As I said on Friday when I
posted the PSLE crab composition,
we’ll go through the various techniques to
start a story for this post. (Edit: I had initially wanted to go through all 9
techniques in this post, but after covering 3 techniques, I find that the post
is already quite lengthy so I’ll divide this post into 2 segments and post
the other 2 segments tomorrow and the day after.)
The 9 techniques to begin a story are:
1.
Describe the setting
2.
Speech/Dialogue
3.
Sound
4.
Characterisation
5.
Question
6.
Flashback
7.
Proverb/Idiom/Famous saying
8.
Unique action
9.
Climax/Create suspense
It’s a lot of information to
go through, I believe several of these techniques — describe
setting, speech/dialogue, sound, proverb/idiom/famous saying, flashback — would
not be unfamiliar to you; you would have done some, if not all, of them in
school.
So let’s start.
1. Describe the setting
This was the introduction we
used for the crab story. What you need to note about this is that when we
describe the setting, we are referring to three things:
a.
the place
b.
the time of the day (morning, afternoon or
night)
c.
the weather
You don’t have to describe all
three at the same time. In the crab story given, we started off by describing
the time of the day (dawn). Then we described the place (by mentioning the
smell of the sea and the sound of the waves)
There are three points I want
to highlight about this technique:
Use
the five senses
To describe a place vividly,
to enable your reader to visualise the place in his mind when he is reading,
describe the place using the five senses. I’m sure you know what the five
senses are from your science lessons:
•
the sense of sight
•
the sense of hearing
•
the sense of touch
•
the sense of smell
•
the sense of taste
Now, this is not a checklist.
If you decide to use this technique to start your composition, please don’t
give one description per sense and consider it done. That’s robotic and
unnatural. Two or three senses would suffice.
Which senses to use? That is a
good question. Not all senses are created equal. To help your reader in his
visualisation, the most important sense would be the sense of sight. This
usually takes up most of the description. What can you see at the scene? Then
add in one or two other senses. I’ve arranged the senses according to their
relevance when writing a composition. It is common to describe what you can
hear and what you can feel. These senses are most apparent to us usually.
The sense of touch tends to be
a bit confusing for most pupils. They wonder: How to describe the sense of
touch for a place? Smooth? Rough? Hard? Soft?
No. When we talk about the
sense of touch in the description of setting, we are referring to things like:
Was it a hot day? Or cool? Was there a wind blowing or if it was humid? In
other words, it’s linked to the weather.
The sense of smell is
appropriate when you are describing places that are associated with certain
scents, like a wet market, the sea, or even a crowded bus or MRT carriage.
The sense of taste is listed
last, because it usually does not apply when we are writing the introduction of
a story, unless a character is eating something or thinking about food, which
is quite rare (the only instance I can think of is the picture composition in
which a girl drops an ice cream cone on a man in a shopping mall).
Colours!
So we’ve established that the
sense of sight will take up the lion share of your descriptions if you should
decide to begin your story by describing the setting.
What to describe? You can talk
about the things or people you see at the scene. And a trick to remember is to
talk about the colours of these things/people (see the sample story).
Which is why every year in
class we had an exercise called the Rainbow Connection; it is to come up with
unusual colours to replace the mundane blue, red, white, etc.
An extract of the list:
Red
|
Blue
|
White
|
Green
|
Black
|
scarlet
|
azure
|
pearly
|
verdant
|
sooty
|
coral
|
cerulean
|
ivory
|
olive
|
ebony
|
maroon
|
sapphire
|
snowy
|
emerald
|
inky
|
Some parents/teachers are
against pupils using bombastic words like ‘verdant’ or ‘cerulean’. They feel
that a simply written but heart-felt composition would be better writing.
I can see their point of view
and if you or your child is a gifted writer who can create a story is original,
sincere and well-written, that’s great. You can skip the rest of this post.
For those who need a little
boost, let’s continue.
I always tell my pupils: Go
for a balance. You don’t have to insert big words into every sentence you
write, but don’t feel shy about using them when you can. You need to showcase
your range of vocabulary in the PSLE and using less common words is a great way
to do that.
Let me share with you a secret
about examiners: There are shallow examiners out there who are easily impressed
by big words, and the more discerning examiners? They won’t penalise you for
using big words as long as you use them correctly, because they understand that
this is a national examination, and you need to showcase your vocabulary
powers.
So to reiterate, use the five
senses (a maximum of three!) and colours if you are at a loss on how to
describe the setting.
Warning
If your story is starting
place indoors, you CANNOT begin by describing the weather. Most examiners will
consider this out of point.
The way to get around this
problem is by linking the weather outside to what’s happening indoors. For
example, a picture of a boy at home. You could start by describing the sunny
weather, and then add that the boy wished he could be outdoors, playing in the
sunshine, rather than being cooped up at home.
2. Speech/Dialogue
There is not much to say about
this except that it would be better to link whatever the character is saying to
the story.
For example, in our sample
story, you could have the teacher giving instructions for the CIP programme.
Hint: You don’t have to give all the instructions; we know teachers can be very
longwinded, we don’t want to expend precious words on CIP instructions. You
could jump to the end of the instructions.
Example:
‘One
more thing. Please use tongs when you are picking up the litter. Some of the
litter could be very dirty, or might even have sharp edges, so it is advisable
to use tongs to hold them. If you don’t have tongs, used your gloved hand. Any
question?’ Mr Tan asked his class, 6 Achievement.
Darryl
yawned, only half-registering his form teacher’s words. He had stayed up late
the previous night; actually he had stayed up late all the way to the wee hours
of this morning to play computer games. At the moment, he was struggling to
keep his eyes open and his body upright, lamenting his ill fortune at being
forced to pick up litter on the beach on a beautiful morning when he could have
been comfortably snuggled in bed…
Warning
After the character speaks,
the writer must introduce the 5Ws and 1H. Not all of them if you don’t want to,
but at least enough so that the reader knows where the characters are and why
they are there.
Sound
This is very similar to
speech/dialogue, and is even simpler.
Essentially, you begin the
story with a sound. Some common ones:
Ring — The narrator is in
class or in school
Ding dong — A story beginning
at home
Crash — A story about
something breaking (glass window, vase, etc.)
Bang — A story about a car
accident
Splash — A story about someone
drowning
Note that if you start your
story with one of the last three sounds, you’re essentially starting in the
middle (usually the climax) of the story. It overlaps with the technique of
starting the story at the climax, and in terms of the timeline, you would have
to go back to the beginning to address your 5Ws and 1H before proceeding with
the story.
A common question is whether
to put the sound in inverted commas.
NO, you don’t. Because
inverted commas are used for:
•
direct speech when someone is talking
•
quoting what someone has said or an excerpt
from a passage
•
irony
When you write sounds, none of
the above applies, so you don’t have to use inverted commas for the sound.
Example:
Vroom…Vroom…(note
that the sound words are not in inverted commas) The loud roars alerted me to the fact that something was up. I know
those sounds. They were produced by the big boxes that transport the two-legged
humans around. Those sounds were a lot louder than what I usually heard.
Curious, I popped my eyes out of the sand and scanned my surroundings…
Here is a list of onomatopoeia
(sound words) for you. Take a look at it. You never know. Some of them might
come in handy someday.
Note: No example is given for
the first post since the sample story starts with describing the setting.
This post is turning out to be
a lot longer than I expect. If I were to talk about all 9 techniques here, I
might exceed 5000 words. So I’ve decided to stop here, and leave the rest for
another two posts. I think this would be enough for you to chew on and digest.
Try to process the information in this post before we move on to the other
techniques.
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