On the evening of May 22nd 2025, a spirited group of MA Creative Writing and Education students and other writers gathered at Goldsmiths to learn from Pete Hobbs, novelist and long-standing First Story writer-in-residence. It was one of those sessions that quietly revolutionises your teaching practice. Over two hours, Pete shared not only a treasure trove of exercises but also distilled seventeen years of working with young writers in disadvantaged schools into a clear, passionate pedagogy. Below are seven key takeaways from his talk and our collective reflections that evening.
1. Creative Writing as Play, Not Performance
Pete began the session with a disarmingly honest admission: “I spend my days failing daily.” It was a sentiment that set the tone for everything that followed. In the First Story approach, creative writing is less about polished perfection and more about the joy of experimenting—of trying things out without fear of getting it “wrong.” This ethos, Pete explained, is grounded in the understanding that “humans and mammals… learn greatly through play.” Writing becomes a form of imaginative play, a safe space where the stakes are lowered and the possibilities widened.
One classic First Story exercise Pete shared was the “childhood senses” activity, where students close their eyes and revisit a place they knew well at around the age of ten—first through sight, then touch, sound, and finally taste and smell. They write short bursts after each sensory immersion. The goal isn’t to craft a complete narrative but to allow authentic memory and detail to emerge without overthinking. As Pete explained, this task “moves the goalposts”—redirecting attention away from narrative construction and towards focused recall. The writing that emerges often surprises students with its vividness and emotional truth. As Pete put it, “The work of imagination is done with your eyes closed; the writing should feel like it comes for free.”
Pedagogically, this exercise encourages mindfulness and helps students discover that their own lived experience is rich with story. It fosters confidence and primes them to value specificity and sensory detail—skills foundational to compelling writing.
2. Language as Ownership, Not Obedience
For many students, school writing has always meant code-switching—leaving their everyday voices at the door in favour of a more “acceptable” register. Pete Hobbs gently but purposefully overturns that paradigm. “There isn’t some standard language,” he reminded us. “The English language belongs to them.” In a First Story workshop, linguistic play is not only allowed—it’s essential. Students are encouraged to use their real speech rhythms, idioms, slang, and multilingual heritage as the foundation for their writing, not something to be corrected out.
This emphasis on ownership rather than obedience frees students from the performance of sounding “literary” or “correct.” As Pete noted, many students have absorbed the idea that writing creatively means adopting a voice that isn’t theirs—one filled with grandiose words or ornate constructions. But that kind of voice, Pete argues, often masks rather than reveals what a writer really wants to say. “What I’m trying to do is give them permission,” he said. “Permission to sound like themselves.”
One exercise he described involved writing the same short scene twice: once in “formal” English and once in the language the student would use with a friend. The effect is often profound. Not only does the second version flow more naturally, but it also brims with personality, urgency, and truth. “They suddenly see,” Pete explained, “that the way they speak can be the way they write.”
This has deep implications for equity in education. When students are invited to write in their own voices, they are also invited to value their own experiences, communities, and cultural references. It is a quiet but powerful act of inclusion.
What Pete offers is not about flattening difference. It’s about recognising that difference as a source of creative strength. The goal isn’t to eliminate register awareness—it’s to develop it consciously, with confidence. As Pete put it: “Once they realise they can own the language, that it’s theirs to spend how they want, they write with a different kind of energy. They write like they mean it.”
3. Write What You Know – With Precision
One of the session’s most memorable lines came not from Pete himself, but from a student in a workshop run by the author, and founder of First Story, William Fiennes: “as cold as the metal railings outside 5B.” It emerged during an exercise where students are asked to rewrite clichés using details from their own lives. Rather than relying on tired similes like “as cold as ice,” students are prompted to ask: cold like what? Cold like something you have touched?
