Task 39: Innovation

I sincerely hope that your reading of the various excerpts I have sent you during this term together with your own attempts at each task will have taught you loads about how to produce really effective prose. You will have picked up techniques and devices - consciously and without realising it - which will enrich your writing in the future, and you will have had the chance to experiment with some of these already too.

For your final task of this term (and your final prose task of this academic year), I would like you to think especially hard about how to continue that experimentation, and attempt as innovative and 'creative' a piece of prose fiction as you can muster. In order to assist you, I have emailed all of you five excerpts from different novels which I think display a particularly innovative use of language and narrative. Look carefully at what each writer is doing - with their narrator, with their tenses, with their vocabulary, grammar and syntax (sentence structure).

Part One

As usual, I would like you to choose ONE excerpt which you liked the most, and explain - in approximately 200 words - what it was about the excerpt that grabbed your interest. In particular, what is the writer doing with language to especially successful effect?

Part Two

Now it is your chance to 'show off' what you have learnt. This does not necessarily mean using lots of long, fancy words and complex, compound sentences - in fact, some of the best writing can be remarkably simple. What I want to be sure of is that all of you have thought long and hard about each and every word, how they are organised, and how every sentence and paragraph has been structured to achieve a particular effect on your reader: deliberate, careful, meticulous prose with an experimental, innovative streak and, above all, exuding originality from start to finish.

I would like you to use the following title: 'The End'. Your piece can either be a self-contained, short story, or the ending of a longer story or novel; but, either way, it must work on its own, and display a clear structure.

Good luck!

Your piece must be posted by midnight on Saturday 4th April.

Your moderators will then have TWO weeks in which to comment, before the first task of the summer term on 19th April.