Stefanie Savva

For a creative writer,  Paper 1 Question 5 is probably the hardest to teach among the two English Language papers because it is not a creative writing question. Question 5 is an exercise on how well a student can write under the pressure of time, in an exam hall and with the weight of 40 marks on their shoulders. Realizing this is of vital importance in the way that you approach this question.

As with most disciplines, the study of creative writing on an undergraduate and postgraduate level has nothing to do with the approach of the subject in secondary education. While a lot of the skills needed to study said degree can be acquired in high school, creative writing is a much more inter-disciplinary degree than what Question 5 makes it to be. Let’s demonstrate this through a narrative:

A group of 25 Y10’s are in an English lesson looking at question 5. The teacher projects the following picture on the board.

The students are asked to first create some lists. What can you see? What can you hear? What can you taste? What can you touch? What can you smell? The teacher then proceeds to circle some details on the picture and asks the students to write some sentences using a simile, a metaphor, onomatopoeia or alliteration and finally the students are given a rough plan on how to write their description. In paragraph one they need to be approaching the scene, in paragraph two they need to be in the scene, in paragraph three they will need to describe a part of the scene in detail and in paragraph four they need to be leaving the scene. While not all teachers and not all schools will be following that exact pattern, something similar is usually used to provide students with some form of structure.

The students’ writing is then marked by the teacher who will specifically look for those elements that correlate to the marking criteria of the examination board. Often responses that have less ‘creative merit’ will score higher because the student has used paragraphs, a variety of punctuation and ambitious vocabulary. The 25 responses will be limited in terms of creative interpretation due to the fact that the majority of them will be informed by the contributions made in the prep time of the lesson.

Now let’s look at a group of 5 first year undergraduates in a creative writing workshop.

Two of the five would have submitted an sample of something (a chapter, a story or a poem) to be read in that week’s workshop. On of the two students have submitted a story about a storm. The student reads the story to the group while the rest keep notes. When the reading has finished, the discussion begins. The group shares thoughts and ideas on what the story is and what it could be, they pull references from different writers and try to unpick the text. Some of the will have some scientific knowledge about storms, some will make links to a natural destruction from which the writer could pull inspiration from. The teacher might make a suggestion about how the student should look into myths concerning storms and maybe embed such ideas in the narrative.

The student will then go away, look though the notes and the recommendations of the class and re-write the story. This will happen 2-3 times in the term before the student has to officially submit the story for marking, alongside an academic commentary, explaining and exploring the writing process, showing the intentions and the hard work that went into writing that piece, and in a way justifying why it could not have been done in 45 minutes.

Creative writing is a craft. Writing a story or a description is an artistic endeavor. And there is no formula that you can use to ‘solve’ composing a narrative. So why do we continue teaching it in such a way? The only answer I can come up with is because it is easier. Some of those formulas will result in high marks and as long as we are getting the expected results then why bother?

And it is this exact approach that makes Paper 1 Question 5 unbearable for a creative writer. As a teacher I am  constantly in battle with my personal approach to writing and with the way I am forced to teach writing to my students. What can I take from Raymond Queneau’s Exercises in Style that I could use in the classroom? Which aspects of the creative writing workshop can I employ when teaching writing? And is there any value to that? It is clear that I don’t have the answers to any of these questions, but there is one thing I am clear about: there must be a better way to teach creative writing.