I have another few questions for creatives/mod C- do the responses always need to have like an elaborate plot?? I struggle to come up with unique perspective bending ideas..
my biggest problem though is I can never actually keep the story/discursive/persuasive going for 1000 words or even 500 in an exam What kind of details should I explore (while staying well away from cliches)
Hey again!
I find that the best stories can take a simple plot and transform it into something elaborate. You don't need to have an insane number of things occurring for a story to be effective; it just needs to go start, go and arrive somewhere satisfying
One of my favourite short stories of all time is Kate Chopin's The Story of an Hour in which all the events within it unfold, as the title suggests, in an hour! You could have a read of it
here if you wanted to get inspired!
If you're struggling to lengthen the story, my first tip is to plan out a trajectory for it. When you know whereabouts you want a story to head and the events that will lead up to it, you can gain a greater sense of whether how much you need to write to reach that destination. My second tip is, for creative writing specifically, to work with the five senses. Engaging and detailed descriptions are always ideal but I find that students have a tendency to favour visual imagery which ends up in a lot of "telling", rather than "showing." You want for your character, and reader, to immerse in their setting and interact sensorily with their environment. If you're lacking auditory features, describe some of the sounds they are hearing. If you feel that the character is too stiff, introduce some tactile imagery and textures for them to react to. The stimulus, whether it's a visual or written one, can also be a point of reference for you to draw from. This can help you deepen the story, as well as develop more narrative and plot to work with! My last tip is to practise; if you don't practise writing creatively under exam conditions, it will be far challenging when you actually have to do it. Once you finish a response, figure out how much you've written and ask yourself what else you might have wanted to have added. You'll mentally create for yourself some options to use in the exam itself. After this, you just have to keep going until you can comfortably reach the desired word count you want
Hopefully that helps but feel free to follow up with more questions!
Angelina