Write an original short story in which two children and their Grandfather are the main characters.

MODEL ANSWER (approximately 335 words)

THE SEEDS

Our grandfather had a theory about children, which was that they should be given work rather than presents, and my brother and I spent most of our childhood disagreeing with it.

The seeds arrived on a Thursday in June. He came back from the market with a paper packet, and Rohit and I crowded round him the way children do when a packet comes into a house, and he opened it with some ceremony and showed us forty or fifty small brown seeds.

I remember exactly what I felt, which was disappointment so sharp it was almost anger. We had wanted a cricket ball.

"You will help me sow them," he said, not looking up.

We helped him sow them. We did it badly and resentfully, and Rohit put his row in crooked on purpose. Then came the part that I now think was the whole point: he gave us the watering. Every evening, both of us, no exceptions.

For eleven days nothing happened at all. This is not in the version Rohit tells, but we stopped believing in the seeds by about day four, and watered the ground the way you say a prayer you have stopped meaning. Grandfather said nothing.

On the twelfth evening Rohit called me, and there was something in his voice, and I came round the corner of the house and he was crouching over the second row with his hands on his knees.

A green shoot, bent like a hairpin, pushing the soil up off its own back.

We ran inside shouting and dragged him out, and he came and looked at it for a long moment and then said only, "Hm," and went back in — and I understood years later that he was not being cold, he was letting us have it.

There are nine trees in that garden now. Grandfather has been gone four years. Rohit, who put his row in crooked, is a botanist.

WHAT THIS QUESTION SPECIFICALLY REQUIRES

THREE main characters are prescribed — two children AND their grandfather. All three must be MAIN characters. The grandfather in particular tends to become scenery, so give him a DECISION that drives the plot, as the seeds do here.

The natural shape of a story with a grandparent in it is that the OLD PERSON UNDERSTANDS SOMETHING the children do not, and that they only see it later. That is a reliable structure and it lets you end on a change of understanding rather than a change of events.

AVOID the two rehearsed plots: the grandfather who tells a moral story and dies, and the children who learn a lesson announced in the last line. Notice that this model never states its lesson at all — the final sentence about Rohit becoming a botanist does the work instead.

Keep to the past tense and punctuate dialogue correctly. FORMAT AND MARKS DIVISION: see "Composition — grade bands and marking" in the Writing Formats & Marking (Reference) chapter, along with the worked model for this composition type.

USE THIS AS A MODEL, NOT AS AN ANSWER TO MEMORISE. The question asks for an ORIGINAL composition, and every year examiners identify scripts reproduced from guide books; a memorised answer can be penalised for plagiarism and will in any case read as borrowed. Study this piece for its STRUCTURE — how it opens, how the paragraphs are ordered, where the required tasks are answered, how it ends — and then write your own, about your own school, your own family, your own town. Your own specific detail is worth more marks than anyone else’s polished sentence.