Short story - English B1

•  Your English teacher has asked you to write a story.
• Your story must begin with this sentence:

"I felt nervous when the phone rang."

• Write your story on your answer sheet.

Some tips:

How to start a story: 

• It all began...
• When I first saw....
• At the beginning....
• It was a hot/cold summer/winter day...

Just to be clear, these are only some simple examples which you can use, as there is no right or wrong way to start a story.

Time phrases:

One of the great differences between writing a letter, essay, article, and so on, and writing a story is the need to pay careful attention to the time over which the story develops. In order to define the order of events in the story, we must use time expressions or time phrases:

• Then
• After that
• Not long afterwards
• As soon as
• While
• Meanwhile
• Some time later
• ____ minutes later
• Later
• Just then

Creating suspense:

When writing a story, the aim is not to inform or to convey information; the real purpose is to entertain the reader, just like when you read a novel. A cool way to entertain is to create suspense, which we can do by using some of the following expressions:

• Suddenly
• All of a suden
• Without warning
• Just at that moment
• Unexpectedly

Finishing your story:

This paragraph, the resolution, should be separated from the rest, and it's a good idea to start with one of the following expressions:

• In the end
• Finally
• When it was all over
• Eventually
• After everything that happened
• Luckily

Verb tenses:

One of the reasons why stories are particularly challenging for B1 students is that they tend to take place in the past, which makes it necessary to use a range of past tenses appropiately. The main three past tenses you should really try to use are the following:

• Past simple (-ed/irregular form)
• Past continuous
• Past perfect

Examples: It was midnight and I was trying to sleep. // I had completely forgotten it was my birthday.