Creative writing assignment: Add detail to a story

A lot of students write stories that don’t have enough detail. They’ll broadly describe an event in a boring, generic way and skip out on the juicy bits so that they don’t have to write as much.

Here’s a simple but effective creative writing assignment that can help students understand that details are important and interesting:

1. Give the students a general situation that isn’t too broad in scope.
Eg: You got home and had a huge argument with a family member.

2. Ask students to fill in the details: actions, thoughts, dialogue.
I strongly suggest that you make dialogue a requirement. Make sure they know how to use quotation marks. (Thoughts can be done in the same way, just without the quotation marks.)

3. Give them a minimum word count.
So that they don’t describe the event in two sentences.