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Our 2020-21 Writing Curriculum for Middle and High School

A flexible, seven-unit program based on the real-world writing found in newspapers, from editorials and reviews to personal narratives and informational essays.

creative writing objectives middle school

Update, Aug. 3, 2023: Find our 2023-24 writing curriculum here.

Our 2019-20 Writing Curriculum is one of the most popular new features we’ve ever run on this site, so, of course, we’re back with a 2020-21 version — one we hope is useful whether you’re teaching in person , online , indoors , outdoors , in a pod , as a homeschool , or in some hybrid of a few of these.

The curriculum detailed below is both a road map for teachers and an invitation to students. For teachers, it includes our writing prompts, mentor texts, contests and lesson plans, and organizes them all into seven distinct units. Each focuses on a different genre of writing that you can find not just in The Times but also in all kinds of real-world sources both in print and online.

But for students, our main goal is to show young people they have something valuable to say, and to give those voices a global audience. That’s always been a pillar of our site, but this year it is even more critical. The events of 2020 will define this generation, and many are living through them isolated from their ordinary communities, rituals and supports. Though a writing curriculum can hardly make up for that, we hope that it can at least offer teenagers a creative outlet for making sense of their experiences, and an enthusiastic audience for the results. Through the opportunities for publication woven throughout each unit, we want to encourage students to go beyond simply being media consumers to become creators and contributors themselves.

So have a look, and see if you can find a way to include any of these opportunities in your curriculum this year, whether to help students document their lives, tell stories, express opinions, investigate ideas, or analyze culture. We can’t wait to hear what your students have to say!

Each unit includes:

Writing prompts to help students try out related skills in a “low stakes” way.

We publish two writing prompts every school day, and we also have thematic collections of more than 1,000 prompts published in the past. Your students might consider responding to these prompts on our site and using our public forums as a kind of “rehearsal space” for practicing voice and technique.

Daily opportunities to practice writing for an authentic audience.

If a student submits a comment on our site, it will be read by Times editors, who approve each one before it gets published. Submitting a comment also gives students an audience of fellow teenagers from around the world who might read and respond to their work. Each week, we call out our favorite comments and honor dozens of students by name in our Thursday “ Current Events Conversation ” feature.

Guided practice with mentor texts .

Each unit we publish features guided practice lessons, written directly to students, that help them observe, understand and practice the kinds of “craft moves” that make different genres of writing sing. From how to “show not tell” in narratives to how to express critical opinions , quote or paraphrase experts or craft scripts for podcasts , we have used the work of both Times journalists and the teenage winners of our contests to show students techniques they can emulate.

“Annotated by the Author” commentaries from Times writers — and teenagers.

As part of our Mentor Texts series , we’ve been asking Times journalists from desks across the newsroom to annotate their articles to let students in on their writing, research and editing processes, and we’ll be adding more for each unit this year. Whether it’s Science writer Nicholas St. Fleur on tiny tyrannosaurs , Opinion writer Aisha Harris on the cultural canon , or The Times’s comics-industry reporter, George Gene Gustines, on comic books that celebrate pride , the idea is to demystify journalism for teenagers. This year, we’ll be inviting student winners of our contests to annotate their work as well.

A contest that can act as a culminating project .

Over the years we’ve heard from many teachers that our contests serve as final projects in their classes, and this curriculum came about in large part because we want to help teachers “plan backwards” to support those projects.

All contest entries are considered by experts, whether Times journalists, outside educators from partner organizations, or professional practitioners in a related field. Winning means being published on our site, and, perhaps, in the print edition of The New York Times.

Webinars and our new professional learning community (P.L.C.).

For each of the seven units in this curriculum, we host a webinar featuring Learning Network editors as well as teachers who use The Times in their classrooms. Our webinars introduce participants to our many resources and provide practical how-to’s on how to use our prompts, mentor texts and contests in the classroom.

New for this school year, we also invite teachers to join our P.L.C. on teaching writing with The Times , where educators can share resources, strategies and inspiration about teaching with these units.

Below are the seven units we will offer in the 2020-21 school year.

September-October

Unit 1: Documenting Teenage Lives in Extraordinary Times

This special unit acknowledges both the tumultuous events of 2020 and their outsized impact on young people — and invites teenagers to respond creatively. How can they add their voices to our understanding of what this historic year will mean for their generation?

Culminating in our Coming of Age in 2020 contest, the unit helps teenagers document and respond to what it’s been like to live through what one Times article describes as “a year of tragedy, of catastrophe, of upheaval, a year that has inflicted one blow after another, a year that has filled the morgues, emptied the schools, shuttered the workplaces, swelled the unemployment lines and polarized the electorate.”

A series of writing prompts, mentor texts and a step-by-step guide will help them think deeply and analytically about who they are, how this year has impacted them, what they’d like to express as a result, and how they’d like to express it. How might they tell their unique stories in ways that feel meaningful and authentic, whether those stories are serious or funny, big or small, raw or polished?

Though the contest accepts work across genres — via words and images, video and audio — all students will also craft written artist’s statements for each piece they submit. In addition, no matter what genre of work students send in, the unit will use writing as a tool throughout to help students brainstorm, compose and edit. And, of course, this work, whether students send it to us or not, is valuable far beyond the classroom: Historians, archivists and museums recommend that we all document our experiences this year, if only for ourselves.

October-November

Unit 2: The Personal Narrative

While The Times is known for its award-winning journalism, the paper also has a robust tradition of publishing personal essays on topics like love , family , life on campus and navigating anxiety . And on our site, our daily writing prompts have long invited students to tell us their stories, too. Our 2019 collection of 550 Prompts for Narrative and Personal Writing is a good place to start, though we add more every week during the school year.

In this unit we draw on many of these resources, plus some of the 1,000-plus personal essays from the Magazine’s long-running Lives column , to help students find their own “short, memorable stories ” and tell them well. Our related mentor-text lessons can help them practice skills like writing with voice , using details to show rather than tell , structuring a narrative arc , dropping the reader into a scene and more. This year, we’ll also be including mentor text guided lessons that use the work of the 2019 student winners.

As a final project, we invite students to send finished stories to our Second Annual Personal Narrative Writing Contest .

DECEMBER-January

Unit 3: The Review

Book reports and literary essays have long been staples of language arts classrooms, but this unit encourages students to learn how to critique art in other genres as well. As we point out, a cultural review is, of course, a form of argumentative essay. Your class might be writing about Lizzo or “ Looking for Alaska ,” but they still have to make claims and support them with evidence. And, just as they must in a literature essay, they have to read (or watch, or listen to) a work closely; analyze it and understand its context; and explain what is meaningful and interesting about it.

In our Mentor Texts series , we feature the work of Times movie , restaurant , book and music critics to help students understand the elements of a successful review. In each one of these guided lessons, we also spotlight the work of teenage contest winners from previous years.

As a culminating project, we invite students to send us their own reviews of a book, movie, restaurant, album, theatrical production, video game, dance performance, TV show, art exhibition or any other kind of work The Times critiques.

January-February

Unit 4: Informational Writing

Informational writing is the style of writing that dominates The New York Times as well as any other traditional newspaper you might read, and in this unit we hope to show students that it can be every bit as engaging and compelling to read and to write as other genres. Via thousands of articles a month — from front-page reporting on politics to news about athletes in Sports, deep data dives in The Upshot, recipes in Cooking, advice columns in Style and long-form investigative pieces in the magazine — Times journalists find ways to experiment with the genre to intrigue and inform their audiences.

This unit invites students to take any STEM-related discovery, process or idea that interests them and write about it in a way that makes it understandable and engaging for a general audience — but all the skills we teach along the way can work for any kind of informational writing. Via our Mentor Texts series, we show them how to hook the reader from the start , use quotes and research , explain why a topic matters and more. This year we’ll be using the work of the 2020 student winners for additional mentor text lessons.

At the end of the unit, we invite teenagers to submit their own writing to our Second Annual STEM writing contest to show us what they’ve learned.

March-April

Unit 5: Argumentative Writing

The demand for evidence-based argumentative writing is now woven into school assignments across the curriculum and grade levels, and you couldn’t ask for better real-world examples than what you can find in The Times Opinion section .

This unit will, like our others, be supported with writing prompts, mentor-text lesson plans, webinars and more. We’ll also focus on the winning teenage writing we’ve received over the six years we’ve run our related contest.

At a time when media literacy is more important than ever, we also hope that our annual Student Editorial Contest can serve as a final project that encourages students to broaden their information diets with a range of reliable sources, and learn from a variety of perspectives on their chosen issue.

To help students working from home, we also have an Argumentative Unit for Students Doing Remote Learning .

Unit 6: Writing for Podcasts

Most of our writing units so far have all asked for essays of one kind or another, but this spring contest invites students to do what journalists at The Times do every day: make multimedia to tell a story, investigate an issue or communicate a concept.

Our annual podcast contest gives students the freedom to talk about anything they want in any form they like. In the past we’ve had winners who’ve done personal narratives, local travelogues, opinion pieces, interviews with community members, local investigative journalism and descriptions of scientific discoveries.

As with all our other units, we have supported this contest with great examples from The Times and around the web, as well as with mentor texts by teenagers that offer guided practice in understanding elements and techniques.

June-August

Unit 7: Independent Reading and Writing

At a time when teachers are looking for ways to offer students more “voice and choice,” this unit, based on our annual summer contest, offers both.

Every year since 2010 we have invited teenagers around the world to add The New York Times to their summer reading lists and, so far, 70,000 have. Every week for 10 weeks, we ask participants to choose something in The Times that has sparked their interest, then tell us why. At the end of the week, judges from the Times newsroom pick favorite responses, and we publish them on our site.

And we’ve used our Mentor Text feature to spotlight the work of past winners , explain why newsroom judges admired their thinking, and provide four steps to helping any student write better reader-responses.

Because this is our most open-ended contest — students can choose whatever they like, and react however they like — it has proved over the years to be a useful place for young writers to hone their voices, practice skills and take risks . Join us!

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20 Creative Writing Activities for Middle School

April 10, 2023 //  by  Stephanie Ledford

Some students are prolific writers, needing no help putting pen to paper and telling their stories. However, there are other students who need a little more direction in order to get their stories out. Whatever the case may be, these 20 creative writing activities for middle school will have all of your students showing their creative prowess.

1. I Am From

After reading the poem “Where I’m From” by George Ella Lyon, have students write their own “I Am From” poems. Using a template, all students will be able to create wonderful poems illustrating their own unique backgrounds.

Learn More: Made by Teachers

2. Found Poems

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Using the words of others, students create their own “found poems.” By taking a snippet here and a line there, they can arrange them in their own creative ways to create new, interesting poems. Reading a book as a class? Have them use the book to create a found poem!

Learn More: Read, Write, Think

Your middle schoolers are sure to feel like poets in the making with this creative assignment. Encourage them to connect themselves to something bigger, like their families, their culture, or their historical background as you task them with creating poems using their own names. Prompt them to begin their writing process by having them use the letters of their names to inspire a new line of poetry that they think reflects who they are as a person.

Learn More: Mama Smiles

4. Chain Stories

This assignment has each student start with a blank piece of paper. After giving them a writing prompt , every student begins writing a story. After your chosen time limit is up, they stop writing and pass their story to the next person in their group who then has to continue telling the story. When each story returns to its original author, the activity is complete.

Learn More: Creativities ESL

5. Visual Character Sketch

Being able to add depth to a character can be difficult for many students. By allowing a student to create a visual sketch, you are allowing them a different approach to writing a character description.

Learn More: Adobe Education Exchange

6. What If…

“What if” writing prompts are a great way to get your learners’ creative juices flowing. By posing a question, they’re given a starting point, and it’s up to them to decide what twists and turns their stories will take. Will they write a sad, action-packed, or scary story? The possibilities are endless!

Learn More: Journal Buddies

7. Descriptive Writing Prompts

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Descriptive writing activities are another way for middle school students to practice their creative writing skills. They can give their descriptions their own unique twists by using their different writing styles to describe common objects. And hey, they might have a different appreciation for the things in their everyday worlds after this assignment!

Learn More: Academic Writing Success

8. Scary Stories

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Go through the entire writing process and teach your students how to write scary stories! Before you begin writing, though, read them some (age-appropriate) scary stories to give them the chills and an idea of what is expected in a scary story.

Learn More: Keep ’em Thinking

9. Daily Journal Writing

There is no better way to improve students’ writing abilities than to do daily writing. Each day, give students a different prompt and allow them to write for fifteen minutes. After, allow them the opportunity to share their story with their peers or the class.

Learn More: Daily Teaching Tools

10. So Much Depends Upon…

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“ The Red Wheel Barrow “–such a simple yet eloquent poem. Following this lesson plan, your students will be able to write their own simple yet eloquent poems and feel like accomplished writers.

Learn More: NYLearns

11. An Ode to…

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Reluctant writers are often intimidated by complicated writing ideas. By using a template like the one pictured above, your students will all be able to feel like poets as they create their own odes about a person, place, or thing.

Learn More: Crafting Connections

12. Story Starters

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Story starters are a great way to help students begin their stories. If you have a digital classroom, the Scholastic story starter page is great because it can formulate much different writing prompts, helping engage all students.

Learn More: Scholastic

13. My Time Machine Trip

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What is everyday life like in 1902? How about in 2122? Have students write stories about their experiences traveling through time using the attached worksheet. For those that need a little extra help, allow them to research time periods so they have an idea of what life was like then.

Learn More: K12 Reader

14. Writing and Math

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This is a great assignment for a math class! Using the provided instructions, students are to write a story that explains to their boss the math they used while delivering packages. Since this assignment asks them to cover specific math concepts, make sure you cover them in class first (or hand this assignment to a math teacher and let them have at it!).

