Imaginative writing sow

Creative Writing Scheme of Work

Task: a) write a story with the title ‘Trapped’ and
b) create a series of entries either for a blog or a diary, in which one of the characters
from your own story expresses their thoughts and feelings about what happens.
(up to 1200 words)

AO4
Write to communicate clearly, effectively and imaginatively. Organise information and ideas
into structured and sequenced sentences, paragraphs and whole texts. Use a range of sentence
structures for clarity, purpose and effect, with accurate punctuation and spelling

Marking Criteria:
http://www.ocr.org.uk/download/assess_mat/ocr_31037_sam_gcse_2010_sam_a651.pdf

Coopers Coborn Lesson Plan
Name of teacher: Class/Subject: Room: Date:

Year 11 Creative Writing
LESSON ONE

Topic/Focus with Lesson Outcomes & Learning Objectives: (incl. key terminology)
Learning Objective: To explore what constitutes creative
Key Words: Content/Narrative. Vocabulary. Structure.
Big Picture: Previous lessons/place in SoW/relevance/learning links
Introducing students to key aspect/foundations of project
Starter:
Students to write their own interpretation as to what constitutes creative. Class feedback; brainstorm
commonalities and make these commonalities into sub-headings and leave space to write beneath each

one. Match sub-headings with key words and introduce any of the key words which have not been
brainstormed.
Structure (with timing): Starter; Teaching strategies; Activities – VAK; learning styles: groupings/pairs /independent;
differentiation; Plenary etc.

Task One: Hand out excerpts (Resource One) and, in pairs, students read through and make notes (model an
example first) as to how each might qualify as creative according to the above sub-headings or in any ways
besides. Or students could highlight areas from the passages in colours matched to the sub-headings.
Task Two: In groups of three or four (ideally one student per sub-heading) continue (one or two more
paragraphs) one of the given excerpts, the idea being to maintain the main features of creativity within that
excerpt. Students can take one sub-heading each and make notes before the group comes together to draft the
continuation. Each student should have a copy of the continuation in their own exercise book.
Task Three: Groups peer assess (but individually) one another’s efforts, highlighting in different colours the
respective areas of creativity.
Plenary: Class Feedback – note examples of creativity on the board.
Key Learning Activities: (students Assessment for Learning (AfL) & Learning to Learn
demonstrating learning) (L2L) Strategies:
Written work. Group Discussions. Peer Assessment. Group work.

Assessment/homework: (incl. Register; peer Resources: (incl. use of ICT – IWB/DGB)
marking; use of criteria)
Homework: Students to bring in their own Written Excerpts. IWB. Highlighter Pens.
‘creative’ passage, prepared to discuss with the
class next lesson.
Classroom management/individual pupil requirements: (incl. G&T, IEPs; seating; SEN etc; H & S; use of TAs)


LESSON TWO

Learning Objective: To revise figurative language and to practice emotive writing.
Key Words: Emotive Language.
To build on previous lesson’s learning.
Starter:
Two or three students present homework from previous lesson.

Task One: Referring back to the excerpts from Lesson One students underline any examples of figurative
language and in the margins explain, specifically, the effect/s of each. Feedback.
Task Two: Give students a range of effects (to create suspense, to evoke serenity . . . ) and, in pairs, they write
a sentence, using figurative language, to create those effects.
Task Three: Ask for a definition of emotive language – students write definition into their exercise books.
Task Four: Students draw onto the centre of their page any object they like – should be no larger than a
postcard. Around the picture students create four spaces and head each one with a different emotion – anger,
pity, happiness, melancholy. Then fill each space with vocabulary (across the five senses) appropriate to the
emotion.
Task Five: Write two paragraphs, each describing the same details of the picture; one paragraph written from
the perspective of an angry/pitiful, happy, melancholic narrator and a second from the perspective of a
narrator experiencing a different emotion. Use the vocabulary already generated.
Plenary: Readings
See Above.




LESSON THREE

Learning Objective: To explore the purpose of and create your own extended metaphors
Key Words: Metaphor. Extended Metaphor.

