A-level Creative Writing Preparing to teach Preparing to teach ...

AQA qualification training

A-level Creative Writing

Preparing to Teach

Creative Writing Resources

BOOKLET 3 Published date: Summer 2013 version 1

Permission to reproduce all copyright materials have been applied for. In some cases, efforts to contact copyright holders have been unsuccessful and AQA will be happy to rectify any omissions of acknowledgements in future documents if required.

Contents

Page

Example of student work

5

The Reflective Commentary

10

15 Ideas to Help You Start Teaching

11

Reading and Resources

15

A Piece of Student Writing FLIGHT April 30th, 1912 It was always windy by the sea. It blew in off the water, bringing with it the taste of salt and wearing away at the long white cliffs that stood sentinel against the high waves. I could see Elise standing on the cliff edge, the wind whipping her long hair about her face and shoulders. She faced out to sea, poised on her tiptoes as if about to dive over the edge. She wouldn’t of course, but that was just what she looked like to me. A bird on the edge of flight. I knew she liked the feeling of standing there, the wind roaring in your ears so loudly that it blocked everything out, and so close to the edge that it felt like you were standing on the edge of the world. She’d never told me this, not in so many words, but I knew it to be true. I loved the feeling too. I jumped off my bike and dragged it up to the cliff edge, dumping it down with a clatter and clambering my way up to stand beside her. She acknowledged me with a nod, though she didn’t turn her head. I nodded back and stared out to sea. The roaring wind made normal conversation impossible, so I spoke inside instead. Are you okay? She asked. Yeah, I guess. You? I’m bored, Toby. I glanced over at her. She wore the long skirt that mother had given her, the wind making it ripple like waves. She stared unflinchingly into the oblivion where sea met sky. The wind had picked up a haze of water droplets far out to sea that made it impossible to tell where the water ended and the sky began. I took her hand and gave it a gentle squeeze. Standing like this once before, we’d been mistaken for boyfriend and girlfriend, though in truth we were twins. We were separated by mere minutes, but she was still technically my younger sister, and so I cared for her as such. I sent the memory to Elise and felt her smile. We had been able to do this for as long as we could remember, communicating silently in words and pictures and feelings. Some posh London doctor had apparently written a paper on it, calling it “Twin Telepathy”. We’d never really had a name for it. For us, it was just “talking”. We shared dream settings sometimes, not necessarily the same dream, but just noticing each other in passing. She sent me a dream now. Not one we’d shared but one I was familiar with nevertheless. She told me it a lot, in both words and pictures. Her dream for the future. She stood proud next to a beautiful biplane, having just beaten the record for youngest woman to fly the channel. Dressed in smart aviator’s gear, she grinned happily and waved. Harriet Quimby, the first woman to receive a pilot’s licence and who had in real life flown the channel a few weeks before, was shaking Elise’s hand. Quimby was Elise’s idol. The image was accompanied by one word: Adventure. I blinked the dream away and found her grinning at me. She’d longed for adventure for a long time, I knew, and had loved birds and planes throughout her childhood. She wanted to escape our little town, to fly to France and maybe even America, in time.