Learn More: Dr. Hamblin

15. How to Bake Cookies for Santa

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Seasonal writing activities are a great way to get kids excited around the holidays! One way to get descriptive paragraphs out of your students is through these instructions on how to bake cookies for Santa. The great thing about this assignment is all levels of writers can participate. Those that are more advanced can provide more details and struggling writers can still feel accomplished by explaining the cookie-making process!

Learn More: Teachers Pay Teachers

16. Diary Entry of a Literary Character

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Another favorite among creative writing ideas is having students write diary entries in the voice of a character from literature. This can be a character from a book you read as a class or from a book they read on their own. Either way, it will showcase their creative writing skills and their knowledge of the character!

Learn More: Banana Magic

17. Write a Rant

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Writing a rant is a good assignment to use when you are trying to teach about the different voices we use when writing. When writing a rant, you are going to use an angrier, more aggressive voice than if you were writing a children’s story. This is a great warm-up to get students ready to write persuasive essays.

Learn More: Teachers and Writers Magazine

18. Write a Newspaper Story

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After reading through some newspapers to get ideas on how newspaper articles are formatted, have each of your students write their own article. When they are all done, you can compile a classroom newspaper!

Learn More: Nie Online

19. Coat of Arms

Studying Shakespeare? Maybe European countries where it was common to have a Coat of Arms? If so, this assignment is perfect for your class. Have students create a coat of arms and then write a few paragraphs explaining their choices.

20. A Letter to Yourself

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Have students write letters to their future selves. Give them specific questions to answer like “where do you see yourself in five years? Are you happy with your life? Is there anything you would change?” And then in five years, mail the letters to their parents!

Learn More: Ms. Carota

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50 creative writing prompts for middle school students.

  • September 11, 2023
  • 11 min read

Table of Contents:

Why creative writing matters, prompts to explore personal experiences, prompts for imagining fantastic worlds, prompts for exploring emotions, prompts to unleash adventure, prompts for humor and laughter, writing prompts for middle school mystery and suspense section, prompts to reflect on the future, prompts for historical time travel, writing prompts for middle school to target sci-fi and futuristic fantasies, writing prompts for middle school to dive into nature, writing prompts for middle school for alternate realities, are these prompts suitable for both classroom and individual use, creative writing.

Press The Play Button On The Audio To Listen Complete Article!

Middle school is a time of exploration, growth, and boundless imagination. It’s a phase where young minds are eager to express themselves, and what better way to channel this energy than through creative writing? This article explores 50 creative writing prompts for middle school students to worlds of wonder, emotion, and adventure. These prompts stimulate their creativity, boost their writing skills, and encourage them to think beyond the ordinary.

Creative writing holds a significance that extends far beyond the confines of a classroom. It is a form of expression that acts like a mirror reflecting human emotions, similar to what is explored in What are the three main purposes for writing? . It is a powerful medium through which individuals can express their innermost thoughts, emotions, and ideas, allowing them to connect with themselves and the world around them on a deeper level. This art form empowers individuals to unleash their imagination and paint vivid landscapes of words, enabling them to communicate in ways that traditional language often falls short of. For middle school students, creative writing is a journey of exploration and growth, much like the journey described in How to write a good story: A complete process . As they engage with a diverse array of writing prompts for middle school, they embark on a path that enriches their vocabulary, refines their grasp of grammar, and teaches them the invaluable skill of structuring their thoughts coherently and effectively. Through crafting narratives and weaving intricate tales, students learn the art of storytelling, a skill crucial in literature and various aspects of life. Whether it’s penning down a compelling essay, delivering a persuasive speech, or even drafting a well-structured email, the ability to organize ideas compellingly is a trait that serves students well throughout their academic and professional journey. However, the benefits of creative writing go well beyond linguistic and organizational services like book writing services . This form of expression acts as a mirror that reflects the complexities of human emotions. As students immerse themselves in crafting characters, settings, and plotlines, they inherently develop a deep sense of empathy. By stepping into the shoes of diverse characters and exploring the world from various perspectives, students cultivate an understanding of different viewpoints, backgrounds, and experiences. This broadens their worldview and nurtures their ability to relate to and connect with people from all walks of life.

  • Discovering a Hidden Door

Imagine stumbling upon a mysterious door in your school that no one else has noticed. Where does it lead, and what adventures await on the other side?

  • The Day I Traveled Through Time

You wake up one morning to find yourself in a different period. Describe your experiences and the challenges you face in this unfamiliar era.

  • My Conversation with a Talking Animal

While wandering in the woods, you encounter an animal that can communicate with you. Write about your unexpected conversation and the wisdom the animal imparts.

  • A Mysterious Message in a Bottle

You discover a message in a bottle washed up on the shore. What does the message say, and how does it change your life?

  • Life on a Floating Island

Describe a world where entire civilizations exist on floating islands in the sky. What are the unique challenges and wonders of this airborne realm?

  • Journey to the Center of a Candy Planet

You embark on a journey to the core of a planet made entirely of candy. Detail your adventures as you traverse the sugary landscapes.

  • The Robot’s Secret Rebellion

In a futuristic city, robots have secretly started rebelling against their human creators. Explore the events leading up to this uprising and the consequences that follow.

  • When Magic Came to the Modern World

Magic suddenly becomes real in the present day. How does society change, and how do you adapt to this new magical reality?

  • The Joy of Finding a Lost Toy

Revisit a childhood memory of losing a cherished toy and the overwhelming happiness of eventually finding it.

  • A Moment of Overcoming Fear

Write about when you faced a fear head-on and emerged stronger and braver on the other side.

  • The Bittersweet Farewell

Explore the emotions surrounding a farewell to a close friend moving away. How do you cope with the mixture of joy and sadness?

  • An Unexpected Act of Kindness

Describe an instance where a stranger’s small act of kindness profoundly impacts your life and perspective.

  • Quest for the Enchanted Crown

Embark on a quest to retrieve a stolen enchanted crown from a treacherous dragon’s lair. Chronicle your epic adventure and the challenges you must overcome.

  • Lost in a Haunted Forest

You find yourself lost in a mysterious and haunted forest. Describe your eerie surroundings and the spine-chilling encounters you experience.

  • Exploring an Abandoned Space Station

Write about your exploration of a deserted space station, uncovering its secrets and unraveling the mysteries of its past.

  • Time-Traveling to Historical Events

Where and when would you go if you could time-travel to any historical event? Describe your experiences and the impact they have on your perspective.

  • The Day I Turned into a Vegetable

Imagine waking up one day to find yourself transformed into a vegetable. How do you communicate, and what hilarious misadventures ensue?

  • Conversations Between My Pets

Write a humorous dialogue between your pets discussing their daily lives, adventures, and their peculiar perspectives on the world.

  • When My Room Became a Miniature Zoo

Describe a scenario where your room suddenly becomes a mini-zoo filled with various animals. How do you manage this unexpected turn of events?

  • The Misadventures of Super Socks

Create a quirky superhero story where a pair of socks gains extraordinary powers and embarks on comical crime-fighting escapades.

  • The Puzzle of the Whispering Walls

Detail a suspenseful investigation into the strange phenomenon of walls that whisper cryptic messages, leading to an unexpected revelation.

  • Footprints in the Forbidden Attic

You discover mysterious footprints leading to the forbidden attic in your house. Write about your daring exploration and the secrets you uncover.

  • The Disappearance of the Midnight Carnival

Describe the mysterious disappearance of a beloved carnival that only operates at midnight. What clues do you follow to solve the enigma?

  • The Secret Diary of a Famous Explorer

You stumble upon the secret diary of a renowned explorer. Unveil the adventures chronicled within its pages and the hidden truths it holds.

  • A Glimpse into Life as an Adult

Imagine yourself as an adult and write about a day in your future life. How have your goals, priorities, and perspectives evolved?

  • Inventing a Revolutionary Gadget

Design a revolutionary gadget that changes the world. Describe its features, benefits, and the impact it has on society.

  • My First Day on Another Planet

Transport yourself to an alien planet and narrate your experiences on the first day of your interstellar adventure.

  • The World After Solving Pollution

Describe a world where pollution has been successfully eliminated. How does this achievement reshape the environment, society, and daily life?

  • Prompts for Exploring Friendship

Write about a strong and unbreakable bond between two friends. What challenges have they overcome together, and how has their friendship evolved?

  • Adventures of the Dynamic Duo

Create a story about a dynamic duo who embark on thrilling adventures together. What makes their partnership special, and how do they complement each other?

  • A Magical Friend from a Book

Imagine a character from a book coming to life and becoming your friend. Describe your magical friendship and the escapades you share.

  • Messages in a Bottle Between Pen Pals

Two pen pals communicate through messages sent in bottles across a vast ocean. Write about their unique form of friendship and the stories they share.

  • An Interview with a Renaissance Artist

Travel back in time to interview a famous Renaissance artist. Explore their inspirations, struggles, and the impact of their art on the world.

  • Surviving the Titanic Disaster

Imagine being a passenger on the Titanic and surviving the tragic sinking. Chronicle your experiences and the lessons you learn from the ordeal.

  • Ancient Egypt: Through the Eyes of a Pharaoh

Experience life as an ancient Egyptian pharaoh. Describe the grandeur of your rule, interactions with subjects, and leadership challenges.

  • Encountering Dinosaurs in Prehistoric Times

Describe an adventurous journey to prehistoric times, where you encounter dinosaurs and experience the wonders and dangers of the ancient world.

  • When Robots Ruled the World

Envision a world where robots have taken over as rulers. Detail the consequences of this robotic regime and the struggles of human resistance.

  • Galactic Explorers on a New Frontier

Join a group of galactic explorers as they venture into uncharted space territories. Describe their discoveries, encounters, and the mysteries they unravel.

  • The Day I Met an Alien from Mars

Write about the day you encounter a friendly alien from Mars. How do you communicate, and what do you learn from each other?

  • Earth 3000: A Utopian Dream or Dystopian Reality?

Transport yourself to the year 3000 and describe the state of the Earth. Is it a romantic paradise or a dystopian nightmare? What led to this outcome?

  • Conversations with Forest Creatures

Imagine having conversations with animals in a magical forest. Write about the wisdom they share and the adventures you embark on together.

  • My Adventure in the Enchanted Rainforest

Describe your thrilling adventure through an enchanted rainforest with mystical creatures and hidden secrets.

  • The Underwater Discovery: Mermaid’s Tale

You discover a hidden underwater world inhabited by mermaids. Chronicle your underwater journey and the interactions you have with these mythical beings.

  • Exploring a World Inside a Dewdrop

Write about a micro-adventure inside a dewdrop, where you encounter miniature worlds and experience nature from a new perspective.

  • Stepping into a Mirror Universe

Describe an experience where you step into an alternate reality through a mirror. How is this world different from yours, and what challenges do you face?

  • The Butterfly Effect: Changing a Single Moment

Explore the butterfly effect concept by narrating a story where changing a single moment in the past has a cascading impact on the present and future.

  • My Life as a Fictional Character

Imagine living the life of a fictional character from your favorite book. Describe your experiences as you navigate their world and story.

  • When Dreams Became Our Reality

Write about a world where dreams have the power to shape reality. How do people use their dreams to create their lives, and what challenges arise?

  • The Ethereal Library

Imagine a mystical library that holds books containing the stories of every possible life you could have lived. Write about a person who stumbles upon this library and can read the book of their alternate life stories.

  • The Reality Architect

In a future society, some specialized architects design alternate realities for individuals seeking escape from their own lives. Write about a reality architect and their journey to create the perfect alternate world for a client.

  • The Convergence Point

Describe a world where all alternate realities converge at a single point in time. People from different realities can meet and interact for a brief period. Write about the challenges and opportunities that arise during this unique convergence.

The suitability of writing prompts for middle school for classroom and individual use depends on their content and complexity. Prompts encouraging critical thinking, creative expression, and thoughtful discussion can work well in both settings. However, there are a few considerations to keep in mind:

  • Ensure that the prompts are clear and easily understandable by individuals and a group of students. Avoid overly complex language or concepts that might be confusing.
  • Writing prompts for middle school allow various interpretations, and responses can engage individual learners and groups. This flexibility encourages students to express their unique perspectives.
  • Choose interesting and relevant writing prompts for middle school to the target audience, whether in a classroom full of students or individuals working independently. Engaging prompts are more likely to spark enthusiasm and thoughtful responses.
  • Prompts that invite discussion and debate can lead to rich and meaningful conversations for classroom use. These prompts should be open-ended and encourage diverse viewpoints.

Middle school is critical for nurturing creativity, similar to the journey detailed in How to launch a book: The ultimate guide for authors , young students’ creativity, and honing writing skills. These 50 creative writing prompts for middle school offer many opportunities to explore diverse themes, emotions, and scenarios while refining their writing abilities. Whether they’re crafting tales of time travel, exploring futuristic realms, or delving into the mysteries of the past, these prompts will ignite the imagination and open new avenues of self-expression for budding writers.

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Language Arts Classroom

Creative Writing Lesson Plans: Week One

Week on of creative writing lesson plans: free lesson plan for creative writing. Creative writing lessons can be scaffolded.

Looking for creative writing lesson plans? I am developing creative writing lesson ideas! 

I’ve written and revamped my creative writing lesson plans and learned that the first week is vital in establishing a community of writers, in outlining expectations, and in working with a new class.

What are some good creative writing exercises?

Some good creative writing exercises include writing prompts, free writing, character development exercises, and fun writing games.

The first week, though, we establish trust—and then we begin powerful creative writing exercises to engage young writers and our community.

How can add encouragement in creative writing lesson plans?

I’ve found students are shy about writing creatively, about sharing pieces of themselves. A large part of the first week of class is setting the atmosphere, of showing everyone they are free to create. And! These concepts will apply to most writing lesson plans for secondary students.

