National Writing Day
Wednesday 24 June 2026
Everyone is invited to grab pens, pencils or laptops and celebrate the power and pleasure of creative writing on National Writing Day!
For 2026, award-winning author and First Story Ambassador Patrice Lawrence invites everyone to Write A Book By Its Cover and use an existing book cover to inspire a new piece of writing. Watch Patrice’s video and then download the accompanying A4 activity sheet.
Share your writing to Instagram on National Writing Day using #WriteABookByItsCover and #NationalWritingDay. (Don’t forget to tag @firststory_uk.)
This activity was commissioned by First Story, England’s leading creative writing charity for young people, for National Writing Day 2026.
Also, explore our library of free writing resources for prompts and inspiration to get your started.
National Writing Day
Share Your Voice
In 2025, we commissioned award-winning YA author Dean Atta to create a NWD activity.
In his video, Dean shares a great way to start some writing by describing your voice using metaphor. We produced an A4 activity sheet to accompany the video which you can download here.
National Writing Day
Roll the dice
In 2023, we commissioned poet and First Story writer John Berkavitch to create a NWD activity.
This fun activity is inspired by the 15th birthday ‘tombola poem’ created by attendees of the 2023 Young Writers Festival. It explains how you can use random words and number generation to spark your creativity.
In his video John shares a great way to start writing, by using a single die and whatever you can see and hear around you to generate ideas for lines.
Check out other great resources by National Writing Day partners, below.
BBC Teach x First Story resources
We collaborated with the team at BBC Teach and some fantastic contemporary writers to produce an exciting new set of creative writing resources, ‘Inside the Writer’s Mind’. Packed with tips and insights, six of the films in the BBC series are accompanied by a free classroom resource produced by First Story.