You’d fly that far to try and get away from me? I teased. I’d have to, to get away from the smell. Hey! I don’t smell! She laughed and stuck her tongue out. I stuck mine out back. As close as we were, I’d never shared the same ambitions as her. In fact, we were quite the contrast. Whilst Elise liked to be outside, running around, dreaming of flying and trawling the newspaper that father brought back every night for pictures and stories of planes, pinning them to her side of our shared bedroom, I preferred to read, cook with mother and help out in our little bakery. Technically, we were both due to inherit the shop, but it was no secret that Elise was not interested. It was a responsibility that I looked forward to. I felt at home here. We better head home, it’s getting late. I dragged my bike back to the road, Elise hopped up onto the handlebars and we cycled home, chatting about school and seagulls. July 2nd, 1912 TWO DEAD IN TRAGIC PLANE CRASH Harriet Quimby, world-famous pilot, known best for her achievements of being the first woman to fly the English Channel, died yesterday in a tragic plane accident at Boston Harbour. Quimby, carrying William Willard as passenger, was performing a standard exhibition flyover at the annual aviation meet when the two seater plane, flying at 1500 ft lurched, throwing both pilot and passenger to their deaths. It is impossible to tell for certain what caused this sudden lurch and theories vary from... I’m sorry, Elise. Come on, let’s light a candle for them. November 27th, 1915 There was a war on. It had been going on for nearly two years at this point. It didn’t hit us as badly as it hit the city. Being a small costal town, I guess they didn’t think we were worth bombing. We’re a fairly self-sufficient community too, what with being literally surrounded by farmers and fields, there’s food aplenty. School still ran, but broken up by air raid drills and lessons on the war. We weren’t allowed to the cliffs as much as we used to be, and we could often hear the planes buzzing overhead. Evacuees came and went. It was a difficult time. November 11th, 1918 That day came the best eighteenth birthday present we could have hoped for. The war ended. We would never be conscripted and father was due to return to us within the month. Elise and I blew out candles on our birthday cake as if we were little kids again and we toasted to the continuation of peace. We also toasted to Elise’s success – a pilot in London was offering to take her on as an apprentice. “Cheers to adventure!” Elise (somewhat tipsy) raised her glass. “To adventure!” Mother and I chorused. You gonna miss me, brother? Miss you? It’s taken me eighteen years to get rid of you! Hey! Duh. Of course I’ll miss you.

May 14th, 1927

You are formally invited to the wedding of TobyJames Cadwell to Maria Elizabeth Sandry ~ 16th July 1928 ~ January 2nd, 1930 I could hear the sound of the post plop onto our front doormat and little Jamie Running to collect it, his tiny toddler feet pattering across the tiles. I slid the last of the bread into the oven and carefully closed the door. Jamie pattered into the kitchen, nearly tripping on a loose tile and grabbing hold of my trouser leg to stop himself from falling. “Woah there kid,” I scooped him up carefully and sat him on the countertop. I’d finished with the bread so it didn’t matter if it got a bit dirty. “What you got there?” I gestured to the post that he clutched protectively to his chest like little paper treasures. He held it up and pretended to read it, like he’d seen me do with the newspaper. The letters were upside-down. He held them out to me. I sorted through them with half an eye. A few orders for the bakery. A letter for Maria, and a telegram for me. Postmarked France... I set Jamie back down on the floor and handed him the letter. “Go give this to mum,” He nodded and toddled off. I carefully opened the telegram, feeling surprisingly nervous with anticipation. I read cautiously and felt the grin spread across my face. Brother. Record broken! I am in France. Smooth flight. The French seem nice. I refuse to eat snails though. Love Elise. August 19th, 1941 Please, Elise, don’t do it. I hated the war. Every second of it. The first had made me scared and upset – scared of what would be lost and upset that people could be so cruel. This one just made me angry. Why was everyone so blind? The war brought nothing but suffering and pain. I had grown up with it, and now my child would too. It wasn’t right. Jamie didn’t like it any more than I did. A lot of the boys at his school, brash young lads full of teenage bravado played soldiers in the playground, emulating their fathers over the channel. I had a small collection of white feathers at my bedside. And now Elise! It’s the right thing to do, Toby. I may not, but you do have a family to protect, you should understand. This cut me deeply.

