Check your own B and F
Your full written version, every verb marked. Go through and check each tense against its mark. Change nothing else.
Count the disagreements. That number is what the next sixteen minutes has to fix.
Six things from your five minutes. Match each to what happens to it on the page.
A finished piece
Locked Out · 234 words
It was the second week of February and the stairwell in our building smelled of other people’s cooking, the way it always did between six and eight.
I had my bag on one shoulder and my coat over the other arm and I was already thinking about the evening. I was about to go back down to the shop for milk when I put my hand in my pocket and the keys were not there.
They were on the kitchen table. I could see them in my head, exactly where I had put them.
So I sat on the stairs. The light was on a timer and it kept going out every ninety seconds, which meant standing up and waving at it. My phone went from eleven per cent to nothing in about forty minutes. Somewhere below, a television was playing the same programme for two hours. A neighbour came past twice and did not ask.
Twice I was going to knock on the door of the flat below. Twice I decided not to.
My flatmate got home at four minutes past eleven. She looked at me on the stairs and said, “How long?” — and when I told her, she sat down next to me and did not go inside for another hour.
We had not spoken properly in five months. At the time I thought that was her fault. I have stopped thinking that.
Four questions about the construction of the piece.
1. Paragraph one contains no events at all. Why open there?
2. Paragraph four runs four background details in a row and then one event. What does that rhythm do?
3. Twice I was going to knock… Twice I decided not to. Why two sentences instead of one?
4. The last paragraph is three short sentences after a long one. What changes?
Two verbs in this model are past perfect — where I had put them and we had not spoken. You are not asked to produce them. Unit 15 teaches them properly.
Notice where they sit: both mark something that was already true before the story began. That is the gap the past perfect fills, and you have been feeling it since Lesson 1.
Seven paragraphs, and where the layers sit
The shape
| Paragraph | Job | Layer | Words |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | The place, before anything happens | Background only | 20–30 |
| 2 | What you were about to do, and what stopped it | Background, then one event | 40–50 |
| 3 | A short paragraph that lands the problem | Two or three short sentences | 15–25 |
| 4 | The long middle. Time made to feel long | Background, ending on one event | 55–70 |
| 5 | The thing you nearly did, twice | Two matched sentences | 15–25 |
| 6 | The turn, with the line somebody said | Foreground | 40–50 |
| 7 | Then and now | Past simple, then present | 20–30 |
Six sentences from a different narrative, out of order. Put them back into the shape.
- A man I had lived above for four years introduced himself to me by name.
- I was about to start cooking when the power went off in the whole block.
- The power came back at half past ten and everybody went inside within four minutes. I have thought about that ever since.
- It was the first properly warm evening of the year and every window on the street was open.
- For two hours the street filled up with people who had never spoken to each other, holding phones and candles and, in one case, a bicycle light.
- Nobody had a torch. Nobody knew whose fault it was.
Two rules the model obeys.
The longest paragraph is the one where the least happens. Making time feel long is done with background, not with the word slowly.
Paragraph length carries pace. Long paragraphs slow the reader down; three short sentences in a row speed them up and then stop them. The final paragraph is short for that reason.
Before you write it
The paragraph where the least happens. One to four words per gap.
So I waited. The office round me — first the lights on the far side, then the ones above the printers. Somebody two floors down a vacuum cleaner back and forth in the same corridor for what felt like an hour. It dark outside and I see my own reflection in the window more clearly than the street. I three emails I did not send. At twenty to nine the cleaner the door and looked genuinely frightened.
Six sentences of the kind that appear in first drafts. Fix each now.
1. I waited for four hours and it was feeling very very long.
2. I was checking my phone about twenty times.
3. So anyway then after that my flatmate came home.
4. Meanwhile I was sitting on the stairs the whole time.
5. I was about to knocking on the door below.
6. At the time I am thinking it was her fault.
Write it
Task card · Writing · Individual · 16 minutes
Your five-minute story, cut to 230 words. This is the piece that goes into your portfolio.
Six or seven paragraphs, about 230 words.
- Paragraph 1: background only. No events. One thing you could smell, hear or see.
- A paragraph containing a plan that failed: I was about to… when…
- One long paragraph where almost nothing happens, made long with background.
- One line of direct speech, in the person’s exact words.
- A final paragraph of short sentences: what you thought then, what you think now.
- Every verb has to agree with its B or F. Write the word count at the bottom.
Write straight through, then mark. Twelve minutes writing, four minutes marking every verb B or F and fixing the disagreements. Doing both at once produces a careful, flat piece.
Task card · Audit · Pairs · 7 minutes
Swap. You are a reader who has never heard any of this out loud.
Hand back a marked page and one spoken sentence: the paragraph where you stopped being able to picture it.
- Mark every verb B or F from the meaning alone, before looking at the tense.
- Circle any tense that disagrees with your mark.
- Find the longest paragraph. Count its events. If there are more than two, say so.
- Box any connector that contradicts the sentence it introduces.
What the drafts did
Five sentences from drafts. Fix each, then check your own page.
1. The rain fell and the queue grew and I stood there getting wetter.
2. I was looking at my watch four times in ten minutes.
3. It was a very very long and really slow evening.
4. Out of nowhere, the train arrived exactly on time.
5. I was about to leaving when she called my name.
What goes home
Two questions about your own draft.
1. Your longest paragraph has six events in it. What has gone wrong?
2. How do you make four hours feel long on the page?
Before next lesson. Rewrite it once from the marked page and bring the clean version on paper.
Next lesson you hand it in and tell the same story for five minutes without it. Both go into the portfolio and both close the unit.