Encouraging others to write is something I love. Seeing a student take pride in his or her own creation is the greatest reward a teacher can experience. Understanding the difficulties involved, however, is easier if you tackle them yourself, so apart from these fine student efforts there's a short narrative by yours truly. Feel free to read!
There’s no copyright so please use this material freely. Some feedback is all I request.
OOOOOOOO
The following pieces were written by a group of four Year 7, 8 students in January 2008. They each had to create a setting for a narrative. It took them less than ten minutes.
The ringing sound of the ice cream truck spread throughout the town. The sound blew in and out of every house it could reach. The sound entered through a broken window and then went out through a space in the roof of an old, untidy hut. The sound, by a gush of wind, was forced into a small cubby house, but was freed by a tiny crack in the wall. The sound was soon attracted by some music coming from inside a house, so it went in through a gold keyhole, waking up five children, and, landing outside in a backyard, it screamed loudly. The sound was soon heard by all the people in the town.
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The harmonious notes drifted across the rooms and slid through small cracks. They circled the sleeping cat like a gentle breeze while creeping up the stairs and wheeling around corners. Gracefully, they settled along the whole house like a massive rug, flowing against the floorboards and walls. They were like prisoners trapped inside, trying to escape so the world could hear them dance along the streets with the soothing breeze. Finally, a window was in sight. It was wide open, almost like it was helping the notes out. The song drifted into the open and was heard.
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The underwater current explored the ruins of the ancient city, carefully swimming from window to window, keyhole to keyhole and stone to stone. It danced with the schools of fish on the flat, hard, sphere-shaped table, which was decorated with seaweeds, like a stage. Old-fashioned pictures had been painted by the squid with its ink, making the city look like an underwater ghost town.
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The sound of the church bell rang through the town as the clock struck twelve o’clock. The sound darted down the stairs and passed some people covering their ears. The sound got a little weaker as it got out of the church .The sound dodged the speeding cars as it darted down the street. It tuned the corner like the Drift King and spotted the tail of the thing it was after. The sound went under cars, over houses and through keyholes, finally trapping its victim. The sound entered the door of McDonalds, caught the smell and had it for its lunch. When it had finished it left, starting to die down and moving slowly back to where it belonged.
OOOOOOOO
These fragments of description were written by a group of students under the influence of Dickens.
The musty smell hung in the lonely city’s air. The smell quietly drifted through the minute crack in the toy store. The smell filled the hollow and unused chapel; then crept silently into the butcher shop on the other side of the church. The smell wound up and down street lamps on the dusty road. The smell weaved in and out of cars parked outside the local cinema. It covered the large town like a huge blanket.
Dust is everywhere. Dust up the road where nobody goes. Dust on the house that sits lonely in the background. Dust on the water tank that is as dry as sand. Dust on the driveway where it is rarely trodden on. Only one tree is in sight, the rest of the landscape is covered in dust.
People everywhere. People climbing up the stairs to the seats. People entering the stadium, packing the doors. People are shouting, yelling and cheering across the places. People in the bathroom, food shop and gift shop. People are everywhere tonight.
Sand everywhere. Sand flying up into the air and falling onto more sand. Sand going down our shirts and flying up in the wind full of sand. Sand crawling over our boards, scratching our legs and sitting in our hair. Sand flying through the sky and ending up in our eyes. Sand rushing past us as we sandboard down the sand.
Year 7s
Using Verbal Adjectives - inspired by Malouf
Torn down brown wallpaper that used to be a creamy beige colour, cobweb covered light globes, its boarded up windows hung with dusty grey curtains, a shaggy carpet that is now home to many insects and two small dressing tables lying side by side that look like they haven’t been properly polished in years is what remains of my old, broken down cottage.
Year 7
Rebecca
At Parramatta Station the sleek country train paused in the wet morning air. Matt wondered whether the aging British tourists who had boarded in the Blue Mountains would get off. Their talk irritated him.
‘That shop’s got bars all round - shows you what kind of place!’ The woman’s voice in front sneered. He was glad he couldn’t see her face.
‘Look at all the graffiti!’ The tourist on his left stuck a grey-haired, over-tanned forearm in Matt’s face as he pulled himself up to standing position. ‘It goes right down that way!’ Why can’t you just go back where you came from? Back to London or wherever it is, pondered Matt. Ever since the mountains they had occupied more than just seats; they had soaked up the silence too. Let people just sit in peace why can’t you?
As they passed through Granville station the tourists’ talk peaked and was accompanied by a flurry of movement. Like blowflies they all settled again into different places. Matt watched them distribute themselves along the windows. Maggots! He thought. Wriggling like maggots on dead meat. That’s what Ugly Ahmed would say anyway. Blowflies and maggots! Matt fidgeted clumsily with the strap on his backpack and pictured Ugly Ahmed’s face. Ahmed ran the tire business where Matt worked. He had a crude way about him at times.
A little later the train came to a standstill at Central Station. The next train south was twenty minutes away so Matt took to the George Street tunnel to stretch his legs and think about Rebecca. About half way through however, where the tunnel emerged partly into daylight, he stopped, eyes level with the traffic. Some kind of accident had happened. A drunken voice was shouting. Two or three people were rushing up out of the tunnel and onto the street to have a look. He even thought he had heard the bump sound, like a sack of cabbages being slammed into by a van. Car horns started going off. In the middle of George Street a teenage girl in grey track pants was lying very still. The drunk was running towards the van, still shouting, as Matt turned away.
