If you are going to write the story question, here is how to do it properly

Yesterday’s post made the case for choosing the story question over the description. A number of you got in touch to say you had already committed to the story, or that the post had persuaded you to switch, and could I now explain how to write a good story. This is that post is for you.

A few things to establish before we get into the substance of it. Question 5 is worth 40 marks: 24 of those marks are awarded for content and organisation, meaning the quality and creativity of what you write and how you structure it, and 16 are awarded for technical accuracy, meaning spelling, punctuation, grammar and sentence control. Together this makes Question 5 worth more marks than Questions 1, 2, 3 and 4 combined. It deserves more of your preparation time than most students give it, and it deserves more of your exam time than most students allocate to it. Aim for 45 minutes. Plan for five minutes first. Write for 35. Spend the final five minutes proofreading with attention. This is the timing framework. Everything else sits inside it.

 

The opening

The single most consequential decision you make in this question is your first sentence, and the single most common error is making that first sentence a cliché. Examiners have read thousands of stories that begin with rain, with a character waking up, with a variation on the phrase “it was a dark and stormy night.” These openings signal, within three words, that the student has reached for the most familiar idea available to them rather than making a creative choice. The examiner will then unconsciously drops to a lower band before the second line has been read.

The principle that should govern your opening is this: start where the interest already is. You are writing a story opening, which means your job is to create immediate forward momentum, a sense that something is already underway or is about to become significant. This can be achieved through action already in progress, through a first-person voice that carries personality and implies a specific perspective on the world, through a detail so particular and unexpected that it makes the reader curious, or through a single line of dialogue that implies a situation without explaining it. What it should never be is a scene-setting paragraph that politely introduces the weather before anything happens. Weather as an opener tells the examiner that you have run out of ideas before you have started.

Consider the difference between these two openings for the same prompt. “It was raining heavily as Clara walked down the empty street.” 

Against: “The door was already open when I arrived. Just enough to let the cold in.” The second creates tension without announcing that it is doing so. It raises questions rather than providing information. The examiner leans forward. That is what you are aiming for.

Voice and the discipline of consistency

One of the most underappreciated aspects of the mark scheme for content and organisation is what it rewards under the word “control.” The Band 4 descriptors are looking for writing that feels and gives the impression of an author who has made choices rather than simply produced words. The most reliable way to demonstrate this kind of control is to choose a voice and hold it consistently throughout the piece.

Decide before you write whether you are writing in first or third person, and stay there. Decide on your tonal register, whether your narrator is wry and detached or urgent and frightened or measured and observant, and sustain it. Students who begin in a haunted, melancholic register and then allow the prose to become chatty and colloquial halfway through the second paragraph signal to the examiner that the voice was accidental rather than chosen. The mark scheme has a word for writing that feels accidental. That word is “inconsistent,” and inconsistency caps your mark.

This consistency of voice extends to tense. Shifts between past and present tense, unless they are clearly purposeful and structurally significant, read as errors rather than as technique. Decide your tense in your planning five minutes and maintain it.

Character

One of the clearest distinctions between a Band 3 and a Band 4 story opening is what the student does with character. The weaker response tends to describe the character, to tell the reader what they look like and feel and want. The stronger response shows the character through the choices they make, the things they notice, the way they speak, and the specific texture of their inner thought.

“She was nervous” tells the examiner something. “She had checked the lock three times before she realised she had left her keys inside” shows the same thing with infinitely more precision and craft. This is the principle of implication over declaration, and it is the primary quality that separates the upper bands from the middle ones. You should be suspicious of any moment in your writing where you are directly telling the reader how a character feels, and you should ask yourself whether the same information could be conveyed through action, dialogue, or a specific observed detail instead.

Dialogue, used well, is one of the most efficient tools available to you in a story opening. A former Eduqas chief examiner once observed that dialogue can “lift” a passage significantly, and the same principle holds across AQA marking. The condition is that the dialogue must do something. It must reveal character, generate tension, or advance the situation. “Want this?” conveys more about a character’s disposition than three sentences of direct description would. What dialogue must NEVER do is fill space. Two characters explaining context to each other in an exam answer reads as exactly that: two characters explaining context to each other in an exam answer. The reader, and the examiner, will notice.

