AQA Paper 1 Creative Writing
Forty marks - a quarter of the whole qualification - for one piece of writing in about forty-five minutes. It is the most improvable question on either paper, and the one most often left the least time.
Original RCF practice material
Every prompt, example and model answer on this page was written by RCF English. They are not AQA questions and no AQA mark scheme wording is reproduced. AQA's own materials are linked on the papers page.
Paper 1 Question 5 is worth 40 marks: 24 for content and organisation (AO5) and 16 for technical accuracy (AO6). You choose between writing a description suggested by a picture and writing the opening part of a story. AQA advises about 45 minutes for Section B.
What the 40 marks are for
| Marks | Objective | What it rewards |
|---|---|---|
| 24 | AO5 - content and organisation | Communicating clearly and imaginatively; choosing tone, style and register to suit form, purpose and audience; organising the whole piece so it holds together |
| 16 | AO6 - technical accuracy | A range of vocabulary and sentence structures used for effect, with accurate spelling and punctuation |
Sixteen marks for accuracy is a fifth of the paper
AQA states that AO6 must account for 20% of the marks for the whole qualification. On this question it is 16 of the 40. That is more than Paper 1 Question 2 and Question 3 combined. Five minutes of checking at the end is the best-paid five minutes on the paper.
The method: 45 minutes, four stages
Choose in 60 seconds (RCF recommendation)
Description or narrative. Choose the one you have practised, not the one that looks easier. If you cannot picture an ending, do not choose the story.
Plan for 5 minutes
For a description: five things you will describe, in a deliberate order. For a narrative: the situation, the change, and the last line. Knowing the last line before you start is what keeps a story from wandering.
Write for 35 minutes
Aim for four to six paragraphs and roughly one and a half to two sides. Vary paragraph length deliberately: a one-sentence paragraph after three long ones lands hard.
Check for 5 minutes
Not for better words - for accuracy. Sentence boundaries, verb tenses, apostrophes, spelling of the words you used most. This is the AO6 sweep.
Description: the structure that stops it drifting
A description has no plot, so it needs a shape imposed on it or it becomes a list of adjectives. The most reliable shape is a camera movement: start wide, narrow to one detail, then pull back out.
A five-part frame
- Wide. The whole scene in two or three sentences.
- Closer. One area of it, with sound and temperature as well as sight.
- One detail. A single small object or movement, described at length. This is where the best writing usually happens.
- A person, or the absence of one. Even a description benefits from something that can change.
- Back out. Return to the wide view, altered by what we have just looked at closely.
Worked example: the closing two paragraphs of a description (original RCF)
On the third step from the bottom someone had left a single glove, palm upwards, fingers slightly curled, as though it had been dropped mid-gesture. It had been there long enough for the dust to settle into the creases and turn them grey. Nobody had moved it. Nobody, in a building of four hundred people, had thought it was theirs to move.
From the top of the stairwell the whole hall was visible again - the folded chairs, the long windows, the light going yellow along the far wall - and it looked exactly as it had ten minutes earlier, except that now it looked like a place where things got left.
Narrative: opening part, not whole story
AQA's specimen paper asks for the opening part of a story. That instruction is a gift, and students routinely ignore it by cramming in a twist ending. You are not being asked to finish anything.
- Start in the middle of something. A character already doing, already deciding, already too late.
- One change. An opening needs a single thing to become different, not a plot.
- Withhold. Tell the reader less than you know. A withheld fact is the cheapest tension available.
- End on a line that opens. Not a resolution - a direction. Compare the ending of the extract on the Paper 1 questions page, where a character decides one thing and does another.
- Two characters at most. Forty-five minutes cannot hold more.
Original RCF model answer: the opening of a story
Question: Write the opening part of a story about a place that has been left empty. (Original RCF practice task, in the style of Paper 1 Question 5.)