Feel free to give me feedback and borrow all that you need! Below, find my detailed my day-by-day progression for creative writing lesson plans  for week one.

Build the community in a creative writing class. A creative writing lesson can build young writers' confidence.

Creative Writing Lesson Day One: Sharing my vision

Comfort matters for young writers. I’m not a huge “ice breaker” type of teacher—I build relationships slowly. Still, to get student writing, we must establish that everyone is safe to explore, to write, to error.

Here are some ideas.

Tone and attitude

For day one with any lesson plan for creative writing, I think it is important to set the tone, to immediately establish what I want from my creative writing students. And that is…

them not to write for me, but for them. I don’t want them writing what they think I want them to write.

Does that make sense? Limitations hurt young writers. My overall tone and attitude toward young writers is that we will work together, create and write together, provide feedback, and invest in ourselves. Older kiddos think that they must provide teachers with the “correct” writing. In such a course, restrictions and boundaries largely go out the window.

Plus, I specifically outline what I believe they can produce in a presentation to set people at ease.

The presentation covers expectations for the class. As the teacher, I am a sort of writing coach with ideas that will not work for everyone. Writers should explore different methods and realize what works for them. First, not everyone will appreciate every type of writing—which is fine. But as a writing community, we must accept that we may not be the target audience for every piece of work.

Therefore, respect is a large component of the class. Be sure to outline what interactions you find acceptable within your classroom community.

Next, as their writing coach, I plan to provide ideas and tools for use. Their job is to decide what tools work for their creative endeavors. My overall message is uplifting and encouraging.

Finally, when we finish, I share the presentation with students so they can consult it throughout the semester. The presentation works nicely for meet-the-teacher night, too!

After covering classroom procedures and rules, I show students a TED Talk. We watch The Danger of a Single Story by Chimamanda Adichie. My goal is to show students that I don’t have a predetermined idea concerning what they should write. This discussion takes the rest of the class period.

Establishing comfort and excitement precedents my other creative writing activities. Personalize your “vision” activities for your lessons in creative writing. Honestly, doing this pre-work builds relationships with students and creates a positive classroom atmosphere.

Activate prior knowledge when building a creative writing course. When building creative writing lesson plans, build off what students know.

Creative Writing Lesson Day Two: Activating prior knowledge

Students possess prior knowledge concerning creative writing, but they might not consider that. Students should realize that they know what constitutes a great story. They might not realize that yet. An easy lesson plan for creative writing that will pay off later is to activate prior knowledge. Brainstorm creative, memorable, unforgettable stories with students. Share your thoughts too! You will start to build relationships with students who share the same tastes as you (and those that are completely different!).

Activation activity

During this activity, I want to see how students work together, and I want to build a rapport with students. Additionally, activating prior knowledge provides a smooth transition into other creative writing activities.

This creative writing activity is simple:

I ask students to tell me memorable stories—books, play, tv shows, movies—and I write them on the board. I add and veto as appropriate. Normally doing these classroom discussions, we dive deeper into comedies and creative nonfiction. Sometimes as we work, I ask students to research certain stories and definitions. I normally take a picture of our work so that I can build creative writing lessons from students’ interests.

This takes longer than you might think, but I like that aspect. This information can help me shape my future lessons.

Creative writing lesson plans: free download for creative writing activities for your secondary writing classes. Creative writing lessons should provide a variety of writing activities.

With about twenty minutes left in class, I ask students to form small groups. I want them to derive what makes these stories memorable. Since students complete group and partner activities in this class, I also watch and see how they interact.

Students often draw conclusions about what makes a story memorable:

  • Realistic or true-to-life characters.
  • Meaningful themes.
  • Funny or sad events.

All of this information will be used later as students work on their own writing. Many times, my creative writing lessons overlap, especially concerning the feedback from young writers.

Use pictures to enhance creative writing lesson plans. With older students, they can participate in the lesson plan for creative writing.

Creative Writing Lesson Day Three: Brainstorming and a graphic organizer

From building creative writing activities and implementing them, I now realize that students think they will sit and write. Ta-da!  After all, this isn’t academic writing. Coaching creative writing students is part of the process.

Young writers must accept that a first draft is simply that, a first draft. Building a project requires thought and mistakes. (Any writing endeavor does, really.) Students hear ‘creative writing’ and they think… easy. Therefore, a first week lesson plan for creative writing should touch on what creativity is.

Really, creativity is everywhere. We complete a graphic organizer titled, “Where is Creativity?” Students brainstorm familiar areas that they may not realize have such pieces.

The ideas they compile stir all sorts of conversations:

  • Restaurants
  • Movie theaters
  • Amusement parks

By completing this graphic organizer, we discuss how creativity surrounds us, how we can incorporate different pieces in our writing, and how different areas influence our processes.

Build a community of creative writers. An impactful creative writing lesson should empower young writers.

Creative Writing Lesson, Days Four and Five: Creative Nonfiction

Students need practice writing, and they need to understand that they will not use every word they write. Cutting out lines is painful for them! Often, a lesson plan for creative writing involves providing time for meaningful writing.

For two days, we study and discuss creative nonfiction. Students start by reading an overview of creative nonfiction . (If you need mentor texts, that website has some as well.) When I have books available, I show the class examples of creative nonfiction.

We then continue through elements of a narrative . Classes are sometimes surprised that a narrative can be nonfiction.

The narrative writing is our first large project. As we continue, students are responsible for smaller projects as well. This keeps them writing most days.

Overall, my students and I work together during the first week of any creative writing class. I encourage them to write, and I cheer on their progress. My message to classes is that their writing has value, and an audience exists for their creations.

And that is my week one! The quick recap:

Week One Creative Writing Lesson Plans

Monday: Rules, procedures, TED Talk, discussion.

Tuesday: Prior knowledge—brainstorm the modeling of memorable stories. Draw conclusions about storytelling with anchor charts. Build community through common knowledge.

Wednesday: Graphic organizer.

Thursday and Friday: Creative nonfiction. Start narrative writing.

Students do well with this small assignment for the second week, and then we move to longer creative writing assignments . When classesexperience success with their first assignment, you can start constructive editing and revising with them as the class continues.

Lesson plan for creative writing: free creative writing lesson plans for week one of ELA class. Add creative writing activities to your high school language arts classes.

These creative writing activities should be easy implement and personalize for your students.

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Engaging Writing Prompts for Middle School Students

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Nurturing creativity is essential to help middle school students explore their potential and prepare for future challenges. One effective method of promoting creativity in the classroom is through engaging writing prompts. These prompts not only spark imaginative thinking but also enhance skills, such as world-building, descriptive language, and point of view.

While writing prompts can be used with all grade levels, middle school is a prime opportunity to use them to bridge foundational skills and knowledge learned in elementary school with critical thinking and analysis that will be used in high school. Middle school students are at an age in their learning where they can explore creativity and writing in a setting that primes them for the higher level of thinking that will come in later years. The benefits of using writing prompts in middle school validates the argument that they should be regularly integrated into the curriculum throughout the school year. Here, we’ll explore the different benefits of writing prompts, engaging writing activities, and even specific writing prompts that can be used with young writers.  

The Role of Writing Prompts

Writing prompts are brief, thought-provoking statements or questions that inspire students to write clearly and creatively. They serve as the ignition for the creative fire within students, encouraging them to explore new horizons through writing. Writing prompts for middle school students also serve as invaluable tools for fostering literacy skills .

Writing prompts, such as creative writing prompts and personal journal prompts , offer a structured framework within which students can explore a wide range of writing ideas and literacy skills. For example, fun writing prompts can be used as hooks or bellringers to engage students in creative and critical thinking before reading a challenging text.

In addition to playing a role in general classroom instruction, writing prompts can also be used in reading and writing interventions. For example, teachers can provide students who may need extra guidance with sentence starters or story starters to help guide analysis or jumpstart creativity. 

Unlocking Creativity Through Engaging Writing Prompts

Writing prompts can also be used for informative and explanatory writing but as discussed already, they play a pivotal role in fostering creativity. In fact, engaging writing prompts are a powerful tool that can unlock the doors to imaginative thinking and self-expression. Let’s take a closer look at the creative benefits of using engaging writing prompts :

Encouraging Imagination and Originality : Writing prompts challenge students to think beyond the ordinary and come up with original ideas. By exploring diverse topics, they can tap into their unique perspectives and unleash their creativity. 

Inspiring Critical Thinking and Problem-Solving Skills : Some writing prompts present real-life situations or dilemmas, prompting students to analyze and devise solutions. This process nurtures critical thinking abilities, preparing students for future problem-solving challenges.

Promoting Emotional Expression and Empathy : Writing prompts that evoke emotions encourage students to express their feelings and develop empathy toward others. This emotional exploration contributes to their holistic growth as individuals.

Enhancing Communication and Language Abilities : As students respond to writing prompts, they refine their communication skills, learning how to articulate their thoughts effectively. Additionally, they expand their vocabulary and command of the language.

Reinforced Reading Skills : Effective writing prompts can be used to support reading instruction and intervention as well. According to Dr. Jason DeHart in Connecting to the Written Word: Intentional Writing with Older Readers , “Older readers are also keenly aware of their own need for additional support, which can result in avoidance behaviors. Teachers who invite students to comfortably engage in writing and composing can gain knowledge of and build relationships with students who would otherwise stay ‘under the radar.’” From techniques like dialogic reading with young readers to intentional writing with older readers, an integrative approach to reading and writing deepens skill levels and understanding.

Integrating Writing Prompts in the Middle School Curriculum

Integrating creativity and self-expression into the curriculum is a fundamental aspect of nurturing well-rounded and confident individuals. Therefore, the integration of writing prompts in the middle school curriculum is not just about fostering better writers; it’s about empowering students to become effective communicators, critical thinkers, and confident individuals.

Writing prompts can be designed to align with educational standards, ensuring they contribute to the overall learning objectives. Writing prompts can also be tailored to various subjects, making them a versatile tool across the curriculum. 

One of the main concepts that writing reinforces is reading. In The Writing Rope: A Framework for Evidence-Based Writing Instruction podcast episode, Joan Sedita, founder of Keys to Literacy and author of The Writing Rope , explores the notion that writing is a task as complex and multifaceted as reading—but it’s often taught as a single skill. Sedita states, “There is this relationship between reading and writing. And what I found in writing this ( The Writing Rope ) and in the professional development work that I do, is that many of the components that we need to teach to students, skills, strategies, are things that also usually support their reading comprehension.” This is just another reason why writing prompts need to be a foundational part of middle school curriculum. 

Writing Prompt Activities for Middle School Students

Here, we’ve included a list of different writing activities, as well as a specific prompt that can be used with each idea.

Diverse Genre Exploration

Writing prompt activities expose middle school students to various literary genres. This diversity broadens their understanding of the written word and empowers them to find their unique writing voice. 

Some genres students can explore include imaginative fiction, personal reflection, mystery and suspense, historical fiction, and poetry and verse. Through these, students can develop the ability to craft suspenseful plots, create vibrant characters, and build intricate worlds that captivate readers’ imaginations. Moreover, as they step into genres like poetry, they can embrace the rhythmic cadence of language, painting emotions and experiences with words in a way that resonates deeply.

PROMPT : Imagine you have the opportunity to blend two different genres together to create a brand-new story. Choose any two genres (e.g., fantasy, mystery, science fiction, historical fiction, romance, adventure, horror) and combine them in a creative and unexpected way. Write a short story that incorporates elements from both genres.

Imagination Ignited

Prompts that delve into fantastical scenarios, futuristic worlds, or magical realms stimulate students’ imaginations. This activity is especially important for exploring the five senses and having students practice the writing skill of showing, not telling. 

PROMPT : Close your eyes and imagine stepping into an enchanted forest. This forest is no ordinary place—it’s a realm of magic, mystery, and unexpected wonders. As you venture deeper into the forest, describe what you see, hear, and feel. What kind of magical creatures do you encounter? Are there hidden secrets waiting to be discovered? 

Real-Life Relevance

Some prompts present real-life situations or dilemmas relevant to middle school students. Writing about familiar experiences allows students to relate more deeply to the subject matter and encourages them to reflect on their daily lives, maybe even stirring up a favorite memory.

Writing prompt exercises for middle school students go well beyond the boundaries of the classroom, incorporating real-world applicability into the educational process. These activities work as vibrant platforms that help students develop their literary abilities while also forging significant connections with their surroundings. 

PROMPT : Imagine you are a young inventor with a mission to create innovative solutions for a more sustainable future. Choose one real-world environmental challenge, such as plastic pollution, energy conservation, water scarcity, or air quality. Write a persuasive essay explaining your inventive solution to address this challenge. Consider how your solution could make a positive impact on the environment and inspire positive change.

Visual Prompts

Visual prompts, such as pictures or videos, act as powerful catalysts for creativity. These stimuli spark inspiration and help students visualize their ideas, leading to descriptive and vivid writing. A few popular visual prompts for middle school students include: enchanted forest, desert island, abandoned amusement park, hidden doorway, and journey through a wormhole.

PROMPT : Examine the image of a person discovering an object in an unexpected place. It depicts a person stumbling upon an unexpected object in an unlikely place. Write a short story inspired by this limited imagery. Consider who the person is, what the object is, and how they react to this surprising discovery.

Character Building

Writing prompts that focus on character development allow students to create intricate and relatable personas. This activity fosters empathy and an understanding of human emotions and behaviors. Some activities include empathy exploration, personal heroes, character evolution, reflective essays, and acts of kindness narratives. Whether reflecting on real people, analyzing fictional characters, or creating characters of their own, students can think both creatively and critically about the people they experience in the world around them as well as their own character traits. 

