Imaginative Writing

Imaginative Writing Checklist

DOs

Include a clear complication or problem in your story

Edit your work carefully, with a focus on:

Capitalisation
Punctuation
Punctuating and formatting dialogue
Spelling
Paragraphing
Sentence structure

Use appropriate and consistent formatting

Show, don’t tell!

Use verbs to create action and movement

Have you story take place over a limited period of time e.g. over the course of a few hours

Balance establishing and exploring plot, character and setting

Follow the specific conventions of the genre you’re writing within

Experiment with more complex types of figurative language, structure and style. If you find yourself relying on similes, try include more metaphors. If you feel confident with metaphors, try including extended symbolism and motif throughout the story.

DONTs

Use excessive exposition and recount

Avoid beginning with explicitly stating the date.

Have your narrator narrate in the same way you speak. Create a distinct and separate narrative voice.

Introduce characters or objects that will not serve a purpose in the story

Introduce significant characters or objects abruptly late in the story

Use abbreviations such as e.g. etc.

Include a rushed, abrupt or cliched conclusion. No good story ever ended with it all being a dream or ;and then they all died'.

Repeat the same word in close proximity e.g. within the same sentence

Overuse the thesaurus tool. The synonyms provided do not always have the same meaning (or connotations) you are trying to create. Check the definition and correct usage of a word before using it for the first time.

Include extensive inner monologue, especially when it’s just your main character thinking about their feelings

Use onomatopoeia in place of describing an actual sound

Imaginative Writing Self-Marking Criteria

So how do you turn a tell into a show?

Here are four great strategies:

1 - Use strong verbs: Don’t use walk if you can say gallop, skip, saunter, stroll or amble.

2 - Use specific nouns and clear adjectives in descriptions that paint a picture for the reader. Don’t just tell us Grandpa baked a pie; say a cinnamon-apple pie with a golden crust rested on the windowsill above his sink.

3 - Include sensory details—describe how something sees, smells, sounds, tastes, and feels

4 - Use dialogue: ‘“Don’t you walk out of here!” Mom yelled’ is better than Mom was angry.

How to use dialogue

Learn from Jon Krakauer in Into the Wild.

I was working then as an itinerant carpenter, framing condominiums in Boulder for $3.50 an hour. One afternoon, after nine hours of humping two-by-tens and driving sixteen-penny nails, I told my boss I was quitting: “No, not in a couple of weeks, Steve; right now was more like what I had in mind.” It took me a few hours to clear my tools and other belongings…

What Krakauer does here: There’s dialogue, but only one line. Rather than giving us the entire conversation, he gives us only what we most need to understand the substance of the conversation.

The lesson to learn: Let the people in your narrative speak, but use just what you need with dialogue. The reader may not need the entire conversation.

Sensory Imagery

One of the best ways to learn about sensory imagery is to study examples in literature that are particularly evocative.

The Yellow Wallpaper, Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1892).

“The color is repellant, almost revolting; a smouldering, unclean yellow, strangely faded by the slow-turning sunlight. It is a dull yet lurid orange in some places, a sickly sulphur tint in others.”

The descriptions of color here are visual imagery. “Faded,” “dull,” and “lurid” are all adjectives we associate with color.

Meanwhile, “smouldering,” “unclean,” and “sickly” are unusual descriptors, since they’re typically associated with people, not colours.

By using a combination of commonplace and unusual language to describe color, Perkins Gilman both invites us to imagine the actual color of the wallpaper and imbues it with emotional weight, transforming this room into a symbol of the character’s emotional frustration and oppression.

Moby Dick, Herman Mellville (1851).

“The vast swells of the omnipotent sea; the surging, hollow roar they made, as they rolled along the eight gunwales, like gigantic bowls in a boundless bowling-green; the brief suspended agony of the boat, as it would tip for an instant on the knife-like edge of the sharper waves, that almost seemed threatening to cut it in two; the sudden profound dip into the watery glens and hollows; the keen spurrings and goadings to gain the top of the opposite hill; the headlong, sled-like slide down its other side;—all these, with the cries of the headsmen and harpooneers, and the shuddering gasps of the oarsmen, with the wondrous sight of the ivory Pequod bearing down upon her boats with outstretched sails, like a wild hen after her screaming brood;—all this was thrilling.”

This passage uses kinesthetic imagery—surging, rolled, tip, dip, slide, shuddering—to give the feeling of motion on a boat.

Sound is also important to this passage: we can imagine the scream of chickens, the gasps of the oarsmen, and the hollow roar of the ocean.

The Awakening, Kate Chopin (1899). “

There were strange, rare odors abroad—a tangle of the sea smell and of weeds and damp, new-plowed earth, mingled with the heavy perfume of a field of white blossoms somewhere near.”

Chopin compares the smell of the sea to smells that we associate with the earth (weeds, soil, flowers) throughout The Awakening, both adding a layer of complexity to her imagery (beyond the usual salty, briny, fishy smells associated with the ocean) and positioning the sea as part of the earth. This foreshadows the pull this character will feel toward the sea.

A Room With a View, E.M. Forster (1908).

“The hour was approaching at which the continental breakfast begins, or rather ceases, to tell, and the ladies bought some hot chestnut paste out of a little shop, because it looked so typical. It tasted partly of the paper in which it was wrapped, partly of hair oil, partly of the great unknown.”

By describing the taste of food with inedible objects and concepts, Forster continues to balance the expectations of travel with its realities. He also calls attention to the idea of attaching meaning to seemingly unimportant things: here, a not-too-tasty candy takes on the weight of the great unknown.

Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë (1847).

“I heard the rain still beating continuously on the staircase window, and the wind howling in the grove behind the hall; I grew by degrees cold as a stone, and then my courage sank. My habitual mood of humiliation, self-doubt, forlorn depression, fell damp on the embers of my decaying ire.”

Descriptions of temperature and moisture are tactile imagery. In this case, the rain and Jane’s physical discomfort mirror her dark mood.

Getting rid of filter words

Filter words are unnecessary words that describe the perspective and thoughts of a character. The reader spends too much time inside a character’s viewpoint instead of going straight to the detail.

Example using filter words:

Melissa felt worried when she realised she forgot to turn off the iron at home. Actually, she wondered whether her daughter’s recent troubles at school were affecting her concentration. She was already running late for her next appointment and thought about whether she had enough time to go home to check. But she decided that it was too late, she had turned onto the freeway and decided that she would cross her fingers and hope for the best.

Example without the “filter” words:

Melissa screeched to a halt. She hadn’t turned the iron off and now she was already driving down the street. Yesterday's conversation with her daughter’s school principal kept replaying in her mind. “Drugs …boys … fighting …”

She was already late for her next appointment. Damn.

Turning on to the freeway, she prayed that she wouldn’t come home to a scorched kitchen.

Here are some other examples:

Getting the first draft

The best way to get the first draft of an imaginative response is to write, write, write without worrying about what you are writing.

This app will generate a writing prompt and you have to keep writing without stopping. If you stop your writing will be erased.

Increasing your use of interesting adjectives.

Add a noun from your writing into this website and search for interesting descriptive adjectives.

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