Step-by-Step Creative Writing for Autistic and Neurodivergent Students, and Students with Anxiety.

I have recently published my latest workbook, The Structured Descriptive Writing Workbook, which is now available on Amazon.

The book grew out of my work with students who find open-ended writing tasks difficult. Descriptive and creative writing are often presented as tasks that depend on imagination, inspiration or instinct. Students may be asked to “bring the scene to life” or “create atmosphere”, but these instructions can hide a lot of decision-making.

For many autistic and neurodivergent learners, and for students who experience anxiety around writing, that can make the task feel overwhelming. The difficulty is not usually a lack of ideas. It is often that the structure of the task has not been made clear enough.

This workbook takes a step-by-step approach. It breaks descriptive writing down into smaller, more manageable decisions, with explicit modelling, sentence-by-sentence guidance, writing frames, developed examples and image prompts for practice. The aim is to help students understand how a descriptive response can be built, rather than expecting them to infer the process from a finished model.

Although the book is particularly useful for GCSE English Language preparation, it can also be used for KS3 support, tutoring, SEND intervention, home education and general creative writing development.

My aim was to create a resource that makes descriptive writing feel less mysterious and more achievable, especially for students who benefit from clear structure before moving towards independence.

The Structured Descriptive Writing Workbook is available on Amazon.

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If you’re interested in how these ideas connect to inclusive English teaching in practice, you may also like my post on supporting autistic girls in the classroom, or the resources I’ve developed for teaching neurodivergent learners.