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IB MYP Year 5 · Language & Literature · Unit 1: Creative Writing | Narrative Writing
📋 What You Will Learn
- Map the narrative arc — exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, and resolution — and use it deliberately to shape reader experience
- Choose and control narrative voice and point of view (first person, third person limited, third person omniscient, unreliable narrator) to match your story's purpose
- Build characters through indirect methods: action, dialogue, thought, and telling physical detail rather than flat description
- Write purposeful dialogue that advances plot, reveals character, and creates tension without padding
- Construct setting and atmosphere that works with — rather than against — the emotional arc of a scene
- Control pace and tension through sentence structure, paragraph length, and strategic withholding of information, and craft openings and endings that earn their place
- Apply "show, don't tell" consistently and understand when telling is the better craft choice
🔍 Guiding Question How do the structural and stylistic choices a writer makes — the angle of the camera, the rhythm of the sentences, the detail held back — shape what a reader feels, and what does that power mean for how you approach Criteria C and D?
🌍 Why This Matters Every story you have ever been moved by — a novel, a film, a bedtime story, a news feature that made you feel like you were there — succeeded because of deliberate craft. Narrative is how humans understand time, causation and consequence. The MYP creative writing assessment asks you to be a craftsperson, not just a storyteller: Criterion C rewards purposeful choices of content, structure, and style; Criterion D rewards controlled, precise, varied language. This note gives you the toolkit to earn marks in both — and to write something genuinely worth reading.
1 · The Narrative Arc: Story Shape and Structure
📖 Definition — Narrative Arc A narrative arc is the overarching shape of a story: the sequence of events that takes a character (and the reader) from a state of relative stability, through complication and crisis, to a new equilibrium — or, in tragedy, to ruin. It is not a formula but a framework: knowing the shape lets you bend it deliberately.
The most widely used model is Freytag's Pyramid , adapted for prose fiction. Think of it as five beats, each with a specific dramatic function:
| Beat | Function | Craft question to ask yourself |
|---|---|---|
| Exposition | Establishes the world, the protagonist, and the status quo — what the character's "normal" looks like before it is disrupted. | What does the reader need to know to care? What can I withhold to create intrigue? |
| Rising Action | A series of complications, obstacles, and escalating stakes that drive the protagonist toward a crisis point. | Is every scene making things harder? Am I raising the stakes with each complication? |
| Climax | The moment of highest tension — a decision, confrontation, or revelation — from which there is no going back. | Is this the inevitable consequence of everything before it? Does it force the protagonist to choose? |
| Falling Action | The consequences of the climactic decision play out; loose threads begin to resolve. | What has irrevocably changed? Who is paying the price? |
| Resolution | The new equilibrium — stable or unstable, hopeful or devastating. Often brief in literary fiction. | What do I want the reader to feel in the last line? Am I earning that feeling? |
📝 Note — short-story structure For MYP creative writing tasks (typically 500–800 words), you rarely have space for all five beats in full. Expert short-story writers often begin in medias res — in the middle of the action — folding exposition in as needed, and ending just after or even before the full resolution, trusting the reader to infer the rest. Chekhov's stories frequently end on the falling action; the climax itself goes unseen. That restraint is a craft choice, not an accident.
2 · Narrative Voice and Point of View
📖 Definition — Narrative Voice Narrative voice is the distinctive persona through which the story is told: its tone, register, attitude, and apparent relationship to the