Creative-Writing for 5th to 12th class students ( it also in your syllabus )

Creative-Writing

THE teacher  was explaining the lines in the beginning of Shakespeare's play Macbeth.  It was a description of the battle and the lines were. 

Like  Valour's minion, carved out his paasage, Till he faced the slave :

With ne'er shook hands, nor baded farewell to him.

The  he unseamn'd him from the nave to the chaps,....

The teacher  asked the students what the word 'unseamed' meant. It was difficult.

The teacher prodded them on. "What does "seam' mean? Haven't you ever come across the word?" One of the students blurted out "Cricket ball" 

This is an example  of   how each  of  us  reacts to words  according to what our own experience bas been.

 When  we write about factual information, all of us write almost similarly. But we. write for pleasure each of us may write about the same event in diferent ways. 

One very important element in creative writing is imagination. This is reflected  in

🔵 our view or perspective 

🔵 choice of words 

🔵 the comparisons we make 

🔵 the images we use 

🔵 the tone we adopt 

Let us study the paragraph below.

 

A town is like an animal. A town has a nervous system and a head and shoulders and feet. A town is a thing separate from all other towns, so that there are no towns alike. And a  town  has a whole emotion. How news travels through a town is a mystery nat easily to be solved.  News seems to move faster than small boys can scramble and dart to tell it, faster than women can call it over the fences. (from an adapted version of Steinbeck's The Pearl). 

The topic.                           :   A Town 

Analogy or comparison.   :    to an animal 

 Word choice                      : "has a whole emotion."

 Comparisons                    : "faster than small boys can scramble and dart, faster than women..."  

 We find the first element of imagination operating in the way the writer visualises the town. Then he extends the primary analogy. The tone he adopts is light humour, a little sarcastic. 

When we begin to write a story or poem we let our imagination free. We try to say  in a new way. This novelty is what makes our writing pleasurable to the reader.

Sometimes sentences structures are also different from factual writing. Consider the following:

 They waited in their chairs until the pearls came in, and then they cackled and fought and shouted and threatened until they reached the lowest price the fisherman would stand. (from The Pearl). 

In a normal construction we will not use so many 'ands'. But the action of the story is best reflected through this kind of chaining of actions through 'ands'. It is appropriate to the movement of the action described.

Let us look at another example 

She dragged me after her into Miss Rachel's sitting-room, which opened to her bedroom.  At her bedroom door stood Miss Rachel, her face almost white as the white dressing- gown she wore. 

The author has used a simile : "white as the white dressing - gown she wore."  In fact, the whiteness of a human face of because of a strong emotion - fear or shock.

 

But here comparing the whiteness to the dressing-gown she wore serves to exaggerate and intensify the emotion. 

Exaggeration is one of the ways in which fact is distinguished from fiction. 

Now look at these lines from a well-known poem, 'An Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard' by Thomas Gray. 

Full many a gem of purest ray serene 

The dark unfathom'd caves of ocean bear 

Full many a flower is born to blush unseen 

And waste its fragrance in the desert air. 

The stanza carries a simple statement : many people with outstanding qualities live and die unnoticed by the world. 

To state this, the poet has used two strong images, 'a gem' and 'a flower.' 

He has used two contrasting placed the ocean, that is full of water and the desert with no water at all. 

Also notice the rhyming words : 'serene' and 'unseen', 'bear' and 'air'. The first and third lines also begin with the same words - "full many a". The lines are of equal length. 

All this together contribute to the literary quality of these lines.