CREATIVE WRITING
UNIT 1-25 Creative Writing Tools
Session 1
OUR 25 CREATIVE WRITING TOOLS
• Alliteration, Allusion, Anastrophe, Assonance, Connotation
• Consonance, Denotation, Hyperbole, Imagery, Internal Rhyme
• Metaphor, Meter, Mood, Onomatopoeia, Oxymoron
• Personification, Puns, Rhyme Scheme, Rhythm, Simile
• Stanza, Synecdoche, Tone, Understatement, Verse
ALLITERATION
• Alliteration -the occurrence of the same
letter or sound at the beginning of
adjacent
or closely connected
words.
• Example: Mommy Made Me Mash My
M&Ms.
• A Poem with alliteration
NOW YOU TRY
• Create a short poem including alliteration.
• Now let’s share
ALLUSION
• Allusion-an expression designed to call something to mind without mentioning it
explicitly; an indirect or passing reference
• Examples-“Don’t act like a Romeo in front of her.”
• “This place is like a Garden of Eden.”
• “Hey! Guess who the new Newton of our school is?”
CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE’S DOCTOR
FAUSTUS
A segment
“Learnèd Faustus, to find the secrets of astronomy
Graven in the book of Jove’s high firmament,
Did mount him up to scale Olympus’ top,
Where, sitting in a chariot burning bright,
Drawn by the strength of yokèd dragons’ necks,
He views the clouds, the planets, and the stars.”
Jove’s high firmament refers to the outer stretches of the universe.
“Olympus’ top” is an allusion to Greek Mythology where
Mount Olympus is home of gods. Similarly, “a chariot burning bright” refers to a
Greek Myth of “god Apollo” who is said to drive the sun in his chariot.
NOW YOU TRY
•Write a Short Poem or Paragraph
using Allusion
•Share
ANASTROPHE
Anastrophe -the inversion of the usual order of words or clauses.
• Examples -"Ready are you? What know you of ready? For eight hundred years have I
trained Jedi. My own counsel will I keep on who is to be trained. . . . This one a long
time have I watched. . . . Never his mind on where he was."
(Yoda in Star Wars: Episode V--The Empire Strikes Back, 1980)
• "Sure I am of this, that you have only to endure to conquer."
(Winston Churchill, address delivered at the Guildhall, London, Sep. 14, 1914)
•
- "Backward ran sentences until reels the mind. . . . Where it all will end, knows God!"
(Wolcott Gibbs, from a parody of Time magazine. The New Yorker, 1936)
EXAMPLES OF ANASTROPHE
• Alexander Pope in Epistle To A Lady:
"How many pictures of one Nymph we view,
All how unlike each other, all how true!"
• In an inaugural address of John F. Kennedy:
"Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country."
• Max Shulman in The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis:
Gracious, she was. But gracious, I mean full of graces...
Intelligent, she was not. In fact, she veered in the opposite direction
NOW YOU TRY
• Write 2-3 sentences containing anastrophe
• Share
ASSONANCE
• Assonance -in poetry, the repetition of the sound of a vowel or diphthong in
nonrhyming stressed syllables near enough to each other for the echo to be
discernible (e.g., penitence,reticence ).
• Examples-"Hear the mellow wedding bells" by Edgar Allen Poe
• "If I bleat when I speak it's because I just got . . . fleeced." - "Deadwood" by Al
Swearengen
• "Soft language issued from their spitless lips as they swished in low circles round and
round the field, winding hither and thither through the weeds" - "Portrait of the Artist
as a Young Man" by James Joyce
ASSONANCE EXAMPLES
• "I must confess that in my quest I felt depressed and restless." - "With Love" by Thin Lizzy
• "In the over-mastering loneliness of that moment, his whole life seemed to him nothing
but vanity." - "Night Rider" by Robert Penn Warren
• “He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound’s the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.
The woods are lovely, dar and deep.
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.”-Rober Frost-Fire and Ice
NOW YOU TRY
• Write a short poem using assonance
• Share
CONNOTATION
• Connotation-an idea or feeling that a word invokes in addition to its literal or primary
meaning.
• "the word “discipline” has unhappy connotations of punishment and repression"
• Examples Mending Wall
by
Robert Frost
• And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go.
To each the boulders that have fallen to each.
CONNOTATION EXAMPLES
• -"What’s Montague? it is nor hand, nor foot,Nor arm, nor face, nor any other part
Belonging to a man. O! be some other name:What’s in a name? that which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet."(Juliet in Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare)
• -Lisa: "A rose by any other name smells as sweet."
Bart: Not if you call them "Stench Blossoms."
(The Simpsons)
• "The name reservation has a negative connotation among Native Americans--an intern camp of
sorts."
(John Russell)
•
NOW YOU TRY
• Write a couple sentences including connotation
• Share
EVERYBODY NOW
• Write a poem that includes each literary tool that we
talked about today
• Share