Whenever I give creative writing classes in schools, I'm always slightly shocked by how many children will admit to being bad at story writing. They say things like, "All my ideas are boring," or, "I start and then I get bored."

To me, the imagination to tell a great story is innate in almost every child.

It's simply a matter of unlocking it. One thing I've found helpful is to get a whole class inventing a story out loud with the help of the tips below. For dyslexic kids or others with learning or behavioural difficulties, it can be very freeing to simply shout ideas out loud and not have the pressure of crafting the perfect sentence. The confidence they gain can then be channeled into writing.

Recently, I did a creative writing class in a beautiful country town. Shortly before I started, a mother came up to me fretting that her shy, dyslexic daughter would be unable to cope. A minute later, another came up to me and apologised in advance for her son. He had a reputation for being disruptive and rude in class and hated writing, even though he was actually very bright.

Freed from the usual conventions of story telling, both were the stars of the day. The girl was bursting with ideas and the boy had me in tears with his superbly written piece on how he'd change the world. All we have to do is give kids the right tools and they can do both: invent stories and change the world.

Tip 1:
An easy way to get kids thinking about descriptive writing, I find, is to get them to imagine that they're writing a postcard to a pen pal in a foreign country. Since that pen pal has no experience of their world, it's important that they convey it in full detail and using all their senses – taste, touch, smell and sight.

Tip 2:
One of the first things children will ask an author is, 'Where do you get your ideas?' I always answer: 'Ideas come from everywhere. Your problem should never be finding ideas. It should be that you have too many.' Since life is infinitely stranger than fiction, newspapers and magazines are a good starting point. A news item about a stowaway boy or a dog that has turned up alive after two years, for instance, could give rise to any number of storylines.

Tip 3:
My books have lots of animals in them, because I'm obsessed with saving horses and wild animals like dolphins and leopards, which I'm fortunate enough to do in reality with the wildlife charity, Born Free. As a child, my relationships with animals were among the most intense and important of my life, and that probably comes through in my novels. To me, the key to writing well about animals is to empathise with them as creatures that have needs and emotions every bit as valid as ours.

Tip 4:
When I get children to invent stories out loud, something that is as much fun for me as it is for them, I first ask them to create a couple of characters. What do they look like? What type of people are they? What are their interests? Next, we need an Event. Something happens. A volcano, a fire, an alien abduction, a school trip that goes wrong. The characters then go on a journey, which is as much about personal discovery as it is about location. Are they brave? Cowardly? How do they figure out an escape route? Lastly, we need a happy ending. Naturally.

Tip 5:
As a child, I was obsessed with reading and I'm convinced that there are no good writers who are not good readers. Forget the Government nonsense about whether or not to read Dickens. Get your kids reading. It doesn't matter if it's comic books or JK Rowling or War and Peace. All that matters is that they learn to love reading. Of course, you could always consider The One Dollar Horse!

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