WRITTING

A Story
LEVEL B1
What’s a story?
 What’s a story?
an account of imaginary or real people and events told for entertainment

Even-thought a story gives us lots of freedom when writing, stories need

an specific structure which makes sense to the reader.
 Parts of the story
• Title: The title should either summarise the whole story (without spoilers!) or
have something to do with the main theme.

• Exposition: This is the beginning of the story, where the characters and
setting are established. It serves as the introduction to the next part, the
action, and the so-called conflict of our story.

• Action: In this part, the characters deal with conflict and do things to solve it.

• Resolution: This is where the conflict is resolved and the story concludes with
an ending, normally without any loose ends.
Can you see the different
parts of the story?
 Expressions to use in
your story
• To begin:

• It all began…

• When I first…

• At the beginning…

• It was a hot/cold/… summer/winter/… day…

Expressions to use in
your story
• XX minutes
Time phrases
• While… later…

• Then…
• Meanwhile… • A moment later…

• After that…
• As… • Later (that
morning /
• Not long
afterwards…
• Some time later… afternoon / day /
night / …)
• A little later…
• As soon as….
•
 Expressions to use in
your story
• Creating suspense:

• Suddenly • Out of the blue

• Al of a sudden • Out of nowhere

• Without warning • Right away

• Just at that moment • Straight away

• Unexpectedly
 Expressions to use in
your story
• Finishing your story:

• In the end

• Finally • Luckily

• When it was all over • …

• Eventually

• After everything that happened

 Expressions to use in
your story
Direct speech

In every story there are characters and they usually interact with each other,
so it is always good if you know how to use direct speech, that is, reproduce
the words the characters actually say or think. The tricky bit about this is the
punctuation and the verbs to choose, because it’s good to use some verbs
other than “say”.
 Expressions to use in
your story
PAST SIMPLE, PAST CONTINUOUS AND PAST PERFECT

These are the most commonly used times in stories. In the example before
given, you can see how these three are repeatedly used.

! PLEASE AVOID A SIMPLE SUCCESSION OF PAST SIMPLE TENSES ALONE !