The Writing Experiment by Hazel Smith

All these passages, then, explore different approaches to writing about the power of the mirror. Now try your own! CONCLUSION Pl ...

26 The Writing Experiment McMaster, R. 1994, ‘The Mirror’, Flying the Coop: New and Selected Poems 1972–1994 , Heinemann, Sydney ...

27 chapter two Genre as a moveable feast In this chapter we experiment with genre through fundamental prose and poetry technique ...

exercises Create a realist prose passage in which you construct a person- in-action.Your text should be a detailed sketch, not ...

its patterns of cause and effect, of social relationships and moral values, largely confirm the patterns of the world we seem to ...

Example 2.2 She is very thin and her arms and legs are like matchsticks. She opens the fridge door and closes it. She walks away ...

swallows a spoonful.Then she lets the door go, feeling acutely anxious and repelled by her behaviour. Now let’s look in more det ...

This passage is effective because Carter uses strong verbs such as ‘dug’ and ‘dragged’, ‘punched’ and ‘kicked’. Note also how th ...

In this passage Auster uses nouns and adjectives, as much as verbs, to suggest the smoothness and skill of Hector’s actions. Thi ...

The process is analogous to that of a filmmaker who takes a mixture of long shots of a scene, where we see the action in its ent ...

reason the balloon should not be allowed to expand upward, over the parts of the city it was already covering, into the ‘‘air sp ...

SATIRE BITES BACK It is also possible to break out of realism through satire, and this is the focus of Exercise 2b which asks yo ...

group. The teaching staff is composed almost solely of New York émigrés, smart, thuggish, movie-mad, trivia-crazed. They are her ...

because of the way Williams arranges the words on the page, and because of its strong visual focus on a single object (Williams ...

phrase, as well as one which relates to the rest of the poem, and takes on the connotation of ‘she stood in for something’. It t ...

Example 2.16 she stoo D in front O f the door w O ndering whethe R Or you may want to turn your poem into a visual object: Examp ...

and events. Metaphor helps to add extra levels to the text, although in Chapter 8 I will point out some of its pitfalls and limi ...

Here the door becomes animate. In the next example the animation of the door is combined with wordplay on call. It exploits diff ...

Example 2.26 frontier or front line? gold or gunfire? In Example 2.27 the doubt is likened to flying a kite. The door has disap- ...

Example 2.31 she searched out her selves wondering whether to open one In Example 2.32 we no longer have only one metaphor. Ther ...