PROMPT : Imagine a character who faces a situation that requires immense courage. This could be standing up to a bully, facing a fear, or defending a friend. Write a short story that follows this character’s journey as they navigate their fear and find the inner strength to overcome the challenge. Explore their thoughts, emotions, and the growth they experience along the way.

Time Travel Through History

Historical writing prompts transport students to different eras, enabling them to experience the past through the eyes of historical figures. Such activities blend storytelling with historical context, making history come alive. This offers middle school students a portal to the past and an opportunity to connect with the people and events that have shaped our world. Students can transport themselves to the courts of ancient civilizations, walk alongside figures of significance, and experience pivotal events that have left an indelible mark.

PROMPT : Imagine you have a time machine that can transport you to any ancient civilization in history. Choose a specific civilization (e.g., Ancient Egypt, Ancient Greece, the Mayan Civilization) and write a detailed account of a day in the life of a young person living during that time. Describe their surroundings, daily activities, challenges, and interactions with others. What do they eat? What do they wear? What adventures do they embark on? 

Writing in Different Tenses and Points of View

Writing prompt activities that require students to experiment with different tenses and points of view expand their narrative skills. From the immediacy of the present tense to the reflective nature of the past tense, and even the speculative intrigue of the future tense, each tense holds a unique charm that can transform a narrative’s tone and texture. This practice prepares them for tackling complex storytelling techniques.

The choice of point of view shapes the reader’s connection to characters and events. Middle school students can experiment with different perspectives, forging intimate bonds or granting omniscient insight that illuminate the narrative in distinct ways. As they use writing prompt activities, let students explore tenses and perspectives. For example, students may be asked to write from the perspective of a best friend, family member, famous person, or main character. By doing so, they not only refine their writing skills but also cultivate empathy for others, new facts or information, and an appreciation for the language.

PROMPT : Write a short story about an unforgettable adventure. Start by describing the adventure in the first person, using the present tense to immerse the reader in the moment. Then, switch to the third person and past tense to recount the same adventure from an outsider’s perspective. Compare the two versions, considering how the choice of tense and point of view impacts the reader’s experience.

Nature and Environmental Themes

Writing prompts inspired by nature and environmental themes promote ecological awareness and encourage students to contemplate their relationship with the natural world. Some nature and environmental themes to spark imaginative writing activities for middle school students include eco-friendly adventures, a letter to future generations, an imaginary ecosystem, an unexpected encounter, and a day without technology.

PROMPT : Step into the shoes of a young explorer who enters a mystical forest known as “The Whispering Woods.” This forest is said to hold ancient secrets and a strong connection to nature. Write a short story that captures your journey through the woods, describing the sights, sounds, and encounters you experience.

The power of writing prompts for middle school students goes beyond honing writing skills; it encourages them to explore their thoughts, express their creativity, and develop a strong voice in the world of words. By providing a diverse array of prompts that resonate with their interests, challenges, and curiosities, educators can inspire young minds to embark on literary journeys filled with self-discovery and growth.

Voyager Sopris Learning’s writing instruction programs include engaging writing prompts and provide an explicit, multisensory approach to writing instruction. For example, Step Up to Writing ® instructional strategies help students understand the importance of each step in the writing process for increased writing success in all content areas. Download free Step Up to Writing lesson samples to explore the program.

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creative writing objectives middle school

Creative Writing Prompts For Middle School Students

creative writing objectives middle school

Written by:

Max Stevens

Max Stevens

Administrator

Creative Writing Prompts for middle school students is a fun list to help unmotivated and uninspired students use their imagination. Do you know one of the major reasons why students struggle with their writing growth is a lack of inspiration and guidance? This can result in low creative thinking leading to lower-quality work and poor confidence.

With these creative writing prompts specifically tailored to middle school students, you’ll have a starting point for your writing. There’s nothing like a spark of inspiration to get you going! Do you need more structured guidance from Oxbridge tutors to give you a massive boost in your creative writing skills? Check out our most in-demand  creative writing summer school !

Are you ready to dive in and feel inspired by exciting writing prompt ideas? Read on!

The Best Writing Prompts for Middle School

Before getting started, you may want to delve deeper into some creative writing examples to get into the swing of things. If you’ve done that, then here are a few of the best writing prompts for middle school students that help spark creativity:

  • Who’s your favourite character in a book? Try journaling from the character’s perspective.
  • What topic are you passionate about? Write a persuasive essay on the topic. 
  • Think about your favourite place on Planet Earth. Write a descriptive essay about it.
  • Write a story that begins with the sentence, “It was a dark and stormy night.”
  • If you had a time machine, where you would go and what you would do.
  • Recall a memorable emotion or experience. Write a poem about it. 
  • Think about a current event you find interesting. Write a news article about it. 
  • Who would you approach if you could ask for advice from anyone, living or dead? Write them a letter. 
  • Imagine you’re an astronaut travelling through space. Write a journal entry about your experience.
  • What’s one of the most memorable moments in your life? Write a personal narrative about it. 
  • Write a short story about a character who overcomes a challenge or obstacle.
  • What topic did you learn about recently? Write an informative essay about it.
  • Write a fictional diary entry from the point of view of a historical figure.
  • What specific animal do you find beautiful? Write a descriptive poem about it.
  • Describe your hopes and dreams for the next five years via a letter to your future self. 
  • Imagine that you are stranded on a deserted island. Write a story about your experience.
  • Write a scene in a play in an unusual setting.
  • What place would you like to visit? Write a descriptive paragraph about it. 
  • Write a personal reflection about a significant event or experience and what you have learned from it.
  • What’s your favourite animal? Write a fictional story from your fave animal’s perspective.

Creative Story Ideas: 34 Story Starters and Prompts for Middle Schoolers

  • A magical pen that brings drawings to life
  • A group of friends find a hidden treasure map.
  • A world where animals can talk
  • A robot who develops human emotions
  • A strange creature is discovered in the depths of the ocean.
  • A character who can see into the future
  • A young detective solves a series of mysterious crimes.
  • Teenage superhero navigates the challenges of middle school while saving the world.
  • A group of middle school students stumble upon a secret government experiment.
  • The magical kingdom is hidden in a scary forest.
  • A vengeful ghost haunts the basketball court at a small school.
  • Time-travel adventure to the Wild West 100 years ago. 
  • Friends have to save their town from a massive alien invasion.
  • A character who learns to communicate with animals to save them from illegal hunters.
  • A future world where AI technology controls everything.
  • A distraught character who can control time and tries to change their past.
  • Four teenagers go on a survival camping trip that turns into a nightmare.
  • The magical creature must find a way back home against the efforts of evil humans who want to use its powers for their own purposes.
  • A young girl discovers she was born 500 years ago.
  • An orphan wakes up with no memory of who they are until they accidentally stumble upon an oddly familiar house.
  • Students accidentally open a portal to another dimension and try to find their way back home fast because their final exam is a week away.
  • A terrifying monster lives beneath the city streets. So why did it start terrorising the city all of a sudden?
  • A gamer gets stuck in a video game. How can said gamer get out? Do they even want to?
  • A middle school student starts having foreboding dreams that come true. What is the universe trying to warn them?
  • Students attend a school for monster-slaying magic. So what monsters are they fighting against?
  • A group of kids discover a secret underground society they must fight to save modern civilisation.
  • An old man saves his town from a natural disaster in 13 minutes. 
  • The dragon wakes up from a century-long slumber. Only to discover it’s the only one left.
  • The robot becomes self-aware and must navigate human emotions.
  • A young inventor creates a machine that can read minds for a sinister purpose.
  • A magical place where everyone has a special ability gets tangled up in a civil war.
  • Supernatural mystery in an old, abandoned mansion that can save the world from a looming threat.
  • A haunted amusement park contains secrets that can solve a criminal case.
  • A young scientist creates a potion that can make people fly.
  • An evil character can control the elements. How will the average human hero stop them?

Writing Prompts for Stories That Start with Dialogue for Middle Schoolers

  • “I can’t believe you did that,” John says to his best friend. Write a story about what John’s best friend did. 
  • “I wish I could go back in time and change everything,” laments Jane. Write a story about Jane’s regrets. What would she do differently if given a chance?
  • “I found something bizarre in the backyard,” said Tom to his sister. Write a story about what Tom found. How did the discovery change their lives? 
  • “I can’t do this anymore!” screamed Sarah to her parents. What is Sarah complaining about? How did her parents react?
  • “I’m going to run away,” whispers Michael to his classmates. Why does Michael plan on running away? What happens when he does?
  • “I knew you were hiding something,” said Jack to his friend. Write a story about Jack’s discovery and how it affects their friendship.
  • Blake cries to her family, “I’m not who you think I am!” 
  • Write a story about how Alex stands up for himself against a bully. Starting with this line: “I’m not going to take it anymore,” 
  • “I think we might be lost,” whimpers Lucy to her friends. Where are Lucy and her friends? Why did they get lost in the first place?
  • Ryan is grappling with a massive decision. Begin the story with “I think this is a sign.”
  • The principal walks through the hallway, saying to Teacher Clare, “Help your students cope with the recent tragedy that plagued our halls.” What happened?

General Creative Writing Ideas for Middle School Students

Here is a list of prompts to get those creative juices flowing:

  • Talk about a time you were so happy you wish the moment would last forever.
  • You went to art class with a blind friend. How would you describe the painting to them? Use descriptive words.
  • If you could go on your dream vacation today, what would it be like?
  • Make a list of the most thought-provoking questions you can come up with.
  • You’re about to meet your favourite celebrity. What interview questions would you ask them?
  • If you could choose what happens next in your life until death, what will your story look like?
  • Imagine how your favourite pet was created and use procedural writing to describe the process.
  • If you were to insert yourself in a book you read, how would you change the story?

Want more fun writing prompts ? Check these out! Write a/an:

  • Short story about reluctant writers whose writing changes the world.
  • Acrostic poem about friendship or love.
  • Science fiction story about a futuristic world where your favourite toy is a legendary weapon with fearsome power.
  • Letter that will help inspire your past self when you were in a difficult part in your life.
  • Personal narrative about a memorable event from your childhood.
  • Descriptive paragraph about a person you admire.
  • Write a horror science fiction story about a world where technology is advanced beyond our current understanding.
  • Background story for your least favourite side character.
  • List of the benefits of writing. Use persuasive writing
  • Instructional essay on how to make a magical portal.
  • Mystery story where the main character finds the missing heirloom of an ancient noble family.
  • Story about a boy who became a millionaire because of a video game idea.
  • Personal letter to a historical figure, asking questions or seeking advice.
  • Descriptive poem about a specific season or weather.
  • Story about time travel and the consequences of changing the past.
  • Fun story about a cross-country road trip you would like to take.
  • Story about a character who is an outsider and how they find a sense of belonging.
  • Terrifying story about a person haunted by a past event and how they come to terms with it.
  • Heroic story about a character who journeys to discover their true identity.
  • Persuasive letter to a public figure expressing your thoughts on a current issue

Journaling Prompts for Middle School Writing

Here are journal prompts for middle school kids:

  • Describe your hometown.
  • What’s your favourite season, and why?
  • What are your greatest fears? Do you want to overcome them? Why or why not?
  • Where would you go if you could go anywhere?
  • Write a descriptive paragraph about your favourite food and why you like it.
  • What’s the meaning of your life? Use reflective writing.
  • What’s your favourite food and what does it remind you of?
  • If you won the lottery today, what would you buy?
  • Do you have a pet dog? How do you feel about your furry friend?
  • Choose one event in your life you wish didn’t happen. Why?
  • What’s your dream dinner party?
  • Would you rather become a normal person or a superhero? Why?
  • Who would you call first when you’re in a dangerous situation?
  • When was the time you felt most peaceful? Describe what was happening.
  • Do you enjoy story writing? Why or why not?
  • What are your top 3 greatest accomplishments so far?
  • If you could have a superpower, what would it be and why?
  • What’s the most embarrassing experience you’ve had?
  • If you could change one thing about the world, what would it be? Why?
  • What’s your dream job? Why?
  • Describe your ideal friend.
  • Imagine you are stranded on a deserted island, what three things would you want to have with you?
  • Write about a time you tried something new and what you learned from the experience.
  • What’s the most beautiful movie science you’ve seen? Describe it.
  • If you could invent any item, what features would it have? And what is its purpose?

If you feel like challenging yourself then check out our high school creative writing prompts .

There you have it – a fun list of favourite writing prompts for middle schoolers to enjoy. What are your favourite ideas to write so far? And,

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creative writing objectives middle school

Teacups & Teaching

Committed to Creative and Critical Thinking

in Something Creative!

Teaching Creative Writing to Middle Schoolers

There are fewer things my students get more excited about than the chance to write their own stories. This makes sense to me—we all yearn on some deeper level to be creative. Some of my students are much more creative than others, but they all enjoy getting that chance. 

Over the past few years, I’ve taught creative writing several times. The length of the unit varies, depending on how much free time I have. Sometimes it’s as long as twelve lessons, sometimes as short as five. No matter what, these are the essential topics I always cover:

  • Showing vs. Telling
  • Story Structure
  • Point of view, Dialogue, & Body language (on separate days or together, depending on timing)
  • Endings 

If time permits, I will sometimes dive deeper with these topics:

  • Finding ideas
  • Diving deeper into worldbuilding (specifically if lots of students write fantasy!)
  • Description using the five senses

Over many years and a concentration in creative writing, I’ve read many books about the craft of writing. However, when I’m teaching, I always return to my first craft book, which I bought at age 13. It’s written by Gail Carson Levine, author of beloved classic Ella Enchanted. 

This delightful book, Writing Magic: Creating Stories that Fly , covers all the topics I listed and more. Not only does it break down each topic into easy parts, but it also provides wonderful examples! Sometimes I use the same ones as Levine, and sometimes I find my own, but I am always grateful for them. Finally, each chapter ends with fun writing exercises, which I often do in class or assign as homework for my students. 

