped. He was angry,” the second sentence tells the reader what they had already worked out.
Writing dialogue
The idea: Dialogue should show character or move the story along. It has a layout: quotation marks around the spoken words, punctuation inside them, and a new paragraph for each new speaker.
- Put quotation marks around the exact words spoken, and nothing else.
- Start the spoken words with a capital letter.
- End them with a comma if a tag follows (“I don't know,” Ava said.), or with a question mark or exclamation mark if they ask or exclaim — inside the closing mark.
- If a tag splits one sentence in two, the second part starts with a small letter: “If you go first,” she said, “I'll follow.”
- Start a new paragraph every time the speaker changes.
Dialogue that earns its place. Two characters trading “Hi,” “How are you?” and “Good” tells us nothing. “I don't know,” Ava said. “It looks narrow.” shows she is scared without her saying so.
Tags. Said and asked are nearly invisible, which is what you want. “She exclaimed excitedly” does a job the words themselves should do.
What costs marks
The idea: The first two are planning mistakes, and no amount of good sentences fixes them later.
- A list of events with no problem.
- Starting too early — waking up, breakfast, the bus — instead of close to the problem.
- Showing a feeling, then telling it anyway.
- Punctuation outside the closing quotation mark, or two speakers in one paragraph.
- An ending that cancels the story: “and then I woke up, and it was all a dream.”