Creative Writing Coursework – The Task

You have to produce a piece of original creative writing where you take a commonly known tale, character or otherwise easily recognisable fictional element and re-write or extend it in new ways using the conventions of at least two different styles of writing.

To accompany your story you must write a rationale which explains the different genres you have used, the elements that you have tried to copy, why you have chosen to use different genres at specific points and the different effects you have tried to achieve.

Limit the story to about 2000 words

Limit the rationale to about 500 words

Things to remember:

Try to use interesting and unexpected genres!

· Make sure that you use easily identifiable genres. If you successfully re-create a genre that no one else knows then, unfortunately, it won’t look like you’ve copied anything at all.

· Try to use innovative or unexpected genres that will tell the original story in a completely different way. Assigning different genres to different characters or different scenes in your story can paint them in an entirely new light.

· Use your own ideas – take ideas from books that you particularly love, especially if you are reading them over the holidays.

· Re-read books (or parts of books) that you think might be helpful so you can copy the style they are written in.

Keep it short!

· The three example essays on this page all achieved and A* and they are all about 2000 words long

· To score highly you do not need to write lots but you need to show close control over your written language and an ability to manipulate your writing to achieve various different effects

You should consider!

· Simply using words from a specific genre is not really going to demonstrate that you have sophisticated control over your language. You also need to make use of:

· Sentence length

· Paragraph length

· Punctuation

· Narrative style (3^rd / 1^st person - narrative intervention)

· Characterisation

· Setting