First Story’s annual celebration of creative writing on 23 June, 2021.
Your voice is powerful. Use it on National Writing Day and beyond.
FilltheBox Challenge | Resources | Ambassadors | Newsletter | 2020 Highlights | Partners
#FilltheBox Creative Writing Challenge
After more than a year of separation, this National Writing Day is all about connection. On 23 June, as we move towards the reopening of the country, join First Story and connect through creative writing.
This National Writing Day we’re challenging writers to #FilltheBox with a piece of creative writing – a poem, a letter, a story – using the theme of connection. Whether it’s in 280 Twitter characters or on a post-it sized piece of paper, there’s a space to write for everyone. An average post-it note is around three inches tall and wide. If you’re drawing your own box, try imagining the length of three bottle caps!
Activity sheets and templates
#FilltheBox Examples
Teaching and Learning Resources
The National Writing Day partners have collated a bank of top-quality creative writing resources. Everything is free to download and share — use the drop-down arrows, below, to explore resources suitable for primary or secondary curriculum.
Primary (KS2)
Secondary (KS3-4)
Writing As a Career
NWD Ambassadors
The list of literary stars promoting National Writing Day this year includes former Children’s Laureate, Michael Rosen; the author of YA novel Oh My Gods, Alexandra Sheppard; Hip hot artist and Ruth Rendell Award-winner, Karl Nova and Orwell Prize-winning author and writer, Kate Clanchy. Building up to the big day on 23 June, ambassadors will be helping us highlight what’s happening online and creating inspiring video prompts to get you writing. Watch this space…
Register for updates
Join our NWD mailing list, and we’ll let you know whenever new resources are published, give you a heads-up when activities are happening online, and share any related news. We’ll only mail you about National Writing Day.
NWD 2020 highlights
The fourth annual National Writing Day took place on 24 June 2020. Thousands took part in our national call to action activity — a 24-word story starting with the prompt ‘One Day…’. Teaching and learning resources were downloaded 3,601 times, with over 2000 stories being written and shared online. Through partnerships with the BBC, well-loved authors and local media, the #247Challenge trended #1 on Twitter all day and reached an estimated 4 million people. Find out more about NWD 2020 here.
NWD Partners
National Writing Day is a First Story initiative organised and delivered in partnership with arts and literacy organisations across the UK.
Related Content
National Writing Day 2021 #FilltheBox Challenge Highlights
The fifth annual National Writing Day took place on 23 June 2021, celebrating the power and pleasure of creative writing. This year’s celebrations took place both online and in schools, to ensure as many people as possible had the opportunity to put pen to paper.
National Writing Day 2021 #FilltheBox Challenge HighlightsRead More
Working with our Young Ambassadors: Pilot stage 1
When we launched the Young Ambassador’s Pilot programme in autumn term 2020 with our Paul Hamlyn Foundation schools, we had no idea what lay ahead. With year group bubbles being sent home periodically across the country and students oscillating between digital and in-person learning, we knew that our well-laid plans were set to be tested! …
National Writing Day 2020 #247Challenge Highlights
National Writing Day 2020 was framed around a mass participation creative writing exercise, the #247Challenge. As a call to action, it proved to be incredibly popular, with thousands of stories and poems shared online. Here we have collated just a few of the incredible submissions we read.
National Writing Day Instagram takeover!
In the week leading up to this year’s National Writing Day on 24 June, we invited two former First Story students from West Yorkshire, Henna Ravjibhai (17) and Sophie Crabtree (19), to take over our Instagram account — as a platform to share their experiences as young writers, and hopefully inspire other young people to practice writing creatively too.
Writing From Home
National Writing Day 2020 takes place on 24 June. With most young people at home due to the pandemic, this year’s programme is being delivered digitally. Our NWD 2020 resource bank includes nine, feature-length creative writing video tutorials led by talented First Story Writers-in-Residence. We’ve been encouraging users on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook to give the tutorials a try and post new writing online. Here we highlight a small selection of the pieces shared during May via the hashtag #WriteFromHome.
National Writing Day Ambassadors Announced
The impressive line-up of literary talent helping us celebrate National Writing Day 2020 includes: current and former Children’s Laureates, Cressida Cowell and Malorie Blackman; Scotland’s National Poet, Jackie Kay; Carnegie medal-winning screenwriter Frank Cottrell-Boyce; best-selling author Mark Haddon; writer and illustrator Laura Dockrill; poet Caroline Bird; playwright Vinay Patel; and children’s author SF Said.
Picket Line Poetry in Hull
Our students from secondary schools across Hull formed a picket line of poetry for National Writing Day protesting their right to express themselves creatively