Week 2 Creative Writing – Openings and Endings
The following extracts show examples of effective openings.
Identify the techniques used within each and use to refer to when writing your own stories.
Openings Extract 1
He didn’t want to see the face.
(Extract from The Face Brian McCabe)
Extract 2
Hello. I’m outside the door again, I can talk to you. You’re not like anybody else in the class. You’re from Mars, you’re a Martian. That’s why I can talk to you, because I’m not like anybody else either.
(Extract from Feathered Choristers Brian McCabe)
Extract 3
The winter of 1886-87 was terrible. Every goddamn history of the high plains says so. There were great stocks of cattle on the overgrazed land during the droughty summer. Early wet snow froze hard so the cattle could not break the crust to the grass. Blizzards and freeze-eye cold followed, the gaunt bodies of cattle piling up in draws and coulees.
(Extract from The Blood Bay Annie Proulx)
Extract 4:
Once upon a time there were three little pigs, who left their mummy and daddy to see the world.
All summer long, they roamed through the woods and over the plains, playing games and having fun.
Extract 5:
I had been making the rounds of the sacrifice poles the day we heard my brother had escaped. I already new something was going to happen; the Factory told me.
(The Wasp Factory Iain Banks)
Week 2 Creative Writing – Openings and Endings
The following three extracts show examples of effective endings.
Identify the techniques used within each and use to refer to when writing your own stories.
Endings Extract 1 –
In this story a young girl evacuated for the war and feeling alone in her new village has defied her teacher by going down to the beach. She kills an adder, then is moved by the beauty of a lone yellow flower. She has an unexpected surprise:
‘One of the airmen, with fair hair, had no face at all: while the other’s face was half gone and what remained was unrecognizable as human. The one with the single boot had only one leg; the fingers of his right hand, flung out in the shallow water, were gleaming bones. A sweet nasty smell mingled with the tang of the sea.
Screaming she turned and raced back. Frenzied eagerness to shock Miss Laing with her discovery drove her on as much as the horror itself. But as she made to clamber up the bank she became aware of the crushed flower in her hand. Weeping and yelling, she rubbed it madly on the grass.’
(Extract from Flowers Robin Jenkins)
Extract 2 –
In this story a young girl is at the beach in charge of her baby brother, complaining and being mean to him she leaves him to visit the Lighthouse. However her true feelings show when she tries to protect him when there is danger from a strange man.
‘She ran forward to reach Bobby first. In fact she’d almost got to him when she slipped on a stone covered in seaweed and went down. The back of her head hitting off its sharp edge.
Her eyes were staring up at the sky as the man and Bobby crouched beside her. Bobby said, ‘You shouldn’t have left me. I’m telling Mummy.’
The man pulled him back. ‘Leave her alone. She’s in bad enough shape.’ Then he put his lips close to her ear. ‘Can you hear me?’
When her eyes flickered he put his hand over her mouth and nose and held it there for a considerable time. After that he turned to Bobby saying, ‘We’ll have to get an ambulance. You can come with me.’
Bobby said he didn’t want to get an ambulance. He wanted to go back to the other beach.
‘All right,’ said the man, taking him by the hand and dragging him towards the sand dunes with Bobby protesting all the way. His cries died down when they vanished over the top.
Later that afternoon, a strong breeze sprang up along the shore, lifting clouds of sand into the air as well as the strands of Megan’s hair drifting across her face. Seagulls came down to stand on her and poke at her with their beaks, then, as if not liking what they found they flew off to the horizon whilst imperceptibly and gradually her body sank into the sand making a groove for itself. A passer-by might have thought she was asleep, she looked so peaceful. But no one came by that day and in the evening when the sun went down she was gone with the tide.
(Extract from The Lighthouse Agnes Owens)
Extract 3 –
In this story a young boy overhears a conversation about a man who had died at the pit, the boy knew the man as he had met him previously as a boxing coach. He is taken down the pit face by his Dad to show him there is nothing to fear. They discuss his dad moving to another mine because of closures.
‘‘Has it got a face as well?’
‘Aye it’s got a face.’
‘Is it like the face in your pit?’
His father shrugged. ‘Much the same.’
‘Ah saw it.’
‘What?’
‘The Face.’
His father shook his head and smiled at him, the way he did when he thought he was too young to understand something.
‘Ah did see it.’
‘Oh ye did, did ye? What did it look like then?’
‘It looked like the man who ran the gym.’
And he knew he’d said something important when his father stopped smiling, turned pale, opened his mouth to say something but didn’t say anything, then stared and stared at him – as if he couldn’t see him at all, but only the face of the dead man.’
(Extract from The Face Brian McCabe)