This simple yet profound shift—from stock phrase to personal precision—marks a turning point in many young writers’ understanding of language. For Pete, this line was revelatory. “It instantly gives you a character who’s been stood outside 5B many times,” he explained. “You have a sense of their relationship to that space… suddenly stories are flooding into that image.” It’s no longer a generic comparison. It’s a portal into a world.
This example encapsulates so much of what First Story’s approach seeks to achieve: helping students realise that their everyday lives are filled with powerful narrative potential. That “5B” becomes a marker of place, emotion, and memory—maybe it’s where a student was routinely sent for misbehaviour, or where they waited nervously for a friend, or where they felt cold and alone at breaktime. Whatever the story, that single image is charged with meaning. As Pete put it, “You just want to zoom in. Which railings? Where? Tell me more about those railings.”
In pedagogical terms, the moment represents a shift from abstraction to embodiment, from imitation to observation. It moves the student from an inherited literary voice to their own. Crucially, it also demonstrates how writing rooted in concrete, textured detail can transcend the personal and become universally resonant. Everyone knows the feeling of cold—but “outside 5B” makes it tangible, real, and narratively alive.
This kind of detail is what Pete calls “the gateway to story.” It’s through precise observation that students gain access to truth, to character, and ultimately to narrative structure—without ever needing to “tell” the story directly. They show it. They feel it. And they begin to believe that their lives, in all their granular specificity, are worthy of being written.
Pete emphasised that when students are encouraged to write what they know—not in the abstract, but in specific, observed detail—something remarkable happens. “The more specific a story is, the more universal it becomes,” he said, echoing Frank Cottrell Boyce. Instead of defaulting to overwrought clichés—bottomless pits of despair, blinding rays of light—students begin to anchor their stories in their own lived realities. They shift from exposition to evocation, and in doing so, they write in ways that resonate.
A related exercise Pete shared was the “everyday metaphor” task. Students start by listing clichés, then replace them with original comparisons drawn from their real environments. The pedagogical goal here is twofold: it fosters metaphorical thinking rooted in authenticity, and it shifts students’ attention from “writing a story” to noticing the world around them.
Pete is clear that this doesn’t preclude fiction or fantasy. Rather, he sees the turn to realism as a powerful entry point. “If they describe a real character first,” he said, “they’ll know what good writing sounds like. And if their fictional characters don’t sound like that—something’s gone wrong.” It’s a way of grounding young writers before they take flight.
4. Exercises that Move the Goalposts
For students paralysed by the blank page, Pete doesn’t offer lectures on technique. He gives them problems to solve—playful, generative constraints that shift their focus from content to process. “I want to give them tasks that occupy their brains in other ways,” he explained. “The writing should feel like it comes for free.”
One standout example was the “constraint-based description” game, where each student is given a location and a linguistic rule: write without adjectives, or without the letter “e,” or only using one-syllable words. Far from being restrictive, these limitations spark surprising originality. One student’s piece—composed entirely of one-syllable words—was arrestingly rhythmic and vivid. Another, written without using the letter “e,” conjured a café scene that was rich in texture despite the missing vowel. “You wouldn’t think it was possible,” Pete noted, “but it forces them to invent.”
Another example: the “describe a place through questions” task. This exercise not only sidesteps the pressure of exposition but also invites character and voice to emerge through interrogation. As one student wrote of a bleak coastal town: “Why do I love the emptiness and bleakness of this place? Who else loves this salty-smelling terrain except the birds?” These were not just descriptions—they were stories in the making.
Pedagogically, these “goalpost-shifting” exercises achieve a powerful reframing. They de-centre correctness, dismantle perfectionism, and foreground process over product. They also model what good creative writing does: it discovers through doing. As Pete put it, “Once you’ve given them something else to think about, story just creeps in.”
5. From Group to Community
One of the most striking aspects of First Story’s approach is how deliberately they foster a sense of equality in the writing space. “We all write together. The teacher, the students, me,” Pete explained. There’s no hierarchy in the First Story room—only a shared commitment to creativity. This ethos transforms a class into a community, where every participant’s voice is treated with respect and interest.
