Story Mountains

Everyone needs a route map, whether it's Hillary and Tenzing climbing Mount Everest or an English candidate writing a story. One of the ways of planning a story is to create a story mountain, with each stage of the tale labelled on the diagram. The drawing doesn't have to be any more than a big triangle, but the five stages help to provide a good structure.

The story mountain is only part of the process, however. Even before the exam, you could invent two or three interesting characters to use or practise telling a particular story - perhaps an old fairy tale in a modern setting. It's always good to be prepared, and it's too late by the time you sit down in the exam hall.

If you're taking an 11+ or 13+ English paper, you should have around half an hour left for the composition after doing the reading comprehension. The routine to follow includes choosing the right question, brainstorming ideas, creating the story mountain, writing the story and checking your work afterwards. Depending on total length of the exam, you should plan to leave yourself a set amount of time for each stage (shown in brackets, assuming you have a total of 30 minutes)

Choose the right question (less than 1 minute). Sometimes you won't be given a choice, but you will always have different options in a proper 11+ English exam. One might be a descri ption (often based on a drawing or photograph), and another might be an essay on a factual subject, but there will always be the chance to write a story, either based on a suggested title or in the form of a continuation of the passage from the reading comprehension. The important thing here is to try to find a topic you know a bit about and - in an ideal world - something you'd enjoy writing about. If you you've never ridden a horse, it would be pointless trying to write a story all about horseracing!

Brainstorm ideas (5 minutes). Some pupils go straight into writing the story at this point. The story might occasionally be quite good, but the danger is that you don't give yourself the chance to come up with the best possible ideas, and you certainly won't make it easy for yourself to structure it when you don't have a plan to help you. Whether in business or at school, the best way of coming up with ideas is to spend some time brainstorming. That means coming up with as many ideas as possible in a limited time. There's no such thing as a bad idea, so try to think positively rather than crossing out anything you don't like. It takes time to come up with well thought-through ideas for a story, so you might not think of more than a couple, but that at least gives you the chance to pick the better one. If you're having trouble, think about the different elements you can change: the plot, the characters, the setting, the period and the genre. Those are the basics, and imagining a particularly good character or setting might just provide the clue you're looking for, and you can always change what kind of story it is - a thriller will look a lot different from a romance or a comedy!

Create a story mountain (5 minutes). Once you've decided on an idea, you can create your story mountain. You don't actually have to draw a mountain or a triangle, but you do need to map out the five main stages of the story. You don't need to write full sentences, just notes that are long enough to remind you of your ideas.

Opening (or introduction) The best way to open a story is probably to start 'in the middle'. Most fairy stories start with something like 'Once upon a time, there lived a beautiful princess locked up in a tower.' and go on to describe the characters and their situations. The trouble with starting like this with what's called the 'exposition' is that it's a bit boring! Nothing actually happens. Far better to think of the most exciting moment in your story and start there. Why can't the same story begin with a kiss (or the handsome prince falling to his death from the balcony)? Once you've written a paragraph or so describing this scene, then you can move on to introduce the main characters, what they're trying to do, where they live, when the story is set and so on.

Build-up (or rising action) The build-up should describe what the main character is trying to do. Is he or she robbing a bank, escaping from prison or fighting off an alien invasion? Problem (or climax) Every story needs drama, which essentially means conflict. If you know what the hero's goal is, you can present an obstacle that gets in the way. That might be a guard drawing his gun or a prison warder spotting the escaping convicts. Whatever it is, it's a problem that needs to be solved.

Solution (or falling action) The solution to the problem is what the hero tries to do to fix it. It may not work, but it's usually the best option available. Outcome (or ending) Not many 11-year-old boys like happy endings, so the plan doesn't always have to come off! If you want your hero to die in a hail of bullets like Butch and Sundance, that's up to you.

Write the story (15 minutes). Stick to the plan. The most important thing to remember is to stick to the plan! It's very tempting to get carried away when you're writing and follow wherever your imagination leads you, but the downside is that your story probably won't have a proper beginning, middle and end, and you might run out of time trying to get the plot back on track. The Three Ds. You should also strike a balance between the Three Ds: Drama, Descri ption and Dialogue. Every story has a plot, so drama will always be there, but a lot of pupils focus so much on what's happening that there is very little if any descri ption or dialogue. Readers want to imagine what people look like and how they feel, so you have to give them something to go on. People also generally have a lot to say when they get emotional or find themselves in tough situations, so you won't be able to capture that unless they talk to one another in your story. Vocabulary. This is also a chance to show off your vocabulary. Including a few 'wow words' (or 'golden words') such as 'annihilate' instead of 'destroy' will impress the examiner no end - as long as you know how to spell them!

Check your work (4-5 minutes).If there's one tip that beats all the rest, it's 'Check your work'. However old you are and whatever you're doing, you should never finish a task before checking what you've done. However boring or annoying it is, you'll always find at least one mistake and therefore at least one way in which you can make things better. In the case of 11+ or 13+ exams, the most important thing is to test candidates' imagination and ability to write an interesting story, but spelling and grammar is still important. Schools have different marking policies. Some don't explicitly mark you down (although a rash of mistakes won't leave a very good impression!); some create a separate pot of 10 marks for spelling and grammar to add to the overall total; and some take marks off the total directly - even if you wrote a good story. Either way, it pays to make sure you've done your best to avoid silly mistakes. If you think you won't have time to check, that's entirely up to you. You'll almost certainly gain more marks in the last five minutes by correcting your work than trying to answer one more question, so it makes sense to reserve that time for checking. If you do that, there are a few simple things to look out for. You may want to make a quick checklist and tick each item off one by one.

Spelling. This is the main problem that most Common Entrance candidates face, but there are ways in which you can improve your spelling. Firstly, you can look out for any obvious mistakes and correct them. It can help to go through each answer backwards a word at a time so that you don't just see what you expect to see. Secondly, you can check if a word appears anywhere in the text or in the question. If it does, you can simply copy it over. Finally, you can choose another simpler word - if you're not quite sure how to spell a word, it's sometimes better not to take the risk.

Capital letters. This should be easy, but candidates often forget about checking capitals in the rush to finish. Proper nouns, sentences and abbreviations should all start with capital letters. If you know you often miss out capital letters or put them where you don't belong, you can at least check the beginning of every sentence to make sure it starts with a capital.

Punctuation. This simply means any marks on the page other than letters and numbers, eg full-stops, commas, quotation marks, apostrophes and question marks. Commas give almost everybody problems, but you can at least check there is a full-stop at the end of every sentence.

Other grammar. It's always useful to read through your story to make sure everything makes sense. It's very easy to get distracted first time round, but it's usually possible to spot silly mistakes like missing letters or missing words on a second reading.