You think I don’t want to protect them?! This is the very reason that I won’t go to war! The more people that join up, the more casualties there will be! If nobody went to war, then no one would have to die. You’re so naive. I... I was lost for words. We’d never argued like this before. I fly out in two days. I said nothing. I just wanted you to know. We stood there for a moment. The silence was unbearable. Then we simultaneously stepped forwards and hugged each other tightly. I’m sorry, Toby. Her thought was softer. I just think this is the right thing for me to do. The RAF... You’ll be in a plane right, you’ll be safe... Honestly, who’s the girl in this family? I’ll be okay. Promise? There was a long pause. Promise. April 17th, 1945 THE SECRETARY OF WAR DESIRES ME TO EXPRESS HIS DEEP REGRET THAT YOUR DAUGHTER FLIGHT LIEUTENANT ELISE CADWELL HAS BEEN REPORTED MISSING IN ACTION PRESUMED DEAD SINCE TWENTY NINE MARCH IN FRANCE. IF FURTHER DETAILS OR OTHER INFORMATION ARE RECIEVED YOU WILL BE PROMPTLY NOTIFIED. The telegram slipped from my fingers. I felt numb. I held my family close, and together we cried. April 30th, 1945 Toby. Huh? Toby! Ah! I awoke with a start. That voice, I was sure I had heard a voice. A voice I knew. A voice I had cried over until I could cry no more. Elise’s voice. Probably just my mind playing tricks on me. God knows I’d been hearing her voice a lot since I’d received the telegram. But it was never her. Just some laughing child or pleasant-voiced woman. But something seemed different this time. I needed to be at the cliffs. I couldn’t say why. I just knew I needed to be there. It was important. I slipped out of bed, careful not to wake Maria, and tiptoed to the shed, stopping only to pull on my coat and boots. I unlocked the shed and pulled out my bike. I hadn’t ridden it since last summer, but it was still in good enough shape. I cycled to the cliffs in a sort of trance. I wasn’t sure why I was doing this. There she was. Standing tip-toed on the cliff edge. The bird on the edge of flight. I wouldn’t allow myself to believe it. This was just a dream, conjured up by my grieving mind. Yet still I walked

towards her. I caught sight of a biplane, crashed clumsily into the long grass of the field. I started running. Elise! She turned her head slightly, and I saw. It was her. Really her. Cut, bruised and with one arm hanging limp, but alive. I was barely twenty meters away. She swayed slightly. Ten meters. She stumbled. Toby, help... And slipped over the cliff. I dived forwards, hands scrambling, heart racing, reaching, reaching. And... Got you. Shaking slightly, I pulled her back onto the verge. She gripped my hand. That was one hell of an adventure. She smiled shakily. My tears flowed freely as I rejoiced the return of my sister. Yes, I sobbed. Yes, it was.

With thanks to Esher College.

In what ways does this story fulfil the criteria for Band 5?

The Reflective Commentary Key Aspects of your Writing to Consider in your Reflective Commentary: • Your Own Reading • The Drafting Process • Significant Stylistic Details • Aspects of Process • Significant Events / Contextual Factors

Activity The following extract is taken from a reflective commentary written by a university Creative Writing student. Read it through and make notes about your observations of the style of writing adopted. Consider what the writer is saying. Do her thoughts and ideas have any significance for your writing? The process of the production of my work is tangible. It comprises numerous small notebooks that I have carried with me throughout the project. In these, I have written down thoughts, observations, snatches of conversation, ideas for poems, titles and lines that have suggested themselves to me. I have essentially collected words, a daily activity that has resulted in source materials for writing poems. I have found that reflecting on the contents of a notebook ensures that I rarely start to write with a blank page in front of me. The way I read poetry has become as important as what I read. Reading is an integral part of the writing process. In the final stages of the project, my reading and rereading took place as I was writing not as a separate activity. I used other people’s poetry to suggest ideas, images, language and techniques that I could incorporate into my own work. This process has developed my use of allusion in particular and also ensures that my work responds to and reflects the poetry of other writers. I now read as a writer, actively rather than passively. Reflecting on the final collection, I notice that most of the poems contain a representation of a female figure. This was not a prerequisite of my project. As one of my strands of inquiry was specifically about place, I expected that less peopled and more located poetry might emerge. This has not been the case.

