Above us, the Milky Way is a slash of sheer silver gossamer, studded with diamonds. The stars of other constellations are in sharp focus, stretching far out into the heavens. Two trains blaze past in the night, sirens and headlights blaring as the signal bells ring on the road next to us. They pierce the... Continue Reading →
Use the image above to write creatively about a character’s response to entering this unfamiliar setting for the first time. Simmo sat on a hard bench near the staircase, which was a wide thing with a strip of red carpet going up the centre. It looked like something a Disney princess would come floating down... Continue Reading →
The 2020 Standard Module C question gave students 40 minutes to Write about a significant place. Begin with the words: This is my world now, and it can be yours too, if you like. A place can soak through your skin like sweat, and ooze into your heart and soul. Breathe it in and let me... Continue Reading →
Then, although it was still the end of the story, I put it at the beginning..., as if I needed to tell the end first in order to go on and tell the rest. Lynda Davis * Rachel looked like a candle flame, even in her sleep. Outside, a single tent away, I could hear Leah, my... Continue Reading →
a schoolboy on holidays, resting in the still shade, / confident within the granary of empire, wealth / that keeps home secure (John Kinsella, ''After 94 degrees in the shade' by Lawrence Alma-Tadema' * In the edifice of his text, the poet keeps them separated in different poems, like two prisoners who don’t know that... Continue Reading →
How queer and foreign it must seem to you and all the coarse words and cruelty which I now relate are far away in ancient time. Peter Carey, The True History of the Kelly Gang * My father is an empty iron suit, a trash-can of quarter-inch metal as crude and dented as a hobo's... Continue Reading →
...were we led all that way for / Birth or death? * Set down this, he said, set down this. And I did, although I was not there as a scribe. I set down his story about following a star in his youth, and how it led him to the land of my own people,... Continue Reading →
What is above all needed is to let the meaning choose the word, and not the other way around. –George Orwell, ‘Politics and the English Language’ * Once upon a time I had a boss (at a tutoring business) who sent out a fortnightly email. It was a relentlessly – sometimes exhaustingly – exuberant piece.... Continue Reading →
Choose a character, persona or speaker from ONE prescribed text that you have studied in Module C. Express the thought processes of this character, persona or speaker by exploring a moment of tension in the text from an alternative point of view. * The mirror cracked from side to side. It had been a cheapie... Continue Reading →
Create a piece of imaginative, discursive or persuasive writing that ENDS with the image above. * 'But enough about me,' he says. 'You had a question.' 'What's it like? When you get there.' He thinks for a minute and says, 'You stand in a narrow laneway between streets, the walls covered in graffiti by a... Continue Reading →
The Craft of Writing 