The keys still worked. That was the first thing, and Dara stood in the doorway for a moment holding them and feeling faintly cheated, as though a house left standing for six years ought to have had the decency to change its locks.
Inside, the hall smelled of nothing at all. She had expected damp, or the sweetish smell of a place that has been shut; instead there was an absence, thin and clean, like the inside of a jar. Her footsteps were louder than they should have been. She put them down more carefully after that, which she recognised as ridiculous even while she was doing it.
The kitchen was the room she had promised herself she would not go into first, so she went into it first. The table was where it had been. Someone - and there had only ever been one someone - had left a cup upside down on the draining board, and the ring of dust around its rim showed that it had been washed, dried and set down deliberately, by a person who intended to come back for it.
Dara looked at the cup for a long time.
Then she went out to the car for the boxes, and left the front door standing open behind her, because she had decided on the drive up that she would not be the kind of person who crept about in her own house, and it seemed important to start as she meant to go on.
Why this answer works
- Organisation (AO5). Five paragraphs, each shorter or longer than the last on purpose. The four-word paragraph - Dara looked at the cup for a long time - carries the emotional weight precisely because everything around it is longer.
- Content (AO5). One change only: a woman enters a house. No twist, no plot. The interest is entirely in what she notices and what she refuses to notice.
- Withholding. We are never told who left, or why. "There had only ever been one someone" is the whole of the backstory, and it works because it is a fragment.
- Range (AO6). Sentence forms vary from a three-word opening to a fifty-word closing sentence. The simile - like the inside of a jar - is unusual but concrete, which is what earns range marks rather than reaching for a longer word.
- The last line opens rather than closes, which is exactly what the opening part of a story asks for.
Question 5 checklist
- Did I plan for five minutes before writing?
- Does my piece have a deliberate shape - a beginning, a shift and an ending I chose in advance?
- Have I varied paragraph length, including at least one very short one?
- Have I varied sentence openings, so that not every sentence starts with the subject?
- Have I used punctuation beyond the full stop - a colon, a semicolon, a dash - correctly?
- Did I spend the last five minutes checking accuracy rather than adding words?
- For a narrative: is this an opening, not a complete story with a twist?
Creative writing at GCSE
Do this
- Describe one thing at length rather than five things briefly.
- Use concrete nouns. A glove is worth more than various items.
- Let one short sentence do the emotional work.
- Reread the last five words of each paragraph - they carry more weight than the first five.
- Write about somewhere you can actually picture.
Avoid this
- Do not end with and then I woke up, or with a twist that cancels the piece.
- Do not open with an alarm clock, and do not describe a character looking in a mirror.
- Do not use a long word you are unsure how to spell - AO6 is 16 marks.
- Do not write dialogue for its own sake; it eats time and rarely earns range marks.
- Do not describe the picture prompt literally, item by item. It is suggested by the picture.
Questions about Paper 1 Question 5
How long should my GCSE creative writing answer be?
There is no set length. In the 45 minutes AQA advises for Section B, most students who plan for five minutes and check for five produce between one and a half and two sides. Quality of organisation and accuracy are marked; word count is not.
Is description or narrative easier?
Neither is marked more generously - both are assessed on the same 24 and 16 marks. Description suits students who can hold a shape without a plot; narrative suits students who can resist finishing the story. Choose the one you have practised.
Do I have to describe the picture exactly?
No. The task is to write a description suggested by the picture, so the image is a starting point rather than a subject to inventory. A piece that begins in the picture and moves somewhere of its own is entirely acceptable.
How much do spelling and punctuation actually matter?
A great deal: 16 of the 40 marks are for technical accuracy, and AQA requires this objective to be 20% of the marks for the whole qualification. A well-shaped piece with weak accuracy loses more than students expect.
Next
Paper 1 question by question
Questions 1 to 4 with methods and worked examples.
Paper 2 viewpoint writing
The other 40-mark writing task.
Common mistakes
What costs the most marks on both papers.