Starter:
Students to draw a bird’s eyeview of a beach/library/city centre/theme
park/classroom/market/zoo/theatre. Picture should e as detailed as possible.
Task One: Students read ‘Not the Furniture Game’ or ‘Zoom’ or ‘The Circus Animal’s Desertion’ (Resource
Two) Discuss one or more as to the metaphor and extended metaphor. Students complete paragraph
beginning, “Armitage/Yeats has employed the metaphor of ___________________ and made it an extended
metaphor in that . . .” to explain the purpose and effect/s of the extended metaphor/s. Feedback.
Task Two: Students return to their own drawings and think of a metaphor. Then think of an analogy for each
detail of the drawing so as to create an extended metaphor. Model an example first.
Extension: Create your won extended metaphor poem.
Plenary: Show and Tell.
See above. Class Feedback/Discussions.


Resource Two



LESSON FOUR

Learning Objective: To explore the roles of recurring motifs.
Key Words: Recurring Motif. Subtext.

Starter:

Complete Resource Three: Match up the motif with the purpose (top half of table) Make up your own motif
or purpose to complete the bottom half of the table.
Task One: Watch short films (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hD8uQzu0IL0 /
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_79g7KMAisU) and students, in pairs, make a note of all the recurring
motifs that appear. Discuss.
Task Two: Give students a simple narrative (boy walking dog) and they come up with ideas as to
themes/ideas that the narrative could explore (futility, routine?) For each idea students then generate ideas as
to images/motifs that could help express the idea. Students should copy this down from the board.
Task Three: In small groups, students prepare a treatment for a brief dramatisation of the given narrative or
one of their own.
Plenary: Class Feedback.
See above.

Homework. Groups should be prepared (i.e.
props, costumes) to film their short films next IWB.
lesson.


LESSON FIVE


Learning Objective: To recap previous learning.
Key Words: See above – lessons one to four

Starter:
Students, in their groups, are to finish their short film treatments, adding to what they already have by
finding ways to incorporate examples of all of the key words from the previous four lessons.
Task One: In groups, students film their short films.
Task Two: Students show their films (unedited?) to the rest of the class, explaining their decisions and how
they incorporated previous learning.
Plenary: Students are spot picked to give examples, from the films, of previous key words.


Cameras. IWB



LESSON SIX


Learning Objective: To explore what it is that makes for convincing characterisation.
Key Words: Empathy/Universality. Idiosyncrasies. Vernacular. Narrative Voice/Tone. Perspective.

Starter:
Each student to, in the centre of a page, draw an outline of a friend, teacher, family member . . . and
around that diagram to note all of the things which determine his/her impression of that person. Could
model an example first. Feedback.
Task One: Discuss Key Words. Students then highlight examples of those key words in excerpts (Resource 4)
Feedback; discuss.
Task One: Write a paragraph or two either to describe a day in the life of the previously chosen friend, family
member, teacher or to continue on from one of the given excerpts.
Task Three: Peer Assess above paragraphs, highlighting key word examples.
Plenary: Feedback to class.
Peer Assessment.

Homework: Write up final drafts of Character
paragraphs – one A4 page.



LESSON SEVEN

Learning Objective: To analyse the ways in which suspense is created.
Key Words: Pace. Impact. Mystery.

Starter:
Brainstorm components of suspense – personal experiences of what it is that creates suspense (the
unknown, the unexpected, the unfamiliar, questions to be answered, consequences, people involved
etc.)
Task One: Watch the below film clips. In pairs discuss and make notes as to how suspense is created in each.
Class feedback.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KQXfBbWgncw http://www.youtube.com/watch?
v=8VP5jEAP3K4&NR=1
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dG5Qk-jB0D4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kWoeIbG3JuY&feature=channel
Task Two: Translate one of the scenes into a paragraph, mirroring the key moments of suspense in the
writing. If time allows, could produce an example as a class, or make a list of the most common film
techniques and discuss how each might be affected in writing.
Plenary: Feedback, focusing on techniques used to translate film techniques.