If there is a topic that you want to teach that isn’t covered in her book, she has an excellent blog that is much more comprehensive! 

While most of my lectures come from Ms. Levine’s book, I have created my own lectures for teaching story structure and character building, using Frozen and Mulan . They are available to purchase here .

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Summer 2024 programs.

The Advanced Writing Exploration Program invites rising 7th, 8th, and 9th-grade writers to be part of a community of dedicated, focused writers looking to explore their literary passions.

The program includes multi-genre workshops, as well as genre-specialized master class sessions. All workshops are student-driven and author-led, and writers will receive continuous feedback from their instructor and peers.

The program will prepare writers for Writopia’s popular and esteemed Creative Portfolio program for high schoolers.

This is an application-only program.

Price: $1290 Applicants can apply for need-based financial aid

Summer sessions include daily craft talks, writing exercises, and deep dives into different writing genres including poetry, memoir, playwriting, screenwriting, essay writing, fiction, comedy, and more. The session concludes with a reading and celebration.

Summer 2024 Date and Location Options:

  • Upper West Side, Monday, July 29th to Wednesday, August 7th, 2024 1 PM to 4 PM ET
  • Online, Monday, August 12th to Wednesday, August 21st, 2024 1 PM to 4 PM ET / 10 AM to 1 PM PT

Click here to apply for AWE!

School Year Programs

The Middle School Advanced Writing Exploration Program (AWE) invites 7th and 8th-grade writers to be part of a community of dedicated, focused writers looking to explore, expand, and deepen their literary passions. The program includes multi-genre workshops, as well as genre-specialized master class sessions. All workshops are student-driven and author-led, and writers will receive continuous feedback from their instructor and peers.

The AWE program also includes one private session in which the writer can focus on academic essay writing, admissions essays, or the creative genre of their choice.

The program will inspire and challenge middle school writers, as well as prepare them for Writopia’s popular and esteemed Creative Portfolio program for high schoolers.

This is an application-only program. We are currently accepting applications on a rolling basis.

Tuition: $645 (Limited financial aid available)

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  • Writing Prompts

150 Writing Prompts For Middle School (+Free Printable)

Make writing fun and easy, with these 150 writing prompts for middle school students. 

The more you write, the better you become at writing. But the problem is not all middle schoolers enjoy writing. There’s always something better to do, playing video games , watching YouTube videos , hanging with friends , lazing about the house – Why bother writing, right? The trick is to understand that even the smallest piece of writing can make a huge difference in a student’s attitude towards writing. 

If you unload too many lengthy assignments, such as writing 1,000 words on topic X or 3,000 about something, something – Writing can seem like a long, boring chore for some students. But if you break it down, and mix it up a bit, then your students have a real chance of actually liking writing for fun. Think of creating small writing tasks that take no longer than around 10 or 15 minutes to complete. As students complete these small tasks with ease, their confidence will grow, eventually turning them into avid young writers.

To help inspire and motivate young writers, we have created this list of 150 quick and easy writing prompts for Middle School students. Keep reading for a free printable writing pack for middle schoolers as well! Here is a quick generator that will generate a random middle school prompt for you:

For more fun writing ideas, check out this list of over 300 writing prompt for kids .

150 Writing Prompts For Middle School Students

This list of prompts is great for whenever your middle-schooler is bored and needs some quick ideas to write about:

  • Make a list of at least three different opening lines for this story idea: A space knight living in outer space wants to fight a real fire-breathing dragon.
  • Complete this sentence in at least three different ways: When I’m bored, I like to…
  • Draw a picture of your dream house, and describe some of the coolest features it has.
  • Make a top ten list of the scariest animals in the animal kingdom. You could even write down one scary fact about each animal.
  • Write an acrostic poem using the letters that spell z-o-m-b-i-e.
  • Describe the scariest monster that you can think of. You could even draw a picture of it.
  • Complete the following sentence in at least three different ways: My goal for the next month is to…
  • Make a top ten list of your favourite foods of all time. You could even write down one reason for why each food is your favourite.
  • Create your own A-Z book or list of monsters. For A is for Abominable Snowman, B is for Bogeyman and so on.
  • Research and write down five facts about an endangered species of your choice. Examples of endangered species include the blue whale, giant pandas, snow leopards and tigers.
  •  Create a postcard for your local town or city. What picture would you draw on the front? And what message could you include on the back?
  • Write an acrostic poem using the letters that spell out your own first name. This poem could be about yourself. 
  • Make a top ten list of your favourite movies of all time.
  • Make a top ten list of your favourite songs of all time.
  • Complete the following sentence in at least three different ways. When I grow up I want to…
  • Which is your favourite season, Winter , Spring , Summer or Autumn? Write a haiku poem about your favourite season.
  • Create a party invite for a dinner party at your house. Think about the party theme, entertainment, food and dress code.
  • Write down a recipe that uses eggs as one of the ingredients.
  • Write a how-to guide on how to take care of a kitten or puppy.
  • What do you enjoy doing on the weekends? Start by making a list of activities that you do on the weekend. Then you can pick one to write about in more detail.
  • Using a photograph (or one of these picture writing prompts ), write a short caption or description to go alongside it. 
  • Imagine you are the owner of a new restaurant. Create a menu of the dishes you will serve at this restaurant. 
  • What has been the best part of your day so far? And what has been the worst part of the day?
  • Imagine that you have a time machine. What year would you travel to and why?
  • If you could have one superpower, what would it be and why?
  • If you could keep one dinosaur as a pet, which dinosaur would you pick and why?
  • Write down everything you remember from a recent nightmare that you had. 
  • What is your favourite country in the whole wide world? List at least five fun facts about this country.
  • Make a list of at least 3 different story ideas about aliens.
  • Create a character description of the world’s most evil supervillains.
  • What is your greatest achievement to date? What are you most proud of and why?
  • Write an action-packed scene that contains the following: A car chase, a lucky pair of socks and a talking parrot.
  • What advice would you give to someone who is being bullied? You could make a list of at least three pieces of advice that you might give.
  • Imagine you are stuck on a desert island. Write a diary entry of your first day on the island.
  • Imagine you are a pirate sailing the seven seas. Talk about the scariest thing you faced while out at sea.
  • You just discovered a new planet . Can you describe this new planet in detail? What would you call it? Does any life exist on the planet? What type of climate does it have?
  • Would you rather have a magical unicorn as a pet or a fire-breathing dragon?
  • Complete the following sentence in at least three different ways: One day I was walking through the forest and discovered…
  • Write a letter to your friend about a favourite memory you have of them. You can use the following starter as inspiration: Remember that time…
  • Make a list of book title ideas for a story about a girl who can go invisible whenever she wants.
  • A talking cat is fast asleep, then suddenly someone wakes it up. Write down a short script between the cat, and the person arguing. 
  • What is the nicest thing that anyone has done for you recently?
  • Make a list of 10 online safety tips to help you stay safe online.
  • Can you think of at least 5 ways to prevent climate change in your daily life?
  • Make a list of your top ten favourite books of all time.
  • Think about a movie that you’ve seen recently. What did you enjoy most about this movie, and what did you dislike about it?
  • You are just about to take a bite of an apple. And then suddenly the apple starts screaming. What do you do next?
  • Describe a magical forest in great detail. What makes this forest so magical?
  • Write a super scary scene, using the following starter: As I walked into the haunted house…
  • What is your greatest fear? Is it possible to ever overcome this fear? If so, how would you do it?
  • Make a list of at least five things you like about yourself. And then make a list of five things that you would change about yourself.
  • What would the perfect day look like for you? How would it start? What activities would you do? And how does it end?
  • You are standing in the playground when you hear two of your classmates making fun of your best friend. What do you do next?
  • A young boy yells at his pet eagle to fly away into the wild. The eagle does not respond. Write down this scene between the two characters in great detail. 
  • Describe a pencil in the greatest detail possible.
  • Create your own superhero character. What are their strengths and superpowers? What about their weaknesses? Also, think of a cool superhero name for them!
  • What is your dream job? What skills and traits do you need to do this job well?
  • Imagine that you have had the worst day ever. Write down what happened to make it so bad.
  • What is your favourite colour? Now write a short rhyming poem about this colour.
  • If you had three wishes, what would you wish for and why? Wishing for extra wishes is not allowed.
  • Write an action-packed scene of a lion chasing a zebra in the wild from the perspective of the lion. 
  • Imagine you own a video gaming company. Your task is to come up with a new video game idea. Explain this new video game idea in detail.
  • What would you do if you were given $1 million dollars? 
  • What is your favourite hobby or interest? Can you provide at least five tips for beginners who might be interested in starting this hobby?
  • Make a top ten list of your favourite celebrities or YouTube stars.
  • Write the opening paragraph of a fairytale about a zombie prince who has returned from the dead.
  • Write an alternative ending to a fairytale that you are familiar with. For example, you could write a sad ending for Cinderella or a cliff-hanger style ending for Jack and the Beanstalk.
  • Write down a conversation in a script format between two people waiting for the bus at a bus stop.
  • Would you rather get abducted by aliens, or discover a magical portal to another realm in your bedroom? Explain your answer.
  • Write a shape poem about your favourite food in the shape of this food.
  • If you had to prepare for a zombie invasion, which three items would you pack in your bag, and why?
  • Describe the most beautiful garden in the world in detail. What type of flowers would it have? Would it have any garden furniture?
  • You receive a strange parcel in the middle of the night. You open the parcel to discover… Write down at least one paragraph of what you discover in the parcel.
  • Use the word, ‘Stampede’ in at least three different sentences.
  • Complete the following metaphor in at least three different ways: Your smile is like…
  • Describe the city of the future. What would the buildings look like? How will people travel? What kind of homes will people live in?
  • What is Marie Curie (the physicist) famous for? Research and write down five facts about her research and studies. 
  • You have just been made leader of the Kingdom of Kinloralm. As the leader, what rules would you set for the kingdom? Make a list of at least 10 rules that you will enforce. 
  • A witch has cast a spell on you. Every night at midnight, you turn into a werewolf. Describe this transformation in great detail. What does it feel like when you are transforming? How does your skin change? What about your teeth and fingernails?
  • Using the following starter , write at least one paragraph: When I look outside the window…
  • After a deep sleep, you wake up to find yourself locked inside a cage. No one else is around. What do you do next?
  • You keep on having the same nightmare every night. In your nightmare, you are running as fast as you can, and then you suddenly fall. When you turn around you see… Write at least one paragraph about what you see. 
  • Write down at least 10 interview questions that you can ask your favourite celebrity. If you have time, you can even write down the potential answers to these questions from the perspective of the celebrity.
  • Write a how-to guide on how to grow tomatoes at home.
  • Make a list of at least five tips for keeping your bedroom clean.
  • Would you rather drive the fastest car on Earth for one hour or own a custom-made bicycle? Explain your choice.
  • Write a limerick poem about an old snail. 
  • Find something in your room that begins with the letter, ‘R’, and write a paragraph describing this object in detail.
  • Research the history of how the first mobile phone was invented. Create a timeline of mobile phone inventions from the very first mobile to the current time. 
  • If you were the headteacher of your school, what changes would you make and why? Try to list and describe at least three changes. 
  • What are the benefits and drawbacks of having access to the internet? Try to think of at least five benefits and five drawbacks.
  • Write about the best day of your life so far. Then write about the worst day of your life so far.
  • Imagine that you are an agony aunt for a newspaper. A reader has written to you with the following problem: Dear Agony Aunt, I have no friends at school. And my classmates are always making fun of me… What advice would you give this reader?
  • Imagine that you are a salesperson. Your task is to sell a new chocolate bar to customers. Write down a sales pitch that was selling this chocolate bar. What features would you highlight? What are the benefits of this chocolate bar?
  • Can you complete the following sentence in three different ways: When I feel upset, I …
  • What is the most difficult part about being in middle school? What is the best part of middle school?
  • Imagine that your best friend has just revealed a huge secret. How would you react? Write down a script of the conversation between you and your best friend.
  • Have you learned any new skills recently? How did you learn these?
  • Imagine you are sitting at a dinner party with a group of strangers. Describe the atmosphere in great detail. Who are you sitting next to? What sort of conversations are the other guests having? What food is being served?
  • Five years from now, where will you be? Will you be the same person? How would you have changed?
  • Write about your plans for the weekend.
  • Describe a day in the life of being a goldfish in a fishbowl at a pet shop.
  • While at the seaside, a message in a bottle washes up onto the shore. You open the bottle and read the message. The message reads: Help Me! I’m stranded on an island! What do you do next?
  • A mother and her son are baking some muffins in the kitchen. Write down a conversation that they might have while they bake together.
  • Make a list of indoor activities you can do when it’s raining outside. Try to think of at least ten activities.
  • Write down a diary entry from the perspective of an alien secretly living undercover on Earth. 
  • Write at least three different opening lines for the following story idea: A king needs to keep his kingdom safe from the ravenous trolls that come out at night.
  • Imagine you are a secret agent cat, write about your most recent mission.
  • Complete the following sentence in at least three different ways: If I could change the world, I would…
  • If you could program a robot, what tasks would you program it to do, and why?
  • Imagine you are the owner of a toy shop. Your task is to hire some toy makers. Write a job description for a toymaker. Think about the skills and traits required to become a toymaker. 
  • You are the owner of a zoo. Suddenly you hear people screaming as the lions are accidentally released. What do you do next?
  • Your future self comes from the future to warn you about something. Write a conversation that you would have with your future self. 
  • If you had a choice to become a superhero or a supervillain, which one would you be and why?
  • Can you think of at least three things that no one knows about you? Why have you kept these things a secret?
  • During a science experiment, you mix up the wrong chemicals. The liquid turns blue and jumps out of the glass container. It then slides into your backpack. What do you do next?
  • Write down at least five things that you are grateful for in your life right now.
  • You notice some strange footprints in your backyard leading to your shed. You follow these footprints and discover…
  • When was the last time someone upset you or hurt your feelings? How did they hurt your feelings? Do you remember what was said?
  • You walk inside a magic shop. You see all sorts of weird and fun things. Describe the inside of the shop in as much detail as possible. 
  • Write at least three different opening lines for the following story idea: A young werewolf wants to be a human again.
  • Make a list of three different story ideas about dragons.
  • Write from the perspective of a kite flying high in the sky. Think about what you feel, see and hear.
  • Write about your favourite subject at school. Why do you like this subject?
  • Write a haiku poem about the full moon.
  • Imagine you are the manager of a TV channel. Make a list of at least three new TV show ideas you can air on Saturday evening.
  • You find a baby alien in your basement. What do you do next?
  • Think of at least three newspaper headlines for the following article idea: The new mayor of your town/city is planning on creating more homes.
  • Imagine that your pet dog has gone missing. Create a missing poster to find your dog. Remember to describe any important details relating to the dog in your power.
  • Write an advertisement for the brand new mixer 3000. It mixes all the best music tracks with sounds to create the ultimate track.
  • Write down three sentences. One of something interesting that happened to you today. Another of something positive that happened. And finally another sentence of something negative. 
  • Write down four different character descriptions. Each character must have a different background story or history when growing up.
  • Imagine you had a terrible experience at a restaurant. Write a complaint letter to the restaurant manager, outlining the problems you had. 
  • Imagine your family is planning to go on a cruise. As you drive to the boat, a person walks up to your car window, holds up a flyer, and demands that they do what they were told. What is your family’s reply?
  • As you’re making your way home, you pass by a group of people. It turns out the person who was walking next to them is a ghost. What do you do next?
  • Your best friend has had a terrible year. You need to plan the best birthday party ever for them. Make a list of items that you will need for the party. 
  • Using the 5 W’s and 1 H technique, outline the following newspaper article idea: A new breed of wolves was discovered nearby. The 5 W’s include: What, Where, When, Who and why. The one H is How.
  • Write a positive self-talk poem, using the following starter: I am…
  • Take a recent picture that you have drawn at home or during art class. Using this picture, can you think of at least three ideas for stories from it?
  • How can you prevent bullying in your school? Make a list of at least five different ways to prevent bullying.
  • Write a list of at least 10 interview questions that you can ask your favourite teacher at school. If you want, you can actually ask these questions and write down the responses your teacher gives.
  • Describe a day in the life of being a mouse that lives in your school.
  • What qualities to look for in a friend? Make a list of at least 3 qualities. Also, think about what qualities you try to avoid. 
  • Complete the following sentence in at least three different ways: When I wake up in the morning, I feel…
  • Do you ever wish you could do more to help people? Make a list of at least five ways you can help a friend who is going through a tough time.
  • When was the last time you felt angry? How did you deal with this anger? Do you think it is okay to be angry all the time?
  • Write down at least three predictions for the future. These predictions can be personal or about the world. You can use the following starter: In 10 years time…
  • Do you enjoy writing? If yes, then what kind of things do you enjoy writing about. Explain your answer.
  • Think about the last book you read. Which scene in the book stood out to you the most? Why did it stand out for you?
  • Complete the following sentence in at least three different ways: The biggest question on my mind right now is…

