I remember taking writing classes in high school and having to write short stories as part of the course. While I didn’t always relish the work of crafting 5,000-word tales on paper, I did manage to get plenty of good results, mostly by following a set of guidelines I found on a book that advised people about winning writing contests. In a way, you can consider fiction writing for class pretty similar to joining a writing contest. After all, your grades will depend as much on the merits of your own story as it would on the quality of writing your classmates produce. Write just a little bit better than everyone and you can nail yourself an A. Here’s how you do it:
Start strong. Bring the action early into the story by presenting a complicated situation, a problem to be resolved or an intriguing incident. The stronger you start out, the better the impression you make. For a teacher grading a stack of papers, first impressions can be huge.
Make your characters believable. Create authentic characters by presenting various aspects of their personalities, as well as giving them realistic dialogue. Make each of them active in your story, helping move the story along, instead of simply being there.
Have a beginning, middle and end, with a clear central theme running through the entire story. This ensures a cohesive story with clear-cut parts. Start out by defining your main theme and writing a working outline of how the story will flow.
Avoid cliche endings. You know those endings in movies that leave you unsatisfied (e.g. revealing that the entire story is a dream sequence)? Stay away from that. If it feels trite, it probably is. Find another way to finish.
Proofread to the hilt. Use an English grammar software to comb through your writing and give it one manual pass for good measure. Grammar, spelling and other writing mechanics are easy enough to fix that you should always use it to sway things in your favor.