IWB.



LESSON EIGHT

Learning Objective: To explore different kinds of ‘trapped.’
Key Words: Physical. Pyschological. Emotional.

Starter:
Discuss key words, specifically how each can be applied to the idea of being ‘trapped.’ Students to think
of two specific examples of ‘trapped’ for each of the key words.
Task One: As a class read through excerpts (Resource Five). In pairs students highlight language, lines,
images etc and colour co-ordinate according to key words. Feedback.
Task Two: In groups of four (paired students from previous task to be separated) are given one key word each
and work together to create a powerpoint presentation which they will show to the rest of the class next
lesson. Presentation should cover examples of how a sense of entrapment is conveyed in the group’s given
key word area.
Plenary: Progress Reports from each group.


Homework: To complete group presentations
ready fro next lesson. Computer Room. Resource Five.



LESSON NINE

Learning Objective: To recap ideas of ‘trapped’ from previous lesson and to create a narrative arc.
Key Words: Equilibrium. Disturbed Equilibrium. Narrative Arc.

Starter:
Students draw a narrative arc onto a sheet of A3 plain paper and have five minutes to plot onto the arc
a beginning, middle and end. Emphasise that this will be a rough draft.
Task One: Presentations from previous lesson. Students should, on the other side of their A3 page, make notes
relevant to the type of trapped they have chosen to write about – language techniques to use, imagery,
sentence types etc.
Task Two: Students to finalise narrative arcs, filling in six to ten narrative events in chronological order. Each
event will later become a paragraph.
Task Three: Students then, in a different colour, annotate their arcs to show where and how they will account
for each of the topics covered in previous lessons (suspense, characterisation, recurring motifs, extended
metaphors . . . )
Plenary: Show and Tell.

Homework: To finish narrative arcs – these will A3 plain paper.
be plans for final coursework pieces.



LESSON TEN

Learning Objective: To begin writing a draft of the final coursework piece.
Key Words: Select from A04 description or from key words or from both.

Starter:
Show students A04 description, discuss and, as a class produce examples of how to and how not to
meet the criteria.
Task One: Students begin writing their first drafts.
Task Two: For the last fifteen minutes of the lesson each student has their work peer assessed by two or three
of his/her classmates. This assessment should be thorough and detailed and should refer to the criteria from
AO4 as well as the key words from previous lessons. 　
Plenary: Students read over comments on their work and can ask for clarification and further guidance from
those who wrote the comments.
Peer Assessment using AO4

Homework: Rewrite first half of first draft.



LESSON ELEVEN

Learning Objective: To finish writing a draft of the final coursework piece.
Key Words: Select from A04 description or from key words or from both.

Starter:
Ask students to share specific examples of how they are either meeting the AO4 criteria or any of the
key word areas.
Task One: Students finish writing their first drafts.
Task Two: For the last fifteen minutes of the lesson each student has their work peer assessed by two or three
of his/her classmates. This assessment should be thorough and detailed and should refer to the criteria from
AO4 as well as the key words from previous lessons. 　
Plenary: Students read over comments on their work and can ask for clarification and further guidance from
those who wrote the comments.
Peer Assessment referring to AO4

Homework: Rewrite second half of first draft.



LESSON TWELVE

Learning Objective: To write the final draft.
Key Words: See Starter

Starter:
Ask students to write onto the board a list of things to remember to include in their final drafts.