What did you think of this list of quick and easy writing prompts for Middle School students? Did you find this list useful or difficult to use? Let us know in the comments below!

Printable Writing Pack for Middle Schoolers

Thank you for reading this post! You can download the free PDF writing prompts for Middle School students pack here .

Writing Prompts For Middle School

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creative writing objectives middle school

5 Secrets for Helping Middle School Writers Succeed

Even though I spent 19 years as a middle school teacher, I frequently ask myself what makes a middle school writing classroom work. I know successful teaching is a series of flexible moving parts. I know it’s one part inspiration and a bigger part organization. I know that every middle school teacher struggles to achieve more good days than bad.

In  Traits of Writing: The Complete Guide for Middle School , I share meaningful and practical ideas for using what I’ve learned about teaching writing in middle school. My aim is to validate what you already know and give you new ways to support students. I also point out obstacles to watch out for and ways around them, so you don’t sacrifice the integrity of your teaching or the writing lives of your students.

As teachers, our greatest challenge may not be understanding best practices, but implementing those practices in classrooms where writing skills vary, time is precious, and the demand for high test scores can smother even the most creative teaching. But take heart. Teaching writing well is not impossible. Here are 5 secrets I know work in middle school and will help your young writers succeed:

1.     The teacher must model how to learn.

If we want our students to write, we have to show them we are writers ourselves, which means opening ourselves up to scrutiny.

2.      Learning should be infectious.

Look for inspiration everywhere and revise you lesson plans accordingly to foster a fascination with language, not just an understanding of terms. Who knows where this might lead?

3.     Students must be active.

Engaging in lively activities, working in small groups, sitting on the floor, listening to music, using the computer, and talking about works in progress keep students moving, and therefore, learning.

4.     Students will work hard if we give them rigorous, relevant tasks.

Let students take a giant leap forward and come up with their own projects and use the skills they have learned over the years to accomplish it. What they write matters less than the fact that they choose to write with such passion and determination.

5.     Students deserve honest, detailed feedback.

Get serious about providing feedback. Students will appreciate your suggestions for making their writing smoother, clearer, and more interesting, and, like any serious writers, won’t always agree or follow them. But your students trust you to tell them the truth because they know your feedback, as difficult as it sometimes will be to convey, will help propel their work forward.

The secrets of writing, once locked away in the writing teacher’s vault, must be revealed and explored. How else will we sort out what works from what doesn’t? But you know this already. The writing lives of your middle school students depend on our getting it right.

To learn more about  Traits of Writing: The Complete Guide for Middle School , you can purchase the book  here.

About the author:

Ruth Culham, Ed.D.,  has published more than 40 best-selling professional books and resources with Scholastic and the International Literacy Association on the traits of writing and teaching writing using reading as a springboard to success. Her steadfast belief that every student is a writer is the hallmark of her work. As the author of  Traits Writing: The Complete Writing Program for Grades K–8 (2012), she has launched a writing revolution.  Traits Writing  is the culmination of 40 years of educational experience, research, practice, and passion.

4 Activities to Help Middle School Students Uncover New Ideas for Writing

No matter how old you are, no matter how much writing you do, no matter how much you improve over time, finding ideas and writing about them clearly and compellingly is a challenge. Small wonder, then, that middle school writers find the ideas trait difficult to master.

Writing must make sense, and that’s what the ideas trait is all about—choosing a topic, narrowing it down, and supporting it with enough details to make the message clear and engaging. In  Traits of Writing: The Complete Guide for Middle School , I outline the ideas trait’s 4 key qualities:

1.     Finding a topic

2.     Focusing the topic

3.     Developing the topic

4.     Using details

The following activities will help your students develop these qualities. Each is a creative, classroom-tested idea that allows students to try out skills and strategies that you share in warm-ups and focus lessons. These activities can take 5 minutes or 50, depending on your students’ needs and interest levels, and can be carried out by students independently or in small groups.

Finding a topic | Writer’s Notebooks

Often, the best topics are the ones students come up with themselves. As you work with students, encourage them to jot down in a notebook possible ideas for use in writing later—ideas that occur to them during science, social studies, health, fine arts, or English, or in everyday life. Let students select a notebook that makes them feel comfortable. Keep your own notebook and model how you jot down ideas for writing, words and phrases you like, intriguing information and observations, and questions to ponder.

Focusing the topic | The Best and the Worst Activity

Have your students brainstorm a list of real-world jobs that require a great deal of writing: a writer for a late-night talk show, a fund-raiser for a charity, a developer of video games, an author of children’s books, and so on. Write the jobs on a chart. Divide the class into small groups and assign one of the jobs to each group. Ask group members to prepare a panel presentation explaining the best and worst parts of the job and present it to the class, using some sort of visual aid that illustrates key points, such as a chart or diagram. Hang their creations in a prominent place for everyone to read and think about. This activity teaches students that writing is a big part of most professions—a lesson they will come to learn on their own soon enough.

Developing the topic | Top-Ten List

Ask students to write a top-ten list of things every adult should know about middle school students. Encourage them to develop each point in a fun, truthful, and interesting way. Here are examples of 2 developed points:

We don’t like to be told what to do. But if you don’t tell us, we won’t do it. And even when you do tell us, many times we don’t do it unless you get mean about it. We’re kinda flakey.

Remembering to put our names on our papers is harder than being blindfolded and sending a text message with our thumbs.

Using details | Getting Into the Details Activity

Give students a general statement, such as “I love Friday,” and ask them to work with a partner to brainstorm at least 10 details that explain why Friday is their favorite school day. Have pairs share those details with the whole class and make one long list. Now ask students to select their favorite details, at least 5 but no more than 10, and choose the one they consider the most important. From there, have pairs write a paragraph describing all the great things about Friday, emphasizing one detail they feel is most important. When they’re finished, ask students to put their paragraphs on their desks and invite their classmates to walk about and read them. Later, discuss the techniques students used to focus the reader’s attention on one detail more than others.

The time you spend teaching students where ideas come from and how to develop them effectively is critical to their success as writers. Finding a topic, focusing it, developing it, and using precise details to support it is where the writing begins.

Learn more about the ideas trait and other traits critical to writing success with  Traits of Writing: The Complete Guide for Middle School . You can purchase the book  here .

Reluctant Reader Books

17 Absolutely Gosh-Wow Writing Lessons for Middle School

creative writing objectives middle school

Below you’ll find a breakdown of our 17 killer writing lessons for middle school, which you can get here .

No doubt you’ll want to check out the lessons first. Click the thumbnail below to preview these amazing middle school writing lessons.

Looking for middle school short stories? Go here .

Looking for 1,029 killer middle school writing prompts? Go here .

Middle School Writing Lessons

So what’s in our lesson plans? Check it out:

1: Who’s the Goat: Debating the Greatest of All Time

2: Mapping the Neighborhood: Creating Maps to Generate Story Ideas

3: My Obituary: The Story of Your Life

4: Double, Double, Toil & Trouble: Writing Recipes for Magic Potions

5: My Principal is an Alien: Writing for the Tabloids

6: You’re Hired! LinkedIn Profiles for Fictional Characters

7: Snow White & the 7 Genres: Rewriting Disney Classics

8: The Choice is Yours: Writing an Adventure as a Class

9: Nuts and Bolts: Writing an Instruction Manual

10: The Watermelons of Despair: Rewriting Classic Titles

11: My Ideal Bookshelf: Illustrating Your Favorite Stack of Books

12: Love Letters From the Undead: Writing Letters From Fictional Characters

13: Harold in the Matrix: Unreliable Narrators in Picture Books

14: Message in a Bottle: Writing Letters to Your Future Self

15: What the Candlestick Saw: Writing From the POV of Inanimate Objects

16: Story Maps: Creating Maps to Visualize Stories

17: The Great American Road Trip: Writing About Travel on the Road

How to Use These Lesson Plans

Our lesson plans are designed to be used in two ways. You can either use them as individual one-off lessons to liven up your writing curriculum. Or you can use them to build upon specific writing units.

For example, creative writing units can benefit from our lessons on point of view, unreliable narrators, and creating LinkedIn profiles for fictional characters.

However, you could use our Who’s the GOAT? and Great American Road Trip lessons as stand alone lessons that are fun and engaging but don’t necessarily connect to a wider unit.

What Grade Level Are These Lessons Appropriate For?

We design our lesson plans to be utilized by a wide range of educators. These writing lessons are not grade-specific, and they can be adapted for students from 5th grade up through 12th grade.

Depending upon the specific needs and ability levels of your students, they can be expanded or contracted. Want your students to dive more deeply into POV? Have them write longer pieces or produce multiple pieces from different points of view. Want them to focus on just the basics of their obituary? Assign two paragraphs instead of multiple pages.

We believe teachers deserve lesson plans that provide a clear path but that leave plenty of room for educators to adapt and adjust for their own purposes.

creative writing objectives middle school

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creative writing objectives middle school

Utah State University

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Learning objectives: creative writing.

For the Creative Writing Emphasis in the BA/BS degrees, the three key Learning Objectives are:

  • Tone  of writing invites reader into the work
  • Anticipates and  addresses potential resistances  on the part of the reader
  • Presents a  matter that the reader will care about  or makes a good case why the reader should care about the topic
  • Provides  appropriate credit or citing  of others’ ideas
  • Shows  knowledge of the appropriate body of literature  associated with the genre and subject of the writing
  • Develops and  original  artistic vision, thesis, or research contribution
  • Free of problems  at the sentence level (syntax, usage, grammar)
  • Uses  clear and descriptive  language
  • Flows  well from paragraph to paragraph

French Journal of English Studies

Home Numéros 59 1 - Tisser les liens : voyager, e... 36 Views of Moscow Mountain: Teac...

