Creative Writing: Hints

[anti]

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There are two approaches to Creative Writing: quiet confidence or utter terror. If you fall in the latter category, never fear: here's a collection of hints gathered from the forums and personal experience; hopefully it will help you in what can be the most painful part of the Area of Study paper!

For those of you who are Quietly Confident about your Creative Writing skills, feel free to add to this thread!


Keep It Simple
Remember you only have forty minutes to do this entire section (if you've planned your time properly). Give yourself five to ten minutes planning and about half an hour to write. A concise, well-planned piece is much better than a long, rambling idea that doesn't go anywhere.

Choose a single idea and work its guts out. Many masterpieces revolve around a single idea - think about Titanic. It's a three hour epic about a ship sinking. Having a single idea also lets you keep coming back to this idea if you lose focus or start to panic. "What was I talking about? Oh yes, a dog who runs away from home."


Vocabulary
This is an important aspect of any creative piece. Because it is short and imaginative, it is IMPERATIVE that your language reflects two things: your grasp of the content (what are you writing about) and your grasp of the language (how are you writing it). You don't have a lot of time to prove to the marker that you know what you're talking about.

Vocabulary improvements are not impossible, so don't discount this point as moot. A single word a day for a week means you have seven new words to put into your creative writing piece. They don't have to be heptosyllabic (that's not a word): you simply need a more descriptive word for something everyday. Compare:

Her face turned a lighter shade of avocado. "You put what in the curry?" she spluttered.

with

She looked sick. "The curry was gross," she said.

Get a thesaurus. They're cheap (or free: http://www.thesaurus.com) and whenever you want a synonym, just look it up.


Structure
I said simple before. This goes for structure as well. Yes, it's possible to write a postmodern chef d'oeuvre with sentences running perpendicular to the traditional top-to-bottom structure but.. no. You are not e.e. cummings. Your words should do the talking. (Feel free to disagree with me.)

If you are stressed, the hardest thing in the world is to be creative with structure as well as content. Don't forget your sentence structure, paragraphing, and punctuation such as speech marks and commas. You'll be practising this with your essays anyway, but remember that the basics apply to creative writing as well.


Perspective
Point of view is an easy way to show change. Writing in the first person ("I") means you can write about the narrator's thoughts without batting an eyelid. Writing in the third person ("He") is good for showing a broad range of elements - it's also the easiest form to maintain.

Writing in the second person ("You") is fiendishly difficult to maintain, since you have to often second-guess the reader.

If in doubt, third person is the way to go: it is natural to write in and it avoids nasty pitfalls like making assumptions about context and character.


Characterisation
You're writing a short story, not Ulysses. Unless it's integral to the plot to know that your protagonist's name is Charlie and he has a twelve year old sister who's currently studying Biology, Chemistry, Physics and French, and that his favourite pop idol is Weird Al although he doesn't like to admit it to his friends because they listen to Kelly Osbourne and think that Weird Al is, well, weird - then don't mention it. It bloats your story AND it wastes your time.

Many short stories don't even need anything more than a first name for the main character(s). If you're talking about animals, you often don't even need to go that far.

Generally, only the protagonist in a short story will develop. You don't have time to explain how other people have changed - you need to get your point through and the most obvious changes will occur to the main character or characters in your story.

In fact, creative writing doesn't require more than a single character to carry the plot. Don't get weighed down in details.


Gather Ideas NOW
So, you still have some time before the Big Day and you'd like to prepare a little? Great, sit down with a piece of paper and a pencil and start writing down thoughts. What are you thinking about? What's on your wall, on the TV, what are you listening to on the radio?

Once you get those creative juices flowing you can start developing plot ideas. What would that goldfish say if he suddenly found out he could breathe out of water? What would you do if you won a million dollars on Temptation? Be brief - you should write a sentence or two maximum about each idea, and focus on the flow of the story and the ending.

Although you may never use these ideas, it's good to have something to come back to if the question surprises you. If you sit there for long enough and doodle you'll come up with less everyday ideas, which are infinitely more fun to write about and generally get more attention from markers too.

If you like pre-preparing before exams, it's also possible to prepare a standard creative writing piece beforehand, but I've never done so so I won't try to explain how to do it.


Endings
The end is everything. It's the last thing a marker will read and hence the most likely part of your story that they will remember.

Twists are nice, but unless you have a twist in mind, don't stress yourself trying to turn your story inside out and upside down. A nicely wrapped up straight ending is so much more pleasant than reading a struggle with where the story wants to go and where the author wants it to go.

Have the ending in mind even before you write your first sentence. Spending some time thinking about an ending should go into your planning time - a conclusion is part of your whole plot / idea and you shouldn't avoid it just because thinking of an ending is hard!

A final word of advice from me: DO NOT FORGET THE ENDING. Regardless of whether you are writing a feature article or short story, poem or letter, not finishing is almost as bad as not writing anything at all.


