3. How to integrate the stimulus

3. How to integrate the stimulus

The stimulus has to relate to writing by definition of the module, but it will contain specific

words that you must integrate into your response to ensure you properly answer the question.

e.g.

A story is not like a road to follow… it’s more like a house. You go inside and stay there for a while, wandering back and forth and settling where you like and discovering how the room and corridors relate to each other, how the world is viewed from these windows. 

Use this quote as a stimulus for a piece of discursive writing that expresses your perspective about the role of literature in representing personal and public worlds. 

‘I have never been to a funeral before and this one is my Grandma’s. My biggest fan, an ever-

present influence in my life. A eulogy that stayed with me for so long, pondering back and

forth until…

See how the stimulus has been integrated.

I pull out the crisp warm pages. Ink smudged and wet. The story I had held in for so long

leaks out of me in ink form as I let the public world view my personal experience. I feel

connected.

Once upon a time stories were to stay in truth, in political correctness, in representation of

public worlds. For what was painted and spoken and written and formed into stories was free

from discovery of emotions. It was a world view and only that. A public world free from

emotion. But now, do we dare to explore the collision of personal and public worlds? A

bridge of emotion and truth? Do we dare to explore that personal world that is our

psychological landscape in hope for connection with something more profound?

Well let’s go back to a time where our stories were stationary. For they stayed in the public

world. A room with no doors. No society was not fractured or dislocated from our world.

A common history printed on pages by S.J Coleridge and the greats. ‘Water, water

everywhere, and not a drop to drink’. No opportunity to drink from the wells of

interpretation. No opportunity to explore our personal world, our psychological landscape,

our emotions. ‘Were we to infer from such universality that narrative was insignificant?’ Did

emotion leak out of us into a personal world exploring corridors in human existence, in

public worlds?

Final tips

Explore plots and characters by writing them from different perspectives.

How?

– Choose an event, situation, story or person from a different context and remake for a contemporary audience (current events and personalities, characters from cultural stories, narrative myths and parable, historical events and personalities)

– Decide: which elements of the story will be omitted, suppressed, minimise to challenge assumptions in the new context? What narrative point of view will be adopted to present a particular perspective on the event to the intended audience? How can assumptions about a character be explored in the new text? Can the original features of the text be remade through symbolism?

Experiment:

– Stylistic elements: cutting unnecessary words

– Substituting other words

– Reconsidering paragraphing decisions and punctuation usage

– Rearranging grammatical units in sentences

Reflect on your own writing

– How did you characterise?

– How did you develop your setting?

– Why did you choose the technique?

– Who was your audience and purpose?

– What was the assumed context, attitude, values?