I often approach creative writing drawing inspiration from movies/tv shows that I watch (the best way to improve with creative writing throughout Year 12 is to watch A LOT of films, find ones that centre upon mood and character in an everyday setting – this way, you can emulate these characters, events and settings without having to spout some emo bs like I did in year 11, an absolute tragedy)
1) I find that integrating techniques is absolutely the most important thing in order to gain marks.
We had to write a persuasive for our third assessment task in a day, which is a very short time to form a sophisticated argument, so I just stuffed my piece with as many techniques as possible, especially more sophisticated ones (alliteration, polysyndeton & asyndeton, varying sentence lengths, internal rhyme, allusion, metaphor & simile, amplification, analogy, anaphora). I ended up getting 18.5/20 which is pretty good considering my school is very harsh with english marking
2) Practising english creatives – this is a bit of a hard one!
Do not simply mindlessly practice! The more practice you do doesn't necessarily equate to better marks / improvements in creative writing. I would suggest doing practice short creatives (maybe 500 ish words) that explore a technique or emulate a short story / scene in film.
During the HSC I wrote practice pieces for sentence variation (practices evoking suspense), imagery and figurative language (practice for setting), sentence fragmentation (for engaging the reader) and a couple of others.
3) After you feel confident in your creative writing skills, prepare for exams by writing 3-5 pre-prepared texts.
Like
Jarjarbinx said, don't be afraid to tap into your personal life in these texts – draw inspiration from your culture or personal events or personal struggles and opinions you have on these. The marker can often identify and connect with a personal text, and they will award you for it! Make sure you centre each of these texts around a certain, general theme, mine were touching on gender, identity, nature, politics. Again, make sure you integrate as many techniques as possible!
Some final notes that might help:
- What to do in an exam if your preprepared texts do not fit the stimulus?
- ABSOLUTELY DO NOT WRITE YOUR PREPARED CREATIVES IN AN EXAM IF THEY DON'T RELATE TO THE STIMULUS. YOU WILL GET ZERO. During the HSC exam, the mod c stimulus was quite a curveball, and didn't fit any of my prepared creatives. This is where I used my bank of films that I had watched during the year. I based my text off a setting in a tv series I had watched, stuffed my piece with techniques, and made sure that it explored the key theme of the stimulus. I think I did fairly well in comparison to others that I talked to otherwards (let's hope I actually did!).
- How do you write something that references the stimulus?
- Read the stimulus multiple times, try your best to deduce an overarching theme or stance on an issue. This will probably become easier the more short answers in Paper 1 that you do.
Gosh, this took a long time to write! If you've made it to the end, I really hope this helps! Feel free to contact me if you'd like some more help and advice, I could always review your practice creatives