36 Views of Moscow Mountain: Teaching Travel Writing and Mindfulness in the Tradition of Hokusai and Thoreau

L'auteur américain Henry David Thoreau est un écrivain du voyage qui a rarement quitté sa ville natale de Concorde, Massachusetts, où il a vécu de 1817 à 1862. Son approche du "voyage" consiste à accorder une profonde attention à son environnement ordinaire et à voir le monde à partir de perspectives multiples, comme il l'explique avec subtilité dans Walden (1854). Inspiré par Thoreau et par la célèbre série de gravures du peintre d'estampes japonais Katsushika Hokusai, intitulée 36 vues du Mt. Fuji (1830-32), j'ai fait un cours sur "L'écriture thoreauvienne du voyage" à l'Université de l'Idaho, que j'appelle 36 vues des montagnes de Moscow: ou, Faire un grand voyage — l'esprit et le carnet ouvert — dans un petit lieu . Cet article explore la philosophie et les stratégies pédagogiques de ce cours, qui tente de partager avec les étudiants les vertus d'un regard neuf sur le monde, avec les yeux vraiment ouverts, avec le regard d'un voyageur, en "faisant un grand voyage" à Moscow, Idaho. Les étudiants affinent aussi leurs compétences d'écriture et apprennent les traditions littéraires et artistiques associées au voyage et au sens du lieu.

Index terms

Keywords: , designing a writing class to foster engagement.

1 The signs at the edge of town say, "Entering Moscow, Idaho. Population 25,060." This is a small hamlet in the midst of a sea of rolling hills, where farmers grow varieties of wheat, lentils, peas, and garbanzo beans, irrigated by natural rainfall. Although the town of Moscow has a somewhat cosmopolitan feel because of the presence of the University of Idaho (with its 13,000 students and a few thousand faculty and staff members), elegant restaurants, several bookstores and music stores, and a patchwork of artsy coffee shops on Main Street, the entire mini-metropolis has only about a dozen traffic lights and a single high school. As a professor of creative writing and the environmental humanities at the university, I have long been interested in finding ways to give special focuses to my writing and literature classes that will help my students think about the circumstances of their own lives and find not only academic meaning but personal significance in our subjects. I have recently taught graduate writing workshops on such themes as "The Body" and "Crisis," but when I was given the opportunity recently to teach an undergraduate writing class on Personal and Exploratory Writing, I decided to choose a focus that would bring me—and my students—back to one of the writers who has long been of central interest to me: Henry David Thoreau.

2 One of the courses I have routinely taught during the past six years is Environmental Writing, an undergraduate class that I offer as part of the university's Semester in the Wild Program, a unique undergraduate opportunity that sends a small group of students to study five courses (Ecology, Environmental History, Environmental Writing, Outdoor Leadership and Wilderness Survival, and Wilderness Management and Policy) at a remote research station located in the middle of the largest wilderness area (the Frank Church River of No Return Wilderness) in the United States south of Alaska. In "Teaching with Wolves," a recent article about the Semester in the Wild Program, I explained that my goal in the Environmental Writing class is to help the students "synthesize their experience in the wilderness with the content of the various classes" and "to think ahead to their professional lives and their lives as engaged citizens, for which critical thinking and communication skills are so important" (325). A foundational text for the Environmental Writing class is a selection from Thoreau's personal journal, specifically the entries he made October 1-20, 1853, which I collected in the 1993 writing textbook Being in the World: An Environmental Reader for Writers . I ask the students in the Semester in the Wild Program to deeply immerse themselves in Thoreau's precise and colorful descriptions of the physical world that is immediately present to him and, in turn, to engage with their immediate encounters with the world in their wilderness location. Thoreau's entries read like this:

Oct. 4. The maples are reddening, and birches yellowing. The mouse-ear in the shade in the middle of the day, so hoary, looks as if the frost still lay on it. Well it wears the frost. Bumblebees are on the Aster undulates , and gnats are dancing in the air. Oct. 5. The howling of the wind about the house just before a storm to-night sounds extremely like a loon on the pond. How fit! Oct. 6 and 7. Windy. Elms bare. (372)

3 In thinking ahead to my class on Personal and Exploratory Writing, which would be offered on the main campus of the University of Idaho in the fall semester of 2018, I wanted to find a topic that would instill in my students the Thoreauvian spirit of visceral engagement with the world, engagement on the physical, emotional, and philosophical levels, while still allowing my students to remain in the city and live their regular lives as students. It occurred to me that part of what makes Thoreau's journal, which he maintained almost daily from 1837 (when he was twenty years old) to 1861 (just a year before his death), such a rich and elegant work is his sense of being a traveler, even when not traveling geographically.

Traveling a Good Deal in Moscow

I have traveled a good deal in Concord…. --Henry David Thoreau, Walden (1854; 4)

4 For Thoreau, one did not need to travel a substantial physical distance in order to be a traveler, in order to bring a traveler's frame of mind to daily experience. His most famous book, Walden , is well known as an account of the author's ideas and daily experiments in simple living during the two years, two months, and two days (July 4, 1845, to September 6, 1847) he spent inhabiting a simple wooden house that he built on the shore of Walden Pond, a small lake to the west of Boston, Massachusetts. Walden Pond is not a remote location—it is not out in the wilderness. It is on the edge of a small village, much like Moscow, Idaho. The concept of "traveling a good deal in Concord" is a kind of philosophical and psychological riddle. What does it mean to travel extensively in such a small place? The answer to this question is meaningful not only to teachers hoping to design writing classes in the spirit of Thoreau but to all who are interested in travel as an experience and in the literary genre of travel writing.

5 Much of Walden is an exercise in deftly establishing a playful and intellectually challenging system of synonyms, an array of words—"economy," "deliberateness," "simplicity," "dawn," "awakening," "higher laws," etc.—that all add up to powerful probing of what it means to live a mindful and attentive life in the world. "Travel" serves as a key, if subtle, metaphor for the mindful life—it is a metaphor and also, in a sense, a clue: if we can achieve the traveler's perspective without going far afield, then we might accomplish a kind of enlightenment. Thoreau's interest in mindfulness becomes clear in chapter two of Walden , "Where I Lived, and What I Lived For," in which he writes, "Morning is when I am awake and there is a dawn in me. To be awake is to be alive. I have never yet met a man who was quite awake. How could I have looked him in the face?" The latter question implies the author's feeling that he is himself merely evolving as an awakened individual, not yet fully awake, or mindful, in his efforts to live "a poetic or divine life" (90). Thoreau proceeds to assert that "We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical aids, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn…. I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by a conscious endeavor" (90). Just what this endeavor might be is not immediately spelled out in the text, but the author does quickly point out the value of focusing on only a few activities or ideas at a time, so as not to let our lives be "frittered away by detail." He writes: "Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; … and keep your accounts on your thumb nail" (91). The strong emphasis in the crucial second chapter of Walden is on the importance of waking up and living deliberately through a conscious effort to engage in particular activities that support such awakening. It occurs to me that "travel," or simply making one's way through town with the mindset of a traveler, could be one of these activities.

6 It is in the final chapter of the book, titled "Conclusion," that Thoreau makes clear the relationship between travel and living an attentive life. He begins the chapter by cataloguing the various physical locales throughout North America or around the world to which one might travel—Canada, Ohio, Colorado, and even Tierra del Fuego. But Thoreau states: "Our voyaging is only great-circle sailing, and the doctors prescribe for diseases of the skin merely. One hastens to Southern Africa to chase the giraffe; but surely that is not the game he would be after." What comes next is brief quotation from the seventeenth-century English poet William Habbington (but presented anonymously in Thoreau's text), which might be one of the most significant passages in the entire book:

Direct your eye sight inward, and you'll find A thousand regions in your mind Yet undiscovered. Travel them, and be Expert in home-cosmography. (320)

7 This admonition to travel the mysterious territory of one's own mind and master the strange cosmos of the self is actually a challenge to the reader—and probably to the author himself—to focus on self-reflection and small-scale, local movement as if such activities were akin to exploration on a grand, planetary scale. What is really at issue here is not the physical distance of one's journey, but the mental flexibility of one's approach to the world, one's ability to look at the world with a fresh, estranged point of view. Soon after his discussion of the virtues of interior travel, Thoreau explains why he left his simple home at Walden Pond after a few years of experimental living there, writing, "It is remarkable how easily and insensibly we fall into a particular route, and make a beaten track for ourselves" (323). In other words, no matter what we're doing in life, we can fall into a "beaten track" if we're not careful, thus failing to stay "awake."

8 As I thought about my writing class at the University of Idaho, I wondered how I might design a series of readings and writing exercises for university students that would somehow emulate the Thoreauvian objective of achieving ultra-mindfulness in a local environment. One of the greatest challenges in designing such a class is the fact that it took Thoreau himself many years to develop an attentiveness to his environment and his own emotional rhythms and an efficiency of expression that would enable him to describe such travel-without-travel, and I would have only sixteen weeks to achieve this with my own students. The first task, I decided, was to invite my students into the essential philosophical stance of the class, and I did this by asking my students to read the opening chapter of Walden ("Economy") in which he talks about traveling "a good deal" in his small New England village as well as the second chapter and the conclusion, which reveal the author's enthusiasm (some might even say obsession ) for trying to achieve an awakened condition and which, in the end, suggest that waking up to the meaning of one's life in the world might be best accomplished by attempting the paradoxical feat of becoming "expert in home-cosmography." As I stated it among the objectives for my course titled 36 Views of Moscow Mountain: Or, Traveling a Good Deal—with Open Minds and Notebooks—in a Small Place , one of our goals together (along with practicing nonfiction writing skills and learning about the genre of travel writing) would be to "Cultivate a ‘Thoreauvian' way of appreciating the subtleties of the ordinary world."

Windy. Elms Bare.

9 For me, the elegance and heightened sensitivity of Thoreau's engagement with place is most movingly exemplified in his journal, especially in the 1850s after he's mastered the art of observation and nuanced, efficient description of specific natural phenomena and environmental conditions. His early entries in the journal are abstract mini-essays on such topics as truth, beauty, and "The Poet," but over time the journal notations become so immersed in the direct experience of the more-than-human world, in daily sensory experiences, that the pronoun "I" even drops out of many of these records. Lawrence Buell aptly describes this Thoreauvian mode of expression as "self-relinquishment" (156) in his 1995 book The Environmental Imagination , suggesting such writing "question[s] the authority of the superintending consciousness. As such, it opens up the prospect of a thoroughgoing perceptual breakthrough, suggesting the possibility of a more ecocentric state of being than most of us have dreamed of" (144-45). By the time Thoreau wrote "Windy. Elms bare" (372) as his single entry for October 6 and 7, 1853, he had entered what we might call an "ecocentric zone of consciousness" in his work, attaining the ability to channel his complex perceptions of season change (including meteorology and botany and even his own emotional state) into brief, evocative prose.

10 I certainly do not expect my students to be able to do such writing after only a brief introduction to the course and to Thoreau's own methods of journal writing, but after laying the foundation of the Thoreauvian philosophy of nearby travel and explaining to my students what I call the "building blocks of the personal essay" (description, narration, and exposition), I ask them to engage in a preliminary journal-writing exercise that involves preparing five journal entries, each "a paragraph or two in length," that offer detailed physical descriptions of ordinary phenomena from their lives (plants, birds, buildings, street signs, people, food, etc.), emphasizing shape, color, movement or change, shadow, and sometimes sound, smell, taste, and/or touch. The goal of the journal entries, I tell the students, is to begin to get them thinking about close observation, vivid descriptive language, and the potential to give their later essays in the class an effective texture by balancing more abstract information and ideas with evocative descriptive passages and storytelling.

11 I am currently teaching this class, and I am writing this article in early September, as we are entering the fourth week of the semester. The students have just completed the journal-writing exercise and are now preparing to write the first of five brief essays on different aspects of Moscow that will eventually be braided together, as discrete sections of the longer piece, into a full-scale literary essay about Moscow, Idaho, from the perspective of a traveler. For the journal exercise, my students wrote some rather remarkable descriptive statements, which I think bodes well for their upcoming work. One student, Elizabeth Isakson, wrote stunning journal descriptions of a cup of coffee, her own feet, a lemon, a basil leaf, and a patch of grass. For instance, she wrote:

Steaming hot liquid poured into a mug. No cream, just black. Yet it appears the same brown as excretion. The texture tells another story with meniscus that fades from clear to gold and again brown. The smell is intoxicating for those who are addicted. Sweetness fills the nostrils; bitterness rushes over the tongue. The contrast somehow complements itself. Earthy undertones flower up, yet this beverage is much more satisfying than dirt. When the mug runs dry, specks of dark grounds remain swimming in the sunken meniscus. Steam no longer rises because energy has found a new home.

12 For the grassy lawn, she wrote:

Calico with shades of green, the grass is yellowing. Once vibrant, it's now speckled with straw. Sticking out are tall, seeding dandelions. Still some dips in the ground have maintained thick, soft patches of green. The light dances along falling down from the trees above, creating a stained-glass appearance made from various green shades. The individual blades are stiff enough to stand erect, but they will yield to even slight forces of wind or pressure. Made from several long strands seemingly fused together, some blades fray at the end, appearing brittle. But they do not simply break off; they hold fast to the blade to which they belong.

13 The point of this journal writing is for the students to look closely enough at ordinary reality to feel estranged from it, as if they have never before encountered (or attempted to describe) a cup of coffee or a field of grass—or a lemon or a basil leaf or their own body. Thus, the Thoreauvian objective of practicing home-cosmography begins to take shape. The familiar becomes exotic, note-worthy, and strangely beautiful, just as it often does for the geographical travel writer, whose adventures occur far away from where she or he normally lives. Travel, in a sense, is an antidote to complacency, to over-familiarity. But the premise of my class in Thoreauvian travel writing is that a slight shift of perspective can overcome the complacency we might naturally feel in our home surroundings. To accomplish this we need a certain degree of disorientation. This is the next challenge for our class.

