GCSE English Creative Writing Task: Using Literature Texts for Inspiration.
Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Stevenson.
Hence it came about that I concealed my pleasures; and that when I reached years of reflection, and began to look round me and take stock of my progress and position in the world, I stood already committed to a profound duplicity of life. Many a man would have even blazoned such irregularities as I was guilty of; but from the high views that I had set before me, I regarded and hid them with an almost morbid sense of shame.
Ideas.
- The first-person narrator appears to be ‘confessing’ to a secret, yet the reader may doubt the sincerity of such an apparent confession. How could you use a first-person speaker to misdirect your reader? Remember an unreliable narrator is often a powerful speaker and your characterisation may engage your readers immediately if you can hook them with your speaker’s feigned ‘confession.’ Where are they when they confess? Are they speaking to an audience or even a jury? Or is this a more furtive, secret confession like a letter or even a diary entry?
- Think about a protagonist who is ‘committed to a profound duplicity of life.’ What is their public role and how might their secret, private way of life be at odds with such a public self?
- You might also enjoy showing a contrast between the public and private life of your protagonist that doesn’t have to be criminal. Dickens played with this idea in Great Expectations when once the character literally arrives home and lifts up the ‘drawbridge’ his behaviour is unrecognisable to that of his hard-bitten, office self.
- Pick out a moment from the novel which has affected you and rewrite it. Bring the scene up to date. Or simply invent new characters to re-enact the scene or even change the POV so the scene takes on a very different meaning and message. For example, imagine the window scene from Jekyll’s POV when Enfield and Utterson appear in the courtyard on their ill fated visit. Or develop Poole’s characterisation as he worries about the behaviour of his ‘master’ Dr Jekyll. Would Poole’s voice be critical and anxious or could you make him more judgemental or resigned? You can of course change the setting and the names and identities of the characters. Just use the scene as an inspiration for a new version.
My Last Duchess by Browning.
That’s my last Duchess painted on the wall,
Looking as if she were alive. …
She had / A heart—how shall I say?— too soon made glad,
Too easily impressed; she liked whate’er
She looked on, and her looks went everywhere.
- Once again, this speaker seems a decidedly unreliable and deceitful narrator. Who is your protagonist speaking to in your version of this chilling confession? Or would you develop the dark humour that Browning utilises in the poem for a different sort of confession?
- If your speaker is on trial, what is the setting and how could the historical timing of the court scene inform the punishments available?
- Could you develop the idea of ghastly, ghostly entrapment so that the villain has trapped the victim in some work of art like a painting or could you do something completely surreal like Maupassant in his infamous story of The Hand? Or change the victim into a fish in an aquarium of some expensive restaurant?
- Or switch the point of view and have the listener’s thoughts on the egotistical Duke or the modern version. Or Imagine some staff meeting with a preening Head and some downtrodden teacher, secretly plotting an act of revenge after years of oppression. Maybe the Duchess had a real admirer and the Duke is not going to escape justice though the punishment may be rather different.
A Christmas Carol by Dickens
They left the high-road, by a well-remembered lane, and soon approached a mansion of dull red brick, with a little weathercock-surmounted cupola, on the roof, and a bell hanging in it. It was a large house, but one of broken fortunes; for the spacious offices were little used, their walls were damp and mossy, their windows broken, and their gates decayed. …
They went, the Ghost and Scrooge, across the hall, to a door at the back of the house. It opened before them, and disclosed a long, bare, melancholy room, made barer still by lines of plain deal forms and desks. At one of these a lonely boy was reading near a feeble fire; and Scrooge sat down upon a form, and wept to see his poor forgotten self as he used to be.
- Think about an act of recollection or remembrance and consider the power of such a revisitation: ‘Scrooge…wept to see his poor forgotten self as he used to be.’ How can a protagonist deliberately ‘forget’ his past experience? How can this ‘haunting’ take place if you do not choose to explore the possibility of a ghostly encounter?
- Places can be animated to show change and the disturbing effects of travelling back to a previously familiar place. GCSE questions are often concerned with the re-evaluation of some past experience. Thus, your writing can use something from Scrooge’s transformation and resurrection to create your own sense of ‘conversion’ or moral shift.
London by William Blake.
I wander thro’ each charter’d street,
Near where the charter’d Thames does flow.
And mark in every face I meet
Marks of weakness, marks of woe.
In every cry of every Man,
In every Infants cry of fear,
In every voice: in every ban,
The mind-forg’d manacles I hear
- Where could your contemporary protagonist be wandering in terms of place? What has happened to cause such devastation? Or is this sense of futility and yet anger, the outcome of their survivor’s guilt? How has your character managed to evade such dystopian misery? Are they guilty of some betrayal- hence reverse poem this and make the speaker the secret perpetrator?
- Think about stories like that of Orpheus and Eurydice. ‘Looking back’ becomes dangerous and leads to perpetual loss. What does this suggest therefore about the act of looking back ad letting go? Synthesise ideas to make the story your own.
- Could the wanderer be a reporter? Could they be visiting a previously beautiful and cherished place? Like Dickens, this wandering might be linked to some re-engagement with the past.
