CREATIVE WRITING PEDAGOGY

Dr. Catherine Noske,

Editor, Westerly Magazine

1. Encouraging an instinctive creative response – A generative engagement with material, an understanding of the importance of creative effect.

2. Creative skills – Confidence in language technique and the ability to craft language in ways distinct from other disciplines.

3. Building practice, the capacity for flexibility – Developing creative skills in reference to underlying theoretical concepts. This demands a confidence in application.

All senior secondary English courses aim to develop students’: skills in listening, speaking, reading, viewing and writing capacity to create texts for a range of purposes, audiences

and contexts understanding and appreciation of different uses of

language.

In addition, the English ATAR course aims to develop students’ ability to: understand the use of language for communication analyse, evaluate and create sustained imaginative,

interpretive and persuasive texts in a range of modes engage in critical analysis and evaluation.

ATAR English Yr.12 Syllabus

Responsive exercises:

1. Choose an object important to you

2. List six verbs you can associate with it

3. List six adverbs likewise

4. List six adjectives

5. Choose your favourite combination, and combine them to create the opening line of a short descriptive passage.

Don’t restrict the focus of the passage – the list-making exercise often brings out new ideas and connections to move off. You can mix it up by numbering the list and calling combinations at random.

“…A skillful artist has constructed a tale. If wise, he has not fashioned his thoughts to accommodate his incidents; but having conceived, with deliberate care, a certain unique or single effect to be wrought out, he then invents such incidents – he then combines such events as may best aid him in establishing this preconceived effect. If his very initial sentence tend not to the outbringing of this effect, then he has failed in his first step.”

Edgar Allen Poe, ‘The importance of the single effect in a prose tale’ (1842)

Composing, Section Three – 30% Questions require the candidate to demonstrate

writing skills by choosing form(s) of writing appropriate to specific audiences, contexts and purposes.

The questions require the candidate to create a sustained imaginative, interpretive or persuasive text.

Questions are not directly related to texts studied.

One question from a choice of four or five

Suggested working time: 60 minutes

Jayne Anne Phillips, ‘Cheers’“The sewing woman lived across the tracks, down past Arey’s Feed Store. Row of skinny houses on a mud alley. Her rooms smelled of salted grease and old newspaper. Behind the ironing board she was thin, scooping up papers that shuffled open in her hands. Her eyebrows were arched sharp and painted on.

…on the wall was a postcard of orange trees in Florida. A man in a straw hat reached up with his hand all curled. Beautiful Bounty said the card in wavy red letters.”

- Note: simple syntax, use of close detail, movement inwards from external to personal, symbolism in description, plenty as opposed to lack.

“Tell me something Honey. How’d I manage all these kids an no man. On television there was loud applause for the queen, whose roses were sharp and real. Her machine buzzed like an animal beside the round clock.

…When I left she tucked the money in her sweater. She had pins between her teeth and lipstick gone grainy in the cracks of her mouth. I had a red swing skirt and a bumpy A on my chest. Lord, she said. You do look pretty.”- Note: simple syntax (statements instead of questions) returns to emphasis pathos of her situation, contrast with hyper-realism of television show. Moment of catharsis in the close, wherein she recognises beauty.

Technical exercises:

You are walking through a busy park and a child lets go of a balloon. Write this (or any similar) scene: In present tense In past tense In first person perspective In third person perspective Using repetition Using the balloon as a symbol for hope Using the balloon as a symbol for fear

Complete these in runs of two/three, and discuss what changes in the piece with each manifestation; what is easy/difficult and why; what they feel was effective.

Don’t force students to share writing, but encourage them to consider what has shifted, what they might take from each.

Ask students to develop their favourite into a full piece.

Developing Perspectives: Write a story about a man who has lost his son

in a war, without mentioning either death, war or the son.

Write a story about the same man, from the perspective of his wife.

Write a letter from the son, sent home before he died.

Exercise aims to encourage student in the application of technique as a problem-solving mechanism to the scenario. Student must identify and apply their choice of technique in responding.

Salman Rushdie sees writers as:

“‘the unacknowledged legislators of the world’, to believe in the literary art as the proper counterweight to power, and to see literature as a lofty transnational, transcultural force that could, in Bellow’s great formulation, ‘open the universe a little more.’”

Joseph Anton (2012)