Task One: Students begin writing their final drafts (and continue into subsequent lessons according to allowed
time)




Resource One - CREAIVITY

1. “Watch. We’re getting younger. We are. We’re getting stronger. We’re even getting taller. I don’t
quite recognise this world we’re in. Everything is familiar but not at all reassuring. Far from it. This is a
world of mistakes, of diametrical mistakes. All the other people are getting younger too, but they don’t
seem to mind. They don’t find it counterintuitive, and faintly disgusting, as I do. Still, I’m powerless,
and can do nothing about anything. I can’t make myself an exception. The other people, do they have
someone else inside them, passenger or parasite, like me?”
(Martin Amis, Time’s Arrow)

2. “It is spring, moonless night in the small town, starless and bible-black, the cobblestreets silent and
the hunched, courters’-and-rabbits’ wood limping invisible down to the sloeback, slow, black,
crowblack, fishingboat bobbing sea . . . Listen. It is night in the chill, squat chapel, hymning in bonnet
and brooch and bombazine black, butterfly choker and bootlace bow, coughing like nannygoats,
sucking mintoes, fortywinking hallelujah; night in the four-ale, quiet as a domino; in Ocky Milkman’s
lofts like a mouse with gloves . . . in Donkey Street, trotting silent, with seaweed on its hooves, along
the cockled cobbles, past curtained fernpot . . .”
(Dylan Thomas, Under Milk Wood)

3. “The fall (bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonnerronntuonnthunntrova
rrhounawnskawntoohoordenenthurnuk!) of a once wallstrait oldparr is retaled early in bed and later on
life down through all Christian minstrelsy. The great fall of the offwall entailed at such short notice the
pftjschute of Finnegan, erse solid man, that the humptyhillhead of humself promptly sends an
unquiring one well to the west in quest of his tumptytumtoes.”
(James Joyce, Finnegan’s Wake)

4. “In the shadow under the green visor og his cap Ignatius J. Reilly’s supercilious blue and yellow
eyes looked down upon the other people waiting under the clock at the D.H.Holmes department store,
studying the crowd of people for signs of bad taste in dress. Several of the outfits, Ignatius noticed,
were new enough and expensive enough to be properly considered offenses against taste and
decency. Possession of anything new or expensive only reflected a person’s lack of theology and
geometry; it could even cast doubts upon one’s soul.”
(John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces)

5. “Unlike the typical bluesy earthy folksy denim-overalls noble-in-the-face-of-cracker-racism aw
shucks Pulitzer-Prize-winning protagonist mojo magic black man, I am not the seventh son of a
seventh son of a seventh son. I wish I were, but fate shorted me by six brothers and three uncles. The
chieftains and queens who sit on top of old Mount Kilimanjaro left me out of the will. They bequeathed
me nothing, stingy bastards. Cruelly cheating me of my mythological inheritance, my aboriginal
superpowers. I never possessed the god-given ability to strike down race politic evildoers with a tribal
chant, the wave of a beaded whammy stick, and a mean glance. Maybe some family fool fucked up
and slighted the ancients. Pissed off the gods, too much mumbo in the jumbo perhaps, and so the
sons must suffer the sins of the fathers.”
(Paul Beatty, White Boy Shuffle)

6. Please lend your ear and meanwhile watch, as the woman now ascends the meadow, which tops
off the hill, no, it doesn’t go any higher, it only goes downhill again on two thousand more pages,
which, however, I shall spare you. So, now we’re there. The grass is meagre, but already really green,
the spring is definitely further advanced, and now it is already somewhere else altogether. I hope I
shall meet it there, too, the summer.”
(Elfriede Jelinek, Greed)

7. The traffic signal changed, and the river of light formed by the cars continued on its way. The signal
shone brightly, suspended in the darkness. Hitoshi had died here. A feeling of solemnity slowly came
over me. In places where a loved one has died, time stops for eternity. If I stand on the very spot, one
says to oneself, like a prayer, might I feel the pain he felt?”
(Banana Yoshimoto, Kitchen)

