Exemplar Craft of Writing HSC Piece

Struggling with Craft of Writing?

Have a read of the following exemplar piece below to find inspiration as you practice preparing for the Module C: Craft pf Writing section in the HSC.

As you read the work, consider the following:

1. What form is the student writing in?
2. What issues and concerns are being raised?
3. What techniques are being used to shape the representation?
4. What conventions of the form are being incorporated?

Bedtime stories, Fables and other Childhood Lessons

‘If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.’

The earliest story I remember reading is: ‘Where Is The Green Sheep?’- a picture book documenting the journey of red, yellow, blue and pink sheep going about their business as we the audience search for our beloved green sheep. I never grew bored of the final page, where we finally notice the green sheep asleep in the distant meadow.

By the time my sister was born, I had learnt to recite ‘Hairy Mclary’ and ‘Minerva Louise’ and listened closely to my mother as she told us the story of the ‘Boy Who Cried Wolf’. Indeed, my sister and I’s childhood consisted of nursery rhymes, stories, Disney and Pixar - anything that provided us with a key to unlock a portal into a distant imaginary world.

Life is Learning. This idea was installed into my thinking process from a very young age. In our household, us children were raised to always recognise the lesson needed to be learnt in every situation we encountered. As a child, it was so compelling to imagine the bravery I might’ve mustered if I were to meet the giant who was searching for Jack, or the fun I would’ve had if I were to trust the cat in the hat when he came to babysit us, or the courage I may’ve built when helping little red kill the big bad wolf to save poor granny. In fact, I assumed all children my age would think the same way, because weren’t we all reading the same stories?

I remember the day I asked my friend about their thoughts on abortion. They replied quoting Mother Teresa: “It’s a poverty to decide that a child must die so that one may live as they wish.” Today, my opinion on this touchy subject remains blurry. But I do remember thinking: but what about those women who have been raped? What about those women whose lives are gravely endangered due to high-risk pregnancy? The shrugging acceptance of war, famine, epidemic, pain and life-long poverty shows us that, whatever we tell ourselves, we've made only the most feeble of efforts to really treat human life as sacred. Yet, regardless of whichever side of the spectrum your opinion may be, it’s clear that there is a whole continuum of thought with many of us never really resting strictly on either side. But why was there this spectra of thought? Why not just one?

I learnt to not tell lies, I learnt to never run in glass slippers and I learnt to never enter a stranger’s home. The moral fables, the endless parade of bedtime stories, the truths that our parents told us taught me all of the necessary things needed for the average life. It’s all just common sense right? Not really.

There are others out there learning to steal, deceive and kill. Others who are being taught to commit the most vile of things like assault, rape and terrorise. Do books teach them that? Obviously not, but what does? Why do we have such a messy melting pot of different people out there in the world? Were we not reading the same books? Maybe it’s one’s experiences in life which leads to certain moral or amoral paths. But, this begs the question: shouldn’t we all be reading tales which tell us not to not break promises? To not take what isn’t ours? To not cheat? It seems that at the heart of a utopian ideal is ironically something sinister: pacification.

One story. One truth.  

I continue to question my mother’s philosophy: Life is Learning. I have been foolish enough to believe that these childhood stories were the antidote to heal all of the wounds which sunk deep into the skin and touched the bone of my life thus far from my parent’s divorce, the abuse, the alcohol through to my own experience of death with loved ones. But what seems to be the case for me is that we all have our own stories and experiences which lead us onto different paths. Some converge and intertwine whilst others will intersect for a few fleeting moments before it is tragically lost - whilst others run away from each other to never meet again. So, if we all read the same stories, live the same experiences, and have all of our paths running in parallel with one another, what happens? Everything stops moving, the noise around us becomes a constant fuzzy murmur, as we all experience the exact same thing. We’d all be fixed coordinates on a cartesian plane, a herd of white sheeps happily frolicking in the meadow with our eyes closed.

So it does seem that life is learning.

Learning that there are others like you, and others not; people who have read the same stories, and people who haven’t even turned the first page yet.