Imaginative Writing

1. Imaginative Writing

2. Imaginative writing • Story • Short story • Diary Entry • Memoir • Adding to the story/continuing the novel (prologue/epilogue/chapter excerpt) • Letters (Personal) • Script (play, radio, tv) or interview • Monologue • Eulogy/Obituary • Fable/Fairy-tale • Children’s story

3. Characteristics of imaginative writing • A strong voice • A specific setting • Chose a specific point of view • Character development (believable and realistic) • Specific choice in narrative style • Use of adjectives/adjectival phrases • Use of adverbs and adverbial phrases • Expanded noun groups • Showing not telling • Dialogue (formatted correctly) • Varying sentence structure (including grammatical theme choices) Intentional use of sentence length to create a pace or particular feeling in the reader • Can be written or spoken • Can be informal or formal • Low lexical count

4. Opening lines “It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife” Pride & Prejudice (Austen) 18th Century, small town

5. Opening lines continued “It was the best of times it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity…” A Tale of Two Cities (Dickens)

6. Point of view • Each point of view has advantages and disadvantages • First “I” • Second “you” • Third “he/she/they”

7. Point of viewFirst person -immediacy -eye witness account -involvement with the narrator -readers can more readily empathise -greater credibilty -limited viewpoint (narrator’s version is the only one you receive) -can be highly subjective -can be an unreliable or naïve narrator

8. Point of viewThird person -omniscient narrator OR -from perspective of one character (limited point of view) -can provide some objectivity -a story about everybody is a story about nobody -difficult for readers to connect with any one character

9. Point of viewSecond person You can feel your body returning to you, sweating and heavy, taking back its rightful shape against the star-bursting, rushing pulse of the drugs. Your feet are pushing against the point of your shoes. There’s mascara spread like Vegemite across your palms and the earth is no longer sliding towards you. It’s raining. Your skin prickles. You feel habit-fried, stillborn. You count what you can remember with reverence. Your eyes were golden. You were fierce; you were forgotten; you were perfect. You feel over-large, swollen with milk and venom, toxic and glorious. You know the drug’s glugged out of you, poured through your body back to the earth, like some mantra that won’t stop, hissed back away, deflating you. You eye the shape your legs make in the dust when you stamp. From The Danger Game by Kalinda Ashton

10. Point of view and narrative voice • Try to establish a consistent, reliable voice for your narrator character • Be on guard against telling the reader something that will sound more like the writer than the narrator (especially in first person narratives) • Third person narration can create a variance in terms of how distant the reader feels from events and characters

11. Narrative Voice in 1984 Task: Describe the narrative voice and point of view in 1984

12. Short story guidelines • In a short story, there should be action, but not too much. You’ve not got the scope to write a whole movie plot! • Aim to have a main character and perhaps one or two other characters. • The action should relate to the key ideas being explored in this piece

13. ‘Show, don’t tell’

14. Flashbacks

15. Narrative voice and Point of view Across the street from their house, in an empty lot between two houses, stood the rockpile. It was a strange place to find a mass of natural rock jutting out of the ground; and someone, probably Aunt Florence, had once told them that the rock was there and could not be taken away because without it the subway cars underground would fly apart killing all the people. This, touching on some natural mystery concerning the surface and the centre of the earth, was far too intriguing an explanation to be challenged, and it invested the rockpile, moreover, with such mysterious importance that Roy felt it to be his right, not to say his duty, to play there. Other boys were to be seen there each afternoon after school and all day Saturday and Sunday. They fought on the rockpile. Sure-footed, dangerous, and reckless, they rushed each other and grappled on the heights, sometimes disappearing down the other side in a confusion of dust and screams and upended, flying feet. ‘It’s a wonder they don’t kill themselves,’ their mother said, watching sometimes from the fire escape. ‘You children stay away from there, do you hear me?’ Though she said ‘children’, she was looking at Roy, where he sat beside John on the fire escape. ‘The good lord knows,’ she continued, ‘I don’t want you to come home bleeding like a hog every day the Lord sends.’ Roy shifted impatiently, and continued to stare at the street, as though in this gazing he might somehow acquire wings. John said nothing. He had not really been spoken to: he was afraid of the rockpile and of the boys who played there. From James Baldwin’s short story ‘The Rockpile’

16. Setting • In Year 10 you worked on the imaginative landscape as a context topic. You might have reflected on how artists use landscape to create a mood, or to reflect a character’s feelings or ideas. • When you are writing, plan what details you are going to give of the world of your story, and how you can use setting to create mood or to reveal something about characters or their lives. • Or you might be writing to create a future or imaginary world. Consider how you can establish some of the features of your world succinctly.

17. Dialogue Dialogue is always used in a story for a reason. It may be: • To show something about a character or relationship • To show the status between two characters in a situation • To show changes or developments in the status of two characters during the course of a conversation • To move the action on • In narration that is limited to one character’s point of view, to reveal some important information or back story • To create conflict • To bring in some humour

18. References • http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/culturepicturegalleries/9817505/30-great-opening-lines-in-literature.html