Resource Two – EXTENDED METAPHOR

Not The Furniture Game

His hair was a crow fished out of a blocked chimney
and his eyes were boiled eggs with the tops hammered in
and his blink was a cat flap
and his teeth were bluestones or the Easter Island statues
and his bite was a perfect horseshoe.
His nostrils were both barrels of a shotgun, loaded.
And his mouth was an oil exploration project gone bankrupt
and his smile was a caesarean section
and his tongue was an iguanodon
and his whistle was a laser beam
and his laugh was a bad case of kennel cough.
He coughed, and it was malt whisky.
And his headaches were Arson in Her Majesty's Dockyards
and his arguments were outboard motors strangled with fishing line
and his neck was a bandstand
and his Adam's apple was a ball cock
and his arms were milk running off from a broken bottle.
His elbows were boomerangs or pinking shears.
And his wrists were ankles
and his handshakes were puff adders in the bran tub
and his fingers were astronauts found dead in their spacesuits
and the palms of his hands were action paintings
and both thumbs were blue touchpaper.
And his shadow was an opencast mine.
And his dog was a sentry box with no-one in it
and his heart was a first world war grenade discovered by children
and his nipples were timers for incendary devices
and his shoulder blades were two butchers at the meat cleaving competition
and his belly button was the Falkland Islands
and his private parts were the Bermuda triangle
and his backside was a priest hole
and his stretchmarks were the tide going out.
The whole system of his blood was Dutch elm disease.
And his legs were depth charges
and his knees were fossils waiting to be tapped open
and his ligaments were rifles wrapped in oilcloth under the floorboards
and his calves were the undercarriages of Shackletons.
The balls of his feet were where meteorites had landed
and his toes were a nest of mice under the lawn mower.
And his footprints were Vietnam
and his promises were hot air balloons floating off over the trees
and his one-liners were footballs through other peoples' windows
and his grin was the Great Wall of China as seen from the moon
and the last time they talked, it was apartheid.

She was a chair, tipped over backwards
with his donkey jacket on her shoulders.

They told him,
and his face was a hole
where the ice had not been thick enough to hold her.

- Simon Armitage

Zoom.

It begins as a house, an end terrace
in this case
but it will not stop there. Soon it is
an avenue
which cambers arrogantly past the Mechanics' Institute,
turns left
at the main road without even looking
and quickly it is
a town with all four major clearing banks,
a daily paper
and a football team pushing for promotion.

On it goes, oblivious of the Planning Acts,
the green belts,
and before we know it it is out of our hands:
city, nation,
hemisphere, universe, hammering out in all directions
until suddenly,
mercifully, it is drawn aside through the eye
of a black hole
and bulleted into a neighbouring galaxy, emerging
smaller and smoother
than a billiard ball but weighing more than Saturn.

People stop me in the street, badger me
in the check-out queue
and ask "What is this, this that is so small
and so very smooth
but whose mass is greater than the ringed planet?"
It's just words
I assure them. But they will not have it.

- Simon Armitage

The Circus Animals' Desertion

I

I sought a theme and sought for it in vain,
I sought it daily for six weeks or so.
Maybe at last, being but a broken man,
I must be satisfied with my heart, although
Winter and summer till old age began
My circus animals were all on show,
Those stilted boys, that burnished chariot,
Lion and woman and the Lord knows what.

II

What can I but enumerate old themes,
First that sea-rider Oisin led by the nose
Through three enchanted islands, allegorical dreams,
Vain gaiety, vain battle, vain repose,
Themes of the embittered heart, or so it seems,
That might adorn old songs or courtly shows;
But what cared I that set him on to ride,
I, starved for the bosom of his faery bride.
And then a counter-truth filled out its play,
'The Countess Cathleen' was the name I gave it;
She, pity-crazed, had given her soul away,
But masterful Heaven had intervened to save it.
I thought my dear must her own soul destroy
So did fanaticism and hate enslave it,
And this brought forth a dream and soon enough
This dream itself had all my thought and love.
And when the Fool and Blind Man stole the bread
Cuchulain fought the ungovernable sea;
Heart-mysteries there, and yet when all is said
It was the dream itself enchanted me:
Character isolated by a deed
To engross the present and dominate memory.
Players and painted stage took all my love,
And not those things that they were emblems of.

III

Those masterful images because complete
Grew in pure mind, but out of what began?
A mound of refuse or the sweepings of a street,
Old kettles, old bottles, and a broken can,
Old iron, old bones, old rags, that raving slut
Who keeps the till. Now that my ladder's gone,
I must lie down where all the ladders start
In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.