On his walk back to the station he looked away from an old man who was missing some teeth and a leg and squatting, arm stretched out, against the tunnel’s toilet-tiled wall. Work for it ya bludger Ahmed would say. Not until he was on the train, around midday, could he finally begin to relax.
‘Rebecca.’ he spoke the word softly to himself, allowing his lips to feel only the slightest pressure. A sensation of comfortable ease came over him as when lying in bed on Sunday mornings. He repeated the word with equal force. ‘Rebecca!’ This time he noticed the breath-shape it made on the cold glass. Stifling a cough due to the moist, stuffy atmosphere he became aware of the way his clothes were sticking to his skin. Several times he had to shift sideways in the high-backed, deeply-padded seat. Outside the blur of monotonous suburbs slid by and soon became open bushland. This in turn changed to green hills and gullies with scattered, messy-looking farms. On one side was the sea. The sea itself was flat all the way to the horizon. In the distance where it touched the sky, tiny white-caps formed on its surface, giving it a mysterious look.
With the hum of the rails Matt’s mind travelled back. Ten years ago, exactly to the day, he had carved their names and the date on the trunk of an old tree just before dark, using his pocket knife. It had been near the beach, not far from the rocky headland, next to the old bandstand. ‘Rebecca and Matt.’ How corny it had seemed, even then. He had added a love heart and a cupid arrow, and they had laughed at it together; at its corniness. Soft light surrounded his vision of her. He saw her youthful face and limbs and the jaunty way she tossed her head in the wind. He remembered how they had walked out to the little pier and stood facing each other in the stinging sea spray, the curious shape the wind had made of her tussled hair and how, without saying anything at all, she had said all there was to say. Yet she had spoken too, warmly and clearly through the buffeting wind. It was why he was here now, on this train, heading south.
‘I’ll meet you here again!’
‘When?’
‘In a thousand years.’ Her voice had a note of teenage daring. It was an old joke of theirs. At that particular moment however, it had sounded hollow to him. This time the leaving was too real. He remembered how hard he had wished he wasn’t leaving; but then that was how things were. He couldn’t say goodbye to her with a joke.
‘Don’t be stupid! We’ll both be dead by then!’
‘Ten then.’ And with that she had turned her face to the wind. In vain he tried to remember more of that blustery day so long ago. Perhaps when she turned away from him, saying nothing more, their thoughts had blown out to sea. Perhaps they had been caught by the sea gods; they who listened but never spoke. That had been another of their little jokes.
Matt’s thoughts clicked back to the present and he found himself wondering if he still thought of sea gods. At least there were no more British tourists. That’s something anyway! I don’t reckon I’ll be mentioning sea gods ever to Ahmed. He’s probably burping and farting and telling someone to do something real quick or else. Now he’s shuffling sloppily across the tyre bay to his sleezy little office for a smoke and he’s picking up the phone and leering through the grimy glass pane.
The gullies and hills were sloping gently now. On the sea side an ugly mixture of fences and new, cream-coloured houses had cropped up. Orange roof-tiles mingled with blue. Some of the backyards showed signs of human life. There were listlessly-dangling, striped beach towels on lines and pieces of stark, plastic play equipment. Most of the houses had an empty look, as if rain-washed lumps of clay and weeds were their only visitors. Further up the coast through the haze, jutting out into the sea, Matt could just make out the shape of a particular headland.
By the time the train pulled into the little town where Matt had once lived, he was feeling quite sweaty and ill. To make matters worse, he realized that he had dozed off, so that as he stepped onto the platform he had the strange sensation of being somewhere unknown, in spite of his surroundings.
The sky was grey and the air still, as before a change. It’s too early anyway - I’ve got heaps of time. I’ll wait till later – just before dark. Slipping the strap of his backpack over one shoulder Matt made his way out of the station and toward the main street. It had a familiar but empty look, even for this time of the year. On the corner a MacDonald’s stood where once there had been a bank. The video shop and the Chinese bakery were still open and further up the street a group was heading for the Sportsman’s Club. The tops of Norfolk Island Pine trees projected above the roofs in the direction of the beach. On second thoughts I’ll go down there now. It’ll give me time to look round. I don’t want to just run into her in the street! It’d be like bumping into just anyone – not someone special.
The weathering of the names on the tree had not been great. The cupid arrow, love heart and date still showed clearly. Yellowish streaks lay across the surface of the whole tree and some of the bark had been vandalized. The bandstand nearby had a forgotten look, like the era from which it came. The little pier poked its way into the water, its pylons clothed in sea-kelps which swayed in the tide, a home for tiny creatures. Towering over everything the headland, too large to be seen properly from the beach where Matt sat alone, silently glowered, staring out to sea, like an angry sea god from a storybook.
At the other more distant end of the beach, almost too distant for the human eye, two figures made their way along the sand in the direction of the headland. One larger, one smaller, the flowing garments and hair of each stood out sideways as if a breeze, not yet felt here, had caught them up. But their progress towards where Matt sat, gazing out to sea, was slow, perhaps too slow. As night came, Matt turned over the return ticket in his pocket. A mother with a bratty-looking boy came down to stand on the pier. She did not look Matt's way and he hardly even glanced at her. She paused momentarily while the boy squawked and rolled around her feet. He was wearing green and grey guerilla-warfare gear. Do you try to be annoying or does it just come naturally? - that’s what Ahmed says. He’s always saying stuff like that to the customers’ kids. It beats me why the customers even come back! A natural charmer! That’s what Ugly Ahmed calls himself. Geez he farts a lot!
PB 02/05/07
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