Ideas to Get You Started Workshops 1. Automatic Writing This is frequently used in writing workshops as a starter to get students in the right frame of mind for writing. Ask students to write continuously for 3 minutes, they must not take their pens off the paper. Whatever they write is their own and should not be shared. 2. List poems A great way of generating ideas for personal writing. Poems are often used in writing workshops as stimulus for both poetry and prose as they are often short complete texts. Ask students to read I Come From by Robert Seatter. They should then write their own list of biographical detail. Choose one detail and use this as the start of a piece of writing. 3. Characterisation Place your hand on a piece of paper and draw round it. Imagine this is the hand of a character you want to develop. Write an adjective in each finger that describes your character. Around the outside of the hand, answer the following questions: If the character was a song what song would they be? If the character was a tree what tree would they be? If the character was an animal what animal would they be? If the character was a piece of clothing, what would they be? If the character was a piece of furniture what would they be? If the character was a time of day what time of day would they be? If the character was a type of weather what would they be? Now, in the palm of the hand, write four words to describe the way other people see this character. Write about your character for 5 minutes, using these details as starting points. 4. Grammar Write a short piece about something that you did today. You are only allowed to use simple sentences. What is the effect of this? 5. Describe a noisy place that you know well. A canteen or a shopping centre for example. You are not allowed to use any adjectives or adverbs.

6. Point-of-View Jed caught a taxi in London road. As always, he was breathless and a little panicky, sure he had forgotten something and worried about what lay ahead. Adding your own flourishes and details, write two more short versions of this in (a) The first-person perspective (i.e. ‘I’) in the present tense. (b) The second-person perspective (i.e. ‘You’) in the past tense. 7. Showing vs Telling Convert the following ‘telling’ narration into ‘showing’, i.e. into dramatization with concrete spoken dialogue as opposed to summary. Add more details (sounds, etc), use speech marks, indents and keep it in the PAST TENSE: She answered the phone and gave her name. She said she did not take cold calls and that she regarded them as an invasion of privacy. She added that she was especially not interested in double-glazing. 8. Biographical Pieces Get students to interview each other and write short biographical pieces that they share with the class. This could become a group profile booklet. This is a good way of introducing the idea of the Anthology, which can be created as a complementary text later in the course. 9. Writers’ Resources Introduce the tools of the writer: Dictionaries, Thesaurus, Internet, Libraries, Other People, The World at Large. Discuss how a writer exploits these resources for research. 10. Favourite Reading Ask students to bring in a short extract from a favourite piece of writing and introduce it to the class. 11. Future as a Writer Establish confidence in themselves as writers. Write the ‘blurb’ for the publication they would like to write. 12. Professional Writing As a group, read the local paper or listings publication from cover to cover in order to identify different types and styles of published writing.

Other Ways of Starting 13. The Creative Writing Journal The journal is a key idea behind this course, so it is well worth considering its inception right at the start of the course. One possible way to do this is to do a tour of the site. Walk around your teaching site and collect fragments of language (and other things) which you notice as ‘useable’. Come back to class and use (some of) these in a short piece of writing. Share your writing with others…etc 14. Reading as Stimulus We have clearly indicated that reading is a vital part of the writing process, so using some short texts as an introduction to writing is a good early starter. Flash fiction (see for example http://www.flash-fiction-world.com/examples-of-flash-fiction.html) is a good source, as is short poetry. Two personal favourites are Pope’s Epigram (I am his highness dog..) and Fleur Adcock’s Send-Off (Half an hour before my flight was called) but finding your own, for your own reasons, is the best way to work. 15. Writing to Order You will want to establish straightway that your students must write, write, write. One way of doing this is to introduce them to the idea of writing to order. At an extreme you could start the course with one of the sample questions, but a gentler way to start would be with a short task and a local context. From this you will immediately generate some writing which the students can then share, comment on etc

(see 2 above)

