A Story That Begins 'The Phone Rang at Midnight': Model Answer and Notes
Quick answer: An original 180-word exam story continuing The phone rang at midnight, set between Toronto and Lucknow, with notes on why it scores and how to avoid the obvious plots.
'The phone rang at midnight' promises a caller, a reason and a household woken up. The reader expects bad news, so the marks are in surprising them without cheating: the call should matter, but it does not have to be a death or an accident. Copy the line exactly, delay the caller's identity by at least a paragraph, and let the call change something in the house by morning. The model below is about 180 words and connects a flat in Toronto to a garden in Lucknow.
Students reach for the hospital call because it is dramatic. It is also the one the examiner has read forty times that afternoon. A call that is not bad news, and is still important, stands out.
The task
Typical wording: 'Begin your story with the line The phone rang at midnight and complete it in 150 to 200 words.' Copy the line as your first sentence. Decide who is calling and why before you write the second sentence, and make the second sentence about the house, not the caller.
Model answer
The Mango Tree. The phone rang at midnight. In the Toronto flat that meant the landline, which nobody ever used, and Aditi heard her father go past her door in the dark, muttering, and pick it up on the fifth ring. She lay still and listened to the silence while he listened.
Then he laughed. It was not a sound she had heard from him in months, not since the move, and she got up and stood in the doorway in her socks.
'It is your Nani,' he said, holding out the phone. 'She has forgotten the time difference again.' Her grandmother's voice came down the line from Lucknow, loud and pleased, and eleven hours ahead. The mango tree, she said. The one Aditi had planted as a seed when she was five and had been told would never grow. It had fruit on it. Eight mangoes. She had counted.
Aditi sat on the kitchen floor and talked to her for half an hour about a tree she had not seen in two years. In the morning her father put a map of Lucknow on the fridge, and started looking at flights.
Why it earns marks
Against content, organisation and expression:
Three other ways to take the same topic
Each withholds the caller and avoids the hospital.
What writers can take from this
- Copy the line exactly; make the second sentence about the house.
- Withhold the caller for at least a paragraph.
- Avoid the hospital; find a call that matters another way.
- Let the call change someone other than the narrator too.
- Use the sounds of a house at night: a door, a ring count, socks on the floor.
- End in the morning with one visible change.
Try it yourself
Begin a 180-word story with 'The phone rang at midnight' and make the call good news that nevertheless causes a problem the family has to solve before breakfast.
Questions
Do I have to use the exact words 'The phone rang at midnight'?
Yes, as your first sentence, word for word. You may add a title above it. Changing the line or burying it in a longer sentence can cost content marks.
Can I write this story in the first person?
Yes. The given line does not fix a narrator, so 'I' can enter in the second sentence. A first-person narrator lying awake listening is one of the strongest ways to open this story.
Should the story have a moral?
Only if asked, and this line rarely wants one. A gentle 'Distance is measured in calls, not miles' would fit the model, but the map on the fridge already says it.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working writers. Updated September 2026.
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