How to write a short story about school life: an example

When you write a story about school or school life, you have to think from the end. A short story is different from a novel that sometimes finds its own way when writing it; you need a plan and a structure that is almost complete, if you want it to be a good story.

Let’s take the example of an important action (for a short story, this is enough!): a 12-year-old boy has been expelled from his school. The question is how to make an exciting and understandable story that ends with this negative event.

This is the time to build a flow of action that leads to your exclusion. Of course, it means that you think the story from its end, but you write it from the beginning. Use your experience and your fantasy to find reasons or reasons why such a young child could be excluded from his school.

You know some core elements and patterns that can lead to it: very bad behavior, being absent many times without excuse, poor performance and bad grades, destroying something and other serious problems. You have to look for really serious aspects, otherwise the story cannot be logical or understandable for the readers.

Imagine a class conference with all the teachers and the principal where they talked about just this one child. What did they say there? How did the teachers judge him? Were they looking for clues to improve? Was it a matter of sympathy? What was the opinion of the head teacher? Was there a teacher who claimed that he was wrong to send him home forever?

Try to look for other facts in your situation, in your life. Teachers will usually be right when they find a student’s or pupil’s behavior intolerable. But I think an author’s task is to look at things behind the visible action. How are your conditions at home? Does he have friends who play with him, help him? How do his brothers act towards him?

Maybe you can find some serious problems in the family or in your daily life beyond school. Perhaps his father is an alcoholic, his mother a drug addict, or her best friend was killed in a car accident? Perhaps he is very unhappy with a problem that he cannot solve on his own?

By addressing this underlying question, an author of a school story can help explain a student’s problem behavior and poor performance, without simply blaming someone. Therefore, the focus can be set on solving a problem, even if the story only makes the problem visible.

If these relevant aspects are part of your plan, you can write the story, no matter where you start: with the exclusion of the boy, with the class conference or with the decisive reason for his misery. Now you can write a success story!