Vocabulary: the problem the chief examiner called “contrived”

AQA’s chief examiners have, across multiple years of published guidance, identified a recurring vocabulary problem in the upper-middle bands. Students who have been taught that ambitious and extensive vocabulary earns marks frequently arrive at the exam with a bank of words they are determined to use regardless of whether those words fit the sentence they are placed in. The chief examiner’s term for this habit is “contrived.” It means the writing is visibly constructed around impressive words rather than the impressive words emerging naturally from the writing. Examiners recognise contrivance immediately, and it costs marks rather than earning them.

The principle you should follow is precision over impressiveness. A word that fits its sentence exactly, that captures the specific shade of meaning you are after, is worth considerably more than a word that is longer or rarer but sits awkwardly in the surrounding prose. “The smell hit me first: damp brick and something sweet that had no right to be there” is more effective than almost any sentence constructed to showcase vocabulary. Use the best word available to you that you are genuinely confident deploying. Use the thesaurus during revision, to build your range. Do not open the thesaurus in the exam, because the words you find there will sit on the page like guests at a party they were never invited to.

Technical accuracy

Sixteen marks are available for technical accuracy, and most students under-recover from this pool. The examiner guidance across multiple years makes the same observations. Many students write far more than they can sustain with accuracy, allowing grammar and punctuation to deteriorate across the later pages as they attempt to reach a perceived minimum length. Three paragraphs of controlled, technically secure writing will outscore six paragraphs of ambitious but deteriorating prose. Quality governs quantity here, and the mark scheme is explicit on this point.

There are two technical accuracy errors that appear so frequently across exam years that they warrant individual attention. The first is the confusion between “its” and “it’s”: the former indicates possession, the latter contracts “it is” or “it has.” Students who know this make fewer errors across the entire paper. The second is the management of sentence boundaries: full stops and capital letters placed correctly, clauses that are subordinated rather than strung together with repeated “and” conjunctions. Secure sentence control is the foundation upon which every other technical feature is built.

Punctuation beyond the full stop and the comma should be used only where you are confident it is correct. A semicolon deployed accurately signals a level of grammatical sophistication that earns marks. A semicolon deployed incorrectly signals the reverse.

Structure and what a story opening actually needs

Because the 2026 format removes the obligation to write a complete story, you are freed from one of the most persistent sources of structural failure in this question, which was the rushed and unconvincing resolution written in the final five minutes of the exam. What you are writing instead is an opening, and an opening has a specific structural logic.

It establishes a world. It introduces a perspective, whether a character’s voice, a specific observer, or a closely focussed point of view. It generates a question or a tension that the reader is compelled to pursue. And it ends in a place that implies the story is beginning rather than concluding, that there is more to be revealed, that the reader has been positioned at the threshold of something significant. You do not need to resolve anything. You need to make the examiner wish they could turn the page. That is the entire structural ambition of a story opening, and it is achievable in three to four well-controlled paragraphs.

Plan those paragraphs before you write. Decide your opening image or action, your character’s voice or situation, the tension or question that will run through the piece, and the final note you want to leave the reader on. Five minutes of planning produces substantially better writing than launching at the prompt unguided. The plan itself earns no marks, but the structural coherence it produces earns a great many.

Tonight’s masterclass

There is a great deal more to say about this question than a single Substack post allows. If you want to see exactly how the mark scheme works and leave with a writing framework you can use in any paper, the masterclass is where that work happens.

The Night Before Masterclass runs tonight from 5pm to 8pm.

In three hours, we will:

✅ Walkthrough of every question on the new-format AQA Language Paper 1 exam
✅ Get a Language Paper 1 framework to help you answer ALL five questions
✅ Get guidance on what examiners are looking for
✅ Timing strategies for the full paper
✅ Model answers to revise from
✅ The full lesson recording to rewatch before bed

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