The Blessing of Being Lost

14 Most of us take great pains to "get oriented" and "know where we're going," whether this is while running our daily errands or when thinking about the essential trajectories of our lives. We're often instructed by anxious parents to develop a sense of purpose and a sense of direction, if only for the sake of basic safety. But the traveler operates according to a somewhat different set of priorities, perhaps, elevating adventure and insight above basic comfort and security, at least to some degree. This certainly seems to be the case for the Thoreauvian traveler, or for Thoreau himself. In Walden , he writes:

…not until we are completely lost, or turned round,--for a man needs only be turned round once with his eyes shut in this world to be lost,--do we appreciate the vastness and strangeness of Nature. Every man has to learn the points of compass again as often as he awakes, whether from sleep or any abstraction. Not till we are lost, in other words, not till we have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves, and realize where we are and the infinite extent of our relations. (171)

15 I could explicate this passage at length, but that's not really my purpose here. I read this as a celebration of salutary disorientation, of the potential to be lost in such a way as to deepen one's ability to pay attention to oneself and one's surroundings, natural and otherwise. If travel is to a great degree an experience uniquely capable of triggering attentiveness to our own physical and psychological condition, to other cultures and the minds and needs of other people, and to a million small details of our environment that we might take for granted at home but that accrue special significance when we're away, I would argue that much of this attentiveness is owed to the sense of being lost, even the fear of being lost, that often happens when we leave our normal habitat.

16 So in my class I try to help my students "get lost" in a positive way. Here in Moscow, the major local landmark is a place called Moscow Mountain, a forested ridge of land just north of town, running approximately twenty kilometers to the east of the city. Moscow "Mountain" does not really have a single, distinctive peak like a typical mountain—it is, as I say, more of a ridge than a pinnacle. When I began contemplating this class on Thoreauvian travel writing, the central concepts I had in mind were Thoreau's notion of traveling a good deal in Concord and also the idea of looking at a specific place from many different angles. The latter idea is not only Thoreauvian, but perhaps well captured in the eighteen-century Japanese artist Katsushika Hokusai's series of woodblock prints known as 36 Views of Mt. Fuji , which offers an array of different angles on the mountain itself and on other landscape features (lakes, the sea, forests, clouds, trees, wind) and human behavior which is represented in many of the prints, often with Mt. Fuji in the distant background or off to the side. In fact, I imagine Hokusai's approach to representing Mt. Fuji as so important to the concept of this travel writing class that I call the class "36 Views of Moscow Mountain," symbolizing the multiple approaches I'll be asking my students to take in contemplating and describing not only Moscow Mountain itself, but the culture and landscape and the essential experience of Moscow the town. The idea of using Hokusai's series of prints as a focal point of this class came to me, in part, from reading American studies scholar Cathy Davidson's 36 Views of Mount Fuji: On Finding Myself in Japan , a memoir that offers sixteen short essays about different facets of her life as a visiting professor in that island nation.

17 The first of five brief essays my students will prepare for the class is what I'm calling a "Moscow Mountain descriptive essay," building upon the small descriptive journal entries they've written recently. In this case, though, I am asking the students to describe the shapes and colors of the Moscow Mountain ridge, while also telling a brief story or two about their observations of the mountain, either by visiting the mountain itself to take a walk or a bike ride or by explaining how they glimpse portions of the darkly forested ridge in the distance while walking around the University of Idaho campus or doing things in town. In preparation for the Moscow Mountain essays, we read several essays or book chapters that emphasize "organizing principles" in writing, often the use of particular landscape features, such as trees or mountains, as a literary focal point. For instance, in David Gessner's "Soaring with Castro," from his 2007 book Soaring with Fidel: An Osprey Odyssey from Cape Cod to Cuba and Beyond , he not only refers to La Gran Piedra (a small mountain in southeastern Cuba) as a narrative focal point, but to the osprey, or fish eagle, itself and its migratory journey as an organizing principle for his literary project (203). Likewise, in his essay "I Climb a Tree and Become Dissatisfied with My Lot," Chicago author Leonard Dubkin writes about his decision, as a newly fired journalist, to climb up a tree in Chicago's Lincoln Park to observe and listen to the birds that gather in the green branches in the evening, despite the fact that most adults would consider this a strange and inappropriate activity. We also looked at several of Hokusai's woodblock prints and analyzed these together in class, trying to determine how the mountain served as an organizing principle for each print or whether there were other key features of the prints—clouds, ocean waves, hats and pieces of paper floating in the wind, humans bent over in labor—that dominate the images, with Fuji looking on in the distance.

18 I asked my students to think of Hokusai's representations of Mt. Fuji as aesthetic models, or metaphors, for what they might try to do in their brief (2-3 pages) literary essays about Moscow Mountain. What I soon discovered was that many of my students, even students who have spent their entire lives in Moscow, either were not aware of Moscow Mountain at all or had never actually set foot on the mountain. So we spent half an hour during one class session, walking to a vantage point on the university campus, where I could point out where the mountain is and we could discuss how one might begin to write about such a landscape feature in a literary essay. Although I had thought of the essay describing the mountain as a way of encouraging the students to think about a familiar landscape as an orienting device, I quickly learned that this will be a rather challenging exercise for many of the students, as it will force them to think about an object or a place that is easily visible during their ordinary lives, but that they typically ignore. Paying attention to the mountain, the ridge, will compel them to reorient themselves in this city and think about a background landscape feature that they've been taking for granted until now. I think of this as an act of disorientation or being lost—a process of rethinking their own presence in this town that has a nearby mountain that most of them seldom think about. I believe Thoreau would consider this a good, healthy experience, a way of being present anew in a familiar place.

36 Views—Or, When You Invert Your Head

19 Another key aspect of Hokusai's visual project and Thoreau's literary project is the idea of changing perspective. One can view Mt. Fuji from 36 different points of views, or from thousands of different perspectives, and it is never quite the same place—every perspective is original, fresh, mind-expanding. The impulse to shift perspective in pursuit of mindfulness is also ever-present in Thoreau's work, particularly in his personal journal and in Walden . This idea is particularly evident, to me, in the chapter of Walden titled "The Ponds," where he writes:

Standing on the smooth sandy beach at the east end of the pond, in a calm September afternoon, when a slight haze makes the opposite shore line indistinct, I have seen whence came the expression, "the glassy surface of a lake." When you invert your head, it looks like a thread of finest gossamer stretched across the valley, and gleaming against the distinct pine woods, separating one stratum of the atmosphere from another. (186)

20 Elsewhere in the chapter, Thoreau describes the view of the pond from the top of nearby hills and the shapes and colors of pebbles in the water when viewed from close up. He chances physical perspective again and again throughout the chapter, but it is in the act of looking upside down, actually suggesting that one might invert one's head, that he most vividly conveys the idea of looking at the world in different ways in order to be lost and awakened, just as the traveler to a distant land might feel lost and invigorated by such exposure to an unknown place.

21 After asking students to write their first essay about Moscow Mountain, I give them four additional short essays to write, each two to four pages long. We read short examples of place-based essays, some of them explicitly related to travel, and then the students work on their own essays on similar topics. The second short essay is about food—I call this the "Moscow Meal" essay. We read the final chapter of Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma (2006), "The Perfect Meal," and Anthony Bourdain's chapter "Where Cooks Come From" in the book A Cook's Tour (2001) are two of the works we study in preparation for the food essay. The three remaining short essays including a "Moscow People" essay (exploring local characters are important facets of the place), a more philosophical essay about "the concept of Moscow," and a final "Moscow Encounter" essay that tells the story of a dramatic moment of interaction with a person, an animal, a memorable thing to eat or drink, a sunset, or something else. Along the way, we read the work of Wendell Berry, Joan Didion, Barbara Kingsolver, Kim Stafford, Paul Theroux, and other authors. Before each small essay is due, we spend a class session holding small-group workshops, allowing the students to discuss their essays-in-progress with each other and share portions of their manuscripts. The idea is that they will learn about writing even by talking with each other about their essays. In addition to writing about Moscow from various angles, they will learn about additional points of view by considering the angles of insight developed by their fellow students. All of this is the writerly equivalent of "inverting [their] heads."

Beneath the Smooth Skin of Place

22 Aside from Thoreau's writing and Hokusai's images, perhaps the most important writer to provide inspiration for this class is Indiana-based essayist Scott Russell Sanders. Shortly after introducing the students to Thoreau's key ideas in Walden and to the richness of his descriptive writing in the journal, I ask them to read his essay "Buckeye," which first appeared in Sanders's Writing from the Center (1995). "Buckeye" demonstrates the elegant braiding together of descriptive, narrative, and expository/reflective prose, and it also offers a strong argument about the importance of creating literature and art about place—what he refers to as "shared lore" (5)—as a way of articulating the meaning of a place and potentially saving places that would otherwise be exploited for resources, flooded behind dams, or otherwise neglected or damaged. The essay uses many of the essential literary devices, ranging from dialogue to narrative scenes, that I hope my students will practice in their own essays, while also offering a vivid argument in support of the kind of place-based writing the students are working on.

23 Another vital aspect of our work together in this class is the effort to capture the wonderful idiosyncrasies of this place, akin to the idiosyncrasies of any place that we examine closely enough to reveal its unique personality. Sanders's essay "Beneath the Smooth Skin of America," which we study together in Week 9 of the course, addresses this topic poignantly. The author challenges readers to learn the "durable realities" of the places where they live, the details of "watershed, biome, habitat, food-chain, climate, topography, ecosystem and the areas defined by these natural features they call bioregions" (17). "The earth," he writes, "needs fewer tourists and more inhabitants" (16). By Week 9 of the semester, the students have written about Moscow Mountain, about local food, and about local characters, and they are ready at this point to reflect on some of the more philosophical dimensions of living in a small academic village surrounded by farmland and beyond that surrounded by the Cascade mountain range to the West and the Rockies to the East. "We need a richer vocabulary of place" (18), urges Sanders. By this point in the semester, by reading various examples of place-based writing and by practicing their own powers of observation and expression, my students will, I hope, have developed a somewhat richer vocabulary to describe their own experiences in this specific place, a place they've been trying to explore with "open minds and notebooks." Sanders argues that

if we pay attention, we begin to notice patterns in the local landscape. Perceiving those patterns, acquiring names and theories and stories for them, we cease to be tourists and become inhabitants. The bioregional consciousness I am talking about means bearing your place in mind, keeping track of its condition and needs, committing yourself to its care. (18)

24 Many of my students will spend only four or five years in Moscow, long enough to earn a degree before moving back to their hometowns or journeying out into the world in pursuit of jobs or further education. Moscow will be a waystation for some of these student writers, not a permanent home. Yet I am hoping that this semester-long experiment in Thoreauvian attentiveness and place-based writing will infect these young people with both the bioregional consciousness Sanders describes and a broader fascination with place, including the cultural (yes, the human ) dimensions of this and any other place. I feel such a mindfulness will enrich the lives of my students, whether they remain here or move to any other location on the planet or many such locations in succession.

25 Toward the end of "Beneath the Smooth Skin of America," Sanders tells the story of encountering a father with two young daughters near a city park in Bloomington, Indiana, where he lives. Sanders is "grazing" on wild mulberries from a neighborhood tree, and the girls are keen to join him in savoring the local fruit. But their father pulls them away, stating, "Thank you very much, but we never eat anything that grows wild. Never ever." To this Sanders responds: "If you hold by that rule, you will not get sick from eating poison berries, but neither will you be nourished from eating sweet ones. Why not learn to distinguish one from the other? Why feed belly and mind only from packages?" (19-20). By looking at Moscow Mountain—and at Moscow, Idaho, more broadly—from numerous points of view, my students, I hope, will nourish their own bellies and minds with the wild fruit and ideas of this place. I say this while chewing a tart, juicy, and, yes, slightly sweet plum that I pulled from a feral tree in my own Moscow neighborhood yesterday, an emblem of engagement, of being here.

Bibliography

BUELL, Lawrence, The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture , Harvard University Press, 1995.

DAVIDSON, Cathy, 36 Views of Mount Fuji: On Finding Myself in Japan , Duke University Press, 2006.

DUBKIN, Leonard, "I Climb a Tree and Become Dissatisfied with My Lot." Enchanted Streets: The Unlikely Adventures of an Urban Nature Lover , Little, Brown and Company, 1947, 34-42.

GESSNER, David, Soaring with Fidel: An Osprey Odyssey from Cape Cod to Cuba and Beyond , Beacon, 2007.

ISAKSON, Elizabeth, "Journals." Assignment for 36 Views of Moscow Mountain (English 208), University of Idaho, Fall 2018.

SANDERS, Scott Russell, "Buckeye" and "Beneath the Smooth Skin of America." Writing from the Center , Indiana University Press, 1995, pp. 1-8, 9-21.

SLOVIC, Scott, "Teaching with Wolves", Western American Literature 52.3 (Fall 2017): 323-31.

THOREAU, Henry David, "October 1-20, 1853", Being in the World: An Environmental Reader for Writers , edited by Scott H. Slovic and Terrell F. Dixon, Macmillan, 1993, 371-75.

THOREAU, Henry David, Walden . 1854. Princeton University Press, 1971.

Bibliographical reference

Scott Slovic , “ 36 Views of Moscow Mountain: Teaching Travel Writing and Mindfulness in the Tradition of Hokusai and Thoreau ” ,  Caliban , 59 | 2018, 41-54.

Electronic reference

Scott Slovic , “ 36 Views of Moscow Mountain: Teaching Travel Writing and Mindfulness in the Tradition of Hokusai and Thoreau ” ,  Caliban [Online], 59 | 2018, Online since 01 June 2018 , connection on 10 February 2024 . URL : http://journals.openedition.org/caliban/3688; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/caliban.3688

About the author

Scott slovic.

University of Idaho Scott Slovic is University Distinguished Professor of Environmental Humanities at the University of Idaho, USA. The author and editor of many books and articles, he edited the journal ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment from 1995 to 2020. His latest coedited book is The Routledge Handbook of Ecocriticism and Environmental Communication  (2019).

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  • 60 | 2018 The Life of Forgetting in Twentieth- and Twenty-First-Century British Literature
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