- W. B. Yeats

Resource Three – RECURRING MOTIFS

Motif Purpose
Black and white imagery To suggest a character’s evilness.
Stars and Planets To echo and emphasise the duality of
characters/personalities.
Devil Imagery (horns, hooves, red, To emphasise the role that Fate plays in our
pitchfork, fire) lives.
Angel Imagery (halos, white, wings) To suggest a character’s goodness.

Birds.
Dry, infertile soil.
To suggest something bad is going to happen.
To suggest romance.

Resource Four - CHARACTERISATION

1. “And suddenly there was a terrible roar all around us and the sky was full of what looked like huge
bats, all swooping and screeching and diving around the car, which was going about a hundred miles
an hour with the top down to Las Vegas. And a voice was screaming: ”Holy Jesus! What are these
goddam animals?” Then it was quiet again. My attorney had taken his shirt off and was pouring beer
on his chest, to facilitate the tanning process. “What the hell are you yelling about?” he muttered,
staring up at the sun with his eyes closed and covered with wraparound Spanish sunglasses. “Never
mind,” I said. “It’s your turn to drive.” I hit the brakes and aimed the Great Red Shark toward the
shoulder of the highway. No point in mentioning those bats, I thought. The poor bastard will see them
soon enough.”
(Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas)

2. “Hungry Joe was a jumpy, emaciated wretch with a fleshless face of dingy skin and bone and
twitchin veins squirming subcutaneously in the blackened hollows behind his eyes like severed
sections of snake. It was a desolate, cratered face, sooty with care like an abandoned mining town.
Hungry Joe ate voraciously, gnawed incessantly at the tips of his fingers, stammered, choked, itched,
sweated, salivated, and sprang from spot to spot fanatically with an intricate black camera with which
he was always trying to take pictures of naked girls. They never came out. He was always forgetting to
put film in the camera or turn on lights or remove the cover from the lens opening.”
(Joseph Heller, Catch 22)

3. “’He’s just a pore lonesome wife-left feller,’ the more understanding said of Fritz Linkhorn, ‘losin’ his
old lady is what crazied him.’
‘That man is so contrary,’ the less understanding said, ‘if you throwed him in the river he’d
float upstream.’
For what had embittered him Fitz had no name. Yet he felt that every daybreak duped him into
waking and every evening conned him into sleep. The feeling of having been cheated – of having
been cheated – that was it. Nobody knew why or by whom.
But only that all was lost. Lost long ago, in some colder country. Lost anew by generations
since. He kept trying to wind his fingers about this feeling, at times like an ancestral hunger; again like
some secret wound. It was there, if a man could get it out into the light, as palpable as the blood in his
veins. Someone just behind him kept turning him against himself till his very strength was a weakness.
Weaker men, full of worldly follies, did better than Linkhorn in thie world. He saw with eyes enviously
slow-burning.”
(Nelson Algren. A Walk on the Wild Side)

4. “I’m not perfect. I think more highly of snow and ice than of love. It’s easier for me to be interested in
mathematics than to have affection for my fellow human beings. But I am anchored to something in life
that is constant. You can call it a sense of orientation; you can call it woman’s intuition; you can call it
whatever you like. I’m standing on rock bottom and further than that I cannot fall. It could be that I
haven’t managed to organise my life very well. But I always have a grip – with at least one finger at a
time – on Absolute Space. That’s why there’s a limit to how far the world can twist out of joint, and to
how wrong, off course, things can go before I notice. I now know, without a shadow of a doubt, that
something is wrong.”
(Peter Hoeg, Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow)

5. “ At times the woman is dissatisfied with these defects that burden her life: husband and son . . .
With her life the woman answers for the smooth running of their enterprise and for good feelings each
to each. Via this woman the man has passed himself on to perpetuity. The woman was of the best
stock that could be found and has passed herself onto the child . . . The woman in her daybag, which
is washed out every day, no longer goes on stage, no, she provides the child with an anchorage on
her blessed coast . . .”
(Elfried Jelinek, Lust)