I COME FROM I come from a suburb waiting forever for the train to London, from smashed windows, graffiti, fog on the platform, skinheads and fights if you look the wrong way I come from clean handkerchiefs, dinner money, God please and sorry one hundred times over, draft excluders and double glazing I come from Chambers Etymological Dictionary, maths tables, 11+, Look & Learn an almost complete set of Observer I-Spy books a family of teachers and yet more teachers, an Orkney grandfather, a Shropshire grandma from no accent at all I come from kindness I come from doh-re-me: The Sound of Music recorders, clarinets, a pianola all the way from Scotland I come from rats behind the garage, and a man who followed me back from the library I come from silence I come from a garden from my father mowing the lawn into the dark from fences, walls, gates and hedges Cuthberts seed packets, The Perfect Small Garden from the sound through the night of trains, trains, trains Robert Seatter from On the Beach with Chet Baker (Seren 2006)

A-level Creative Writing Suggested Reading List

Teachers and students of A-level Creative Writing may find the following reading list useful. It is not definitive but is an evolving document. If you would like to recommend a book for the list please send your suggestion to AQA: [email protected]. Encouraging students to read widely and read for pleasure is most important of all. The following books are secondary to that, with useful exercises and examples for teachers. General: Creative Writing: A Workbook with Readings: The Open University, ed. Linda Anderson. The Writer’s Workbook: ed. Newman Cusick and La Tourette (Hodder Arnold 2004) The Creative Writing Workbook: John Singleton (Palgrave Macmillan 2001) The Hero with a Thousand Faces: Joseph Campbell (New World Library, 2012) Inside Creative Writing: Graeme Harper (Palgrave Macmillan 2012) On Writing: Stephen King (Hodder) Doing Creative Writing: Steve May (2007) Routledge Negotiating with the Dead: Margaret Atwood (Virago) Writing Down the Bones: Natalie Goldberg (Shambhala Publications) Cambridge Introduction to Creative Writing: David Morley (2007) Cambridge Companion to Creative Writing: David Morley (2012) Reading Like a Writer: Francine Prose (Union Books) Solutions for Writers; Practical Craft Techniques for Fiction and Non-fiction: Sol Stein (Souvenir Press) The Handbook of Creative Writing: Steven Earnshaw, ed. (Edinburgh University Press, 2007) Writing with Power: Techniques for Mastering the Writing Process: Peter Elbow, (OUP, 1981) 99 Ways to Tell a Story: Matt Madden (Chamberlain/Penguin 2005)

Prose: The Art of Writing Fiction: Andrew Cowan (Longman 2011) Creative Writing: A Guide and Glossary to Fiction Writing: Colin Bulman (Cambridge: Polity Press) Fiction/Non-fiction: A Reader and Rhetoric: Garry Engkent and Lucia Engkent (Nelson, 2001) The Arvon Book of Literary Non-fiction: Sally Cline and Midge Gillies (Bloomsbury, 2012) The Art of Creative Non-fiction: Lee Gutkind (John Wiley & Sons, 1997) Poetry: Writing Poems: Peter Sansom (Bloodaxe 1994) Drafting and Assessing Poetry: A Guide for Teachers: Sue Dymoke (Sage 2003) Reading Poetry: An Introduction Tom Furniss and Michael Bath (Longman, 1996) The Poet’s Kit: Katherine Knight Praxis Books 1994 The Forms of Poetry: Peter Abbs and John Richardson (Cambridge University Press 1990)

Script and Screenwriting: Story: Substance, Structure, Style and the Principles of Screenwriting: Robert McKee, (Methuen, 1999) Crafting Short Screenplays That Connect: Claudia Hunter Johnson (Focal Press/Elsevier, 2010) The Creative Screenwriter: Exercises to Expand Your Craft: Zara Waldeback and Craig Batty (Bloomsbury 2012)

Useful Websites

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NAWE website www.nawe.co.uk

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NATE website www.nate.org.uk

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NWP website www.nwp.org.uk

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Arvon Foundation www.arvon.org