This document provides guidance on how to plan a composition by answering basic questions about who, when, where, why, and how. It advises the reader to carefully consider the characters, setting, timing, reasons, and events of the story before beginning to write. Answering these planning questions will help generate a concise summary of what will happen in the story. The document cautions against relying purely on luck or writing in a way that is absurd or boring for the reader. Proper planning is presented as key to crafting an engaging composition.

2. STEP 1: YOU MUST PLAN!
• You MUST plan. Don't just use the first idea that
pops into your head.
• You're relying on pure luck whether that idea is
a good or bad idea. We all know that it's a bad
idea to answer any (test) paper relying on plain
luck, but for some strange mysterious
reason, when it comes to composition, you
abandon all logic .
• While we're at it, let's also walk across the PIE
blindfolded. Remember: you MUST plan!

3. HOW TO PLAN
• Just guide yourself with the following basic
questions:
• Who, When, Where, Why, How and What.
• This is not meant to be a magic formula.
• The order in which you answer them is also not
important except What is always answered
last, and I will explain why later.

4. WHO
• Who are the characters in your story?
• You?
• A 3rd party?
• Your friends / classmates / family / relatives?
• John? Who?

5. WHERE
• Where did it happen? In School/at the
graveyard/in the park?
• Of course sometimes you can be limited as in
the example A Day At the Beach would have to
happen at the beach.
• A good student always asks, which part of the
beach? A better student asks where is this
beach?

6. WHEN
• What day did the story occur? Yesterday? Your birthday?
Last Christmas? September 1939? When?
• Don't forget the time! What time did it happen? Obviously
a story set in the afternoon would be very different from
one set in the middle of the night.
• When did it happen? In the morning? At night? While you
were in the park? Eating cornflakes? Reading the
newspapers? Doing all three?

7. WHY
• If the topic is "A Heart-breaking New Year", why was it
heart-breaking? If it was "A Joyful Birthday
Party", obviously it is not necessary to ask why it was
joyful. Elaborate.
• For some topics it may be harder to explain why. For
example, "A Day At The Beach". Why were you there?
Was it for a picnic (no!) or for some other reason (yes)?

8. HOW
• How did it happen? This may overlap with "What".
• Sometimes people have more fun reading how something
happens than the fact that it did happen.
• Especially if the method is especially clever or amusing.
Sometimes, you don't need to tell how something
happened (how you went to the beach), sometimes you
do (how the prisoner escaped from jail). Use your
common sense.

9. WHAT
• Lastly, What happened?
• In other words, it is a concise summary of everything you
intend to put into your story.
• Once you have put together WHO, WHEN, WHERE, WHY
and HOW, you are now ready to say answer WHAT
happened.
• It is like putting meat on the skeleton of an animal except
without all the blood and stuff.

10. A NEGATIVE EXAMPLE
Back to the example of A Day At The Beach. One
teacher I know told me about a student who wrote
about a picnic he had with his friends. It began
optimistically with them finding a nice shady spot
to set up. It went downhill from there as he began
to narrate they had sandwiches (nice delicious
sandwiches), fried bee hoon (nice delicious fried
bee hoon), fishballs (nice delicious fishballs) and
packet drinks (nice delic... you get the idea). By
the time the teacher got to packet drinks, it was so
boring it could physically drive breath out of your
body.

11. Be Realistic
Use your common sense. Don't go overboard. A story that is wholly absurd
is as bad as a story which is boring. Don't insult your reader's intelligence
by expecting them to believe ridiculously exaggerated heroism. Really
don't. Really.
If you set up your story right, you won't have to resort to extreme solutions.
Nobody is going to believe you beat a man with a machine gun by dodging
through a rain of bullets and karate chopping him on the neck.
Last Words
Have fun. Planning makes it more fun, not less. Because it depends only on
your imagination, every student is as good as another. It is the only place
where the competition is completely fair. Go for it.