Pete shared how he begins each year by modelling vulnerability. He writes in front of students, shares his rough drafts, and invites feedback. This modelling opens the door for students to take creative risks without fear of judgement. It also enables the development of workshop culture—where feedback is thoughtful, generous, and focused on the writing, not the writer.
A Goldsmiths participant who had worked alongside Pete during her placement observed this transformation in real time: “They uplifted one another. They listened to each other’s pieces and started to really value what each person had to say.” That emotional safety is carefully cultivated. Pete described how he slowly steps back over the course of the year, handing over more of the critique process to the students themselves. “By the end, they’re commenting on each other’s work without my input. That’s the goal—writerly independence.”
Pedagogically, this approach builds voice, agency, and empathy. It helps students learn how to be active, thoughtful listeners as well as expressive writers. And in an age of performative learning and high-stakes assessment, it reminds us that learning thrives in reciprocal, trusting communities.
6. Real Editing, Real Publishing
First Story doesn’t just celebrate students’ voices—it amplifies them. At the end of each programme, participants’ work is collected into a professionally produced anthology. This isn’t a token booklet stapled together in the staff room—it’s a typeset, copy-edited publication, treated with the same seriousness as any small press collection. “Dozens of people work on it,” Pete noted. “It’s one of the most expensive parts of the programme, but it matters. It shows them they’re being treated as real writers.”
Editing is approached with the same sensitivity as writing. Pete walks students through the revision process slowly, explaining that their first draft is not a final product but a foundation. “They’ve only had five minutes to write it,” he reminds them. “Now they’ve got an hour to improve it.” Students learn to identify clichés, vague abstractions, and clunky phrasing—not because they’re “wrong,” but because they obscure the truth of what the student is trying to express.
Over a typical First Story year, three-quarters of the workshops are devoted to new writing. The final quarter focuses on revision: shaping pieces for the anthology, giving titles, choosing favourite lines. “I line edit them like I would a prizewinner,” Pete said, and it’s no empty boast. He treats every student’s work with editorial rigour and deep care.
The impact can be transformative. Not only do students see themselves as writers—they become writers in the eyes of their peers, their schools, and the wider literary community.
7. The Power of Concrete Detail to Carry Emotion
A thread that ran through the entire session—woven into exercises, commentary, and readings—was Pete’s belief in the power of the specific. “Big feelings need small details,” he told us, again and again. Teenagers often reach for abstractions when trying to convey emotion: bottomless pits of darkness, rays of blinding light, infinite sadness. But such phrases, Pete argued, don’t touch the reader. They describe without evoking.
Instead, Pete teaches his students to evoke rather than explain—to let emotion seep through image and detail. In one memorable exercise, students were asked to write sensory memories of their childhoods. The results were astonishing: a velveteen leaf brushed against a cheek, the clink of coins in a pocket, the hiss of warm milk. These moments, tiny and precise, carried more weight than any sweeping declaration ever could.
One participant put it succinctly: “You listen to someone’s memory and you feel it. The detail makes it real.” Pete’s insistence on writing from what you can see, hear, touch, and taste is not just a stylistic choice—it’s a way of unlocking emotional truth.
For teachers, this is a vital reminder: we don’t need to teach students to be profound. We need to teach them to notice. And from that attention, the profound will follow.
Final Thoughts
What struck me most was how these strategies, while developed in the context of schools serving disadvantaged communities, are deeply transferable. Whether you’re working with reluctant teenagers or aspiring postgraduates, the First Story approach fosters mindful, meaningful writing.
As Pete reminded us, these are not rigid rules but guiding principles. What matters is the ethos: make space for play, give students ownership of language, and build writing communities rooted in trust, specificity, and truth.
If you’d like to explore more of these exercises, Pete kindly shared a selection—including the “childhood senses” and “constraint-based description” activities we tried. Let me know, and I’ll forward them to you.
Let’s keep learning—and failing—together.
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