In the Exam...
I like to leave Creative Writing til last - firstly because I find it the easiest and secondly because it gives me all the time in the world to finish it (provided I can answer my other questions).

Some people like to do it first, so you make sure you have an ending (creative writing is useless without an ending, whereas you can quickly wrap up essays).

Either way, you should ensure that you give yourself enough time to write your piece in its entirety AND give yourself time to proofread it at least once. For some reason commas generally get misplaced a lot in creative writing, so check your grammar as well as the general plot flow.

Write down ideas - if you think of one during reading time then write it down as soon as you can in sentence or dot form. Think about features that you'd like to include - quotes? conversations? characters? any language techniques such as metaphors? - and make sure you have a conclusion before you even begin writing.

Finally - don't forget the title, particularly if it's a short story or feature article.

[MissSavage29]

Can i just mention not to forget some the very basics which are inevidably forgotten under HSC pressure

You should refer to the readers 5 senses - make them feel, hear, see etc your story to make it more interesting.

Dont forget that it is an english exam - and hence the markers want to know that you are aware that there are techniques in writing. While your whole peice should not read like a giant collection of english phrases put in a simile, metaphor, punctuation (like ! or ... or having no punctuation or longer sentences for meaning)

[samuel_thom]

To add to that - spelling is really important - for example, the difference between inevidably and inevitably may be whole mark.

[Casmira]

I also recommend you use your introduction to establish the (past/present/future) tense of your journey, as well as if its expected or unexpected, that way you can mould only yyour intro and leave the rest upto more or less memorising (mostly)

[goan_crazy]

Most importantly, incorporate the stimulus or quote or whatever they give you into your writing!

Ps. captain gh3y... anti is a she

[Mz_mE]

my teacher said that if ur talking about an animal.. never ever make that animal you. dont talk as though u are flying or u r searching for food becoz its sorta degrading you as a person and seems childish..

ohh and im sorta confused about the concept of journey and how we are meant to incorporate that into our creative writing piece.. im doing physical journeys and i no that u need to sorta make it a metaphor for inner/imaginative through ur writing.. but im not sure wat else important things u need to include.. ie.. reason for journey, reflection of self stuff like that..

[danieljarvis]

good post. creative is my definate weakness! thanks!

[Smartie87]

is this bad....? i have already written my story n i plan on manipulating it ever so slightly to include the question. in our trials, all that was required was to mention the line they gave us once....

do u think its gonna be really specific what they ask us??? cuz to be honest, i dont have a back up plan

[jessiej87]

well the problem being a creative can be something like a speech or a feature article or diary entries... so if u know how to adapt to all that then i guess its ok??

generally if you do ur piece in first person u can adapt it to diary entires or a speech but u prob need a feature article just in case

[Aloshan]

Originally Posted by MissSavage29

Can i just mention not to forget some the very basics which are inevidably forgotten under HSC pressure

You should refer to the readers 5 senses - make them feel, hear, see etc your story to make it more interesting.

Dont forget that it is an english exam - and hence the markers want to know that you are aware that there are techniques in writing. While your whole peice should not read like a giant collection of english phrases put in a simile, metaphor, punctuation (like ! or ... or having no punctuation or longer sentences for meaning)

its "inevitably" darling.......

[gloomy]

Originally Posted by Smartie87

is this bad....? i have already written my story n i plan on manipulating it ever so slightly to include the question. in our trials, all that was required was to mention the line they gave us once....

do u think its gonna be really specific what they ask us??? cuz to be honest, i dont have a back up plan

no no, its not bad at all.
If anything, its the best way to prepare!! But just remember to prepare yourself to change your story to suit the question/stimuli.

[MissSavage29]

Originally Posted by Aloshan

its "inevitably" darling.......

thank you... while some of us are helping out - i'm still ever amused that some people like to go through and pick out spelling mistakes.

[ladki]

omg..u seriuz... im doin physical journeys aswell n i dun get it eitha. it juz seems hard to incorporate this context into creative writing, i juz wrote wat i thought wud get me atleaz markz n i shud do well in essay n 1st sect.So hopefully it all works out in d end.

[wrong_turn]

as anti said, keep your idea simple!! you have only 40 mins to fit the crap you want in it.

or if you really want to save time, do it in about 20 mins or less as to conserve time. like i did

but make sure that your creative piece conveys journeys and also is effective and original. i know a lot of people have said keep it simple. but i mean simple as in the idea is small but original.

i did a journey of a pen, simple yet effective if you do it properly.

kepp it short as well. markers are not expecting huge 10 page masterpieces. as long as yo convey an effective journey in your creative, they dont care about anything else, except sophistication, grammar and spelling in this section.

[Manan]

Also...maybe have some sort of grounding to it....eg historical basis or something. And something different, for example, I used the Armenian Genocide as the central theme to it and then just moulded that around the question...that gives you something to work with so you dont have to start your ideeas from scratch...