The Craft of Writing
Writing is a craft that can easily be mastered and perfected!
The Ideas and Audience
Before you write brainstorm a number of key ideas that could be used to frame your
story. The idea that you select will become the driver of your writing. You could focus on
an idea such as: The importance of walking in another’s shoes or that the end justifies
the means.
Decide who your target audience is and consider what it will take to engage them.
Now start to shape a story with the main idea and the meaning that you wish to convey
clearly in your head. Consider the setting, the characters, the key incidents, the
orientation, the coda and the resolution. A narrative about the idea of empathy could
feature characters that are bigoted, ignorant and indifferent to the suffering of others.
The setting
Play with how to orient and re-orient your reader and establish a world for your
characters focusing on showing not telling through imagery appealing to the senses
especially sound, colour, touch and smell, strong verbs rather than too many adjectives,
contrast, and a variety of sentence structures.
Contrast is a powerful tool! You could orient the reader deceptively into a warm and
secure setting in a quiet neighbourhood with white picket fences and then reorient them
abruptly disrupting their expectations through a disturbing incident and a dark
character.
Focus on the craft of writing: imagery, figurative devices, syntax, punctuation and
structure.
Ensure that your readers can ‘see’ the setting – don’t neglect those small details that
can capture the essence of a place! E.g. We buzz north through hours of good farm
country.
The big, neat paddocks get browner and drier all the while and the air feels thick and
warm. Biggie drives. He has the habit of punctuating his sentences with jabs on the
accelerator and although the gutless old Volksie doesn't exactly give you whiplash at
every flourish, it's enough to give a bloke a headache. We wind through the remnant
jarrah forest, and the sickly-looking regrowth is so rain-parched it almost crackles when
you look at it. (Tim Winton, The Turning)
The character/s
Sometimes our most effective writing is based on our lives and our experiences. Think
about the people you have met, even yourself and create one or more characters.
Think about how a character’s perception of the world and others has been shaped by
their context, attitudes, experiences, values and perspectives.
Consider dialogue and how it can be used to effectively capture the voices and
perspectives of the characters.
Focus on representing a character’s:
Voice
Eyes
Facial expression
Body language
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Dress
Talismans such as a pocket watch or a wrist band
Gestures
Relationships
How they move in their world
The objects in their home, office, etc that represent who they are or what they
have left behind.
Structure and Cohesion
Play with the narrative structure and vary the length of your paragraphs and sentences.
Remember the orientation, the complication, the coda and the resolution; however, if
you feel like taking a risk subvert some of these such as having no resolution.
You could:
Incorporate different perspectives
Use the third person but employ stream of consciousness so that the reader gets
inside the head of your character
Use flashback of a circular structure.
Employ parallel storylines
Have a twist
Build the tension to breaking point through short, fast paced sentences.
The opening paragraph should immediately draw the reader in. You could start straight
into the action or open with an evocative description of the setting.
Don’t be afraid of the one sentence paragraph!
Use a motif or an extended metaphor that reflects your main idea.
Imagery
Show don’t tell. Avoid too much information and focus on appealing to the senses
through effective descriptions. Remember one of a reader’s most powerful tools is
imagination! A text that suggests rather than tells all has a powerful impact. Choose and
control your use of a range of language features to engage and influence an audience.
This means using techniques such as:
A variety of sentence beginnings and sentence lengths. You could use short,
simple sentences and fractured sentences to create tension or long, complex
sentences to slow the action down. Ellipsis (…) is a dramatic way of leaving
something not said or hinting that what will happen is too difficult to describe.
Vary paragraph lengths – don’t be afraid to use a single sentence paragraph to
make a dramatic statement. A motif such as a key, a mirror or a door that can be
used to symbolically convey the idea or message and cohesively unify the
narrative. Poetic devices such as: similes, metaphors, personification, alliteration,
assonance, sibilants and onomatopoeia. There are many others. Tim Winton in
The Turning cleverly uses very ordinary similes to make us smile and visualize
what he is describing or what the character is feeling. E.g. “Reeds bristled like
Venetian blinds in the breeze.”
Contrast: juxtaposition can be very effective.
Imagery: paint a picture for your reader – add colour, sound and smells.
Tim Winton does this well: “From the water’s edge you couldn’t even see our
street. I found eggs in the reeds, skinks in the fallen log, a bluetongue lizard
jawing up at me with its hard scales shining amidst the sighing wild oats. I sat in
the hot shade of a melaleuca in a daze.”
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Voice
Develop a strong, distinctive voice. To achieve this is it is advantageous to write about
what you have experienced so that your writing comes from the heart. If this is not
possible because of the nature of the set task, adopt a believable persona and maintain
his/her voice. This could mean using colloquial register and slang so that you
convincingly capture the voice of the character.
Enjoy the play of your imagination, your ideas and your
language.
Contributed by the English Teacher’s Association NSW
Herald Education teaching and learning activities April 2010
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