6. “She lies in Umberto’s arms, content to be held but indifferent to his passion. If he lies still, she is
pleased. She finds it acceptable for him to cherish her; she finds it absurd for him to desire her. She
has never before been able to ignore Umberto’s advances because they have offered her an
opportunity to show him the intricate sexuality of her body which has always seemed to her to be as
unpredictable, as delicate and as pure as an almond hidden in its two shells. Her immunity now
surprises her. Her child has already offered her the gift of self-sufficiency.”
(John Berger, G)

Resource Five – Trapped

1. “Locked into seclusion, Connie sat on the floor near the leaky radiator with her knees drawn up to
her chest, slowly coming out of a huge dose of drugs. Weak through her whole useless watery body,
she still felt nauseated, her head ached, her eyes and throat were sandpapery, her tongue felt swollen
in her dry mouth, but at least she could think now. Her brain no longer felt crushed to a lump at the
back of her skull and the slow cold weight of time had begun to slide forward . . . Captivity stretched
before her, a hall with no doors and no windows, yawning under dim bulbs. Surely she would die here.
Her heart would beat more and more slowly and then stop, like a watch running down. She stared at
the room, empty except for the mattress and odd stains, names, dates, words scratched somehow into
the wall with blood, fingernails, pencil stubs, shit: how did she come to be in this desperate place?”
(Marge Piercy, Woman on the Edge of Time)

2. “I paced the floor to and fro with heavy strides, as if excited to fury by the observations of the men –
but the noise steadily increased. Oh God! What could I do? I foamed – I raved – I swore! I swung the
chair upon which I had been sitting, and grated it upon the boards, but the noise arose over all and
continually increased. It grew louder – louder – louder! And still the men chatted pleasantly, and
smiled. Was it possible they heard not? Almighty God! No, no! They heard! – they suspected – they
knew! – they were making a mockery of my horror! – this I thought, and this I think. But anything was
better than this agony! Anything was more possible than this derision! I could bear those hypocritical
smiles no longer! I felt that I must scream or die! – and now – again – hark! Louder! Louder! Louder!
Louder! –
‘Villains!’ I shrieked, ‘dissemble no more! I admit the deed! – tear up the planks! – here, here!
– it is the beating of this hideous heart!”
(Edgar Allan Poe, The Tell Tale Heart)

3. “He used to sit reading in that chair and she would be opposite him on the sofa, sewing on buttons
or mending socks or putting a patch on the elbow of one of his jackets, and every now and then a pair
of eyes would glance up from the book and settle on her, watchful, but strangely impersonal, as if
calculating something. She had never liked those eyes. They were ice blue, cold, small and rather
close together, with two deep vertical lines of disapproval dividing them. All her life they had been
watching her. And even now, after a week alone in the house, she sometimes had an uneasy feeling
that they were still there, following her around, staring at her from doorways, from empty chairs,
through a window at night.”
(Roald Dahl, William and Mary)

4. “He lost his temper. And he hit me. He lost his temper. It was as simple as that. And he hit me. He
sent me flying across the kitchen. I hit the sink and fell. I felt nothing, only shock. And a spinning in my
head. I knew nothing for a while, where I was, who was with me, how come I was on the floor. Then I
saw his feet, then his legs, making a triangle with the floor. He seemed way up over me, miles up. I
had to bend bak to see him. Then he came down to meet me . . . I saw his knees bending; I saw his
hand puling up one of his trouser legs, I saw his face. His eyes were going over my face, every inch,
every mark. He was worried. He was shocked and worried. He loved me again. He held my chin. He
skipped over my eyes. He couldn’t look straight at me. He felt guilty, dreadful. He loved me again.
What happened? I provoked him. I was to blame. I should have made his dinner. It was my own fault;
there was a pair of us in it. What happened? I don’t know.”
(Roddy Doyle, The Woman Who Walked Into Doors)

Imaginative writing sow

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