Imaginative writing - you can do it!

Writing is a process

Nobody sits down and tosses a great piece of writing off first try.

Writing well takes time.

There are four steps in the writing process. Depending how much time you have and how long the piece is, they could take anything from half an hour to weeks, or even months to complete.

The four steps are:

1. planning

2. drafting /writing

3. editing

4. rewriting.

Steps three and four are repeated for as long as it takes to be happy with the result.

Audience, purpose and context

This is the golden triangle of good writing. Engrave these three words in your heart and mind.

Writing well means knowing

1. what you want to do (purpose)

2. who it’s for (audience) and

3. the situation surrounding it (context).

While these four steps are basically the same, what you do in the planning process is going to change depending on the nature of that Golden Triangle.

A student has to master two main types of writing. The first (most fun) one is called ‘imaginitive’. This is what it sounds like. You are the creator, it’s all yours to make up and write down. You invent it. The form you most often use in school is called narrative writing. That means ‘story’. But it could also include poetry, or a script for a play or a film.

Narrative writing is mostly fiction, and you’ll know it mostly from reading novels - they are all

narrative.

There is another species of narrative writing, which is non-fiction. It’s based on facts and real events, but they are presented as a story. The story is a true one, not made entirely out of the writer’s imagination. If you’ve read the story of someone’s life, or a book about ‘my hero’, or a story of something that happened in history, that’s narrative non-fiction.

Let’s work through the essentials for creative writing.

Planning

Turn the computer OFF.

On separate bits of paper, post-it notes, using a mindmap, or a whiteboard - whatever works for you – write your main idea down. All the ideas that spring into your head after that are written down and added to it like branches to a tree.

Sort these into ‘families’, look for the links between issues or themes that relate to each other.

In a creative piece you should aim for three major branches:

The plot – what happens

The setting – where it happens

The characters – who it happens to

Now sort them into ‘must have and ‘could’ have. Throw out the rest. If you realise something

important is missing, add it in. Now rearrange them in the order they will occur in your story and get ready to write.