is there creative writing in the hsc

How to Prepare for the HSC Creative Writing Exam

Some people have a natural flair for writing and creative ideas – however, if you’re like most students, completing the HSC creative writing exam in the space of 40 minutes can be a difficult and downright daunting task. Even if you believe don’t have a creative bone in your body, with some careful planning and study you too can ace the HSC creative writing exam – here’s how.

Refer to the syllabus

Just like the rest of your subject exams, a huge factor that determines success in the HSC creative writing section is ensuring you know the syllabus. Refer to the marking criteria to establish what is required of you – especially the study focus you must address (such as belonging or discovery) – and focus on this theme throughout your piece. The stimulus provided should also be a central focus and mentioned throughout your essay – not just haphazardly thrown in at the beginning or end. This way, the markers can clearly see that you have a solid understanding of the concept, as opposed to just memorizing a story word for word.

Know your language techniques

One thing you can learn and practice prior to your HSC creative writing exam that will boost your score greatly is language techniques. It’s best to build up an arsenal of 5-10 techniques that you understand well, and that makes your story more interesting to read. Similes, metaphors, and alliteration – you would have learned all of these and more when analyzing your set texts through the year, so put them to good use! A great one to use is sensory imagery, which makes the reader really feel as though they are in the story and puts to use a rule of any good writing – show, don’t tell.

Develop your characters

The way you develop your character, especially the protagonist in your story, can be a make or break factor for your HSC creative writing piece. It’s not enough to describe their physical appearance or overuse clichés like “troubled teenager” – you need to give them unique qualities that make them both memorable, and relatable in some way.

Write about what you know

The easiest way to succeed in HSC creative writing when you lack confidence in your imaginative ideas is to write about what you already know. Stories are the most organic and authentic when described in accurate detail. The best way to achieve this kind of integrity in your text is to write about an event that you have personally experienced – remembering the vivid aspects of what happened, as well as your emotional response to the situation – and convey this to your marker through your words. Alternatively, you can also write about a topic of interest that you have researched and have a good understanding of.  

HSC creative writing focuses on your ability to compose an engaging, grammatically correct and well-structured story that fits in with the area of study and stimulus. Need some help with preparing for the HSC creative writing exam and getting a Band 6?  Contact C3 Education  and speak to one of our professional  HSC tutors  today to see how we can help.

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Tips and Tricks for HSC Creative Writing

Everyone wants to do well in creative writing, but oftentimes we do not know where to begin.

The typical advice we’re given to improve our imaginative pieces include: “just read more!” or “just write more”. Although these are ways by which we can really enhance our creative skills, I have decided to compile a series of tips and tricks that have allowed me to construct full-scoring imaginative pieces in the hopes of providing students a deeper insight into the key characteristics of successful stories.

I too was afraid and intimidated by creative writing assessments as I wouldn’t consider myself a particularly strong imaginative writer, but through practice, I have been able to develop a relatively robust narratological framework and approach to this mode of writing that has worked consistently well for students.

Once you realise that creative writing, like any other form of non-fictional writing like discursive, persuasive, or formal essays, is defined by a very clear set of features, this makes our job much easier to accomplish.

1.     Subtlety in your storytelling is important

You should always treat your reader as if they know exactly what is going on in the story. Don’t underestimate your reader’s abilities to abstract meaning from your story or their capacity to extract the underlying purpose of the work and the reasons why it is constructed the way it is. Oftentimes, students are afraid that their stories are too abstract and that as a result, their reader will not be able to understand what is going on the work.

However, for the most part, I see that students tend to be too explicit or ‘overt’ in their storytelling to the extent that their work ends up suffering from a lack of nuance. For instance, don’t use similes if you are going to state in plain terms the deeper meaning behind it e.g., “With each step forward he made, he felt as though time was passing by quicker and quicker.” In this instance, there isn’t anything terribly wrong with how it has been written, but it does lack skilful construction in the sense that it doesn’t have any sense of ambiguity in terms of what the idea behind the sentence is.

We always want to give readers enough space to interpret the work and extrapolate meaning from it based on what they personally think the story is about. This means that rather than having each sentence in your work be an explicit link back to your idea, you should be considering how all elements of your work are working together in a cohesive way to represent your overarching idea, thus allowing room for more subtlety and ambiguity in the particular sentences and phrases you use to construct your piece.

A much better example, if you were trying to represent the idea of passing time, would be something along the lines of: “He imagined what it feel like to no longer worry about the past or future, what it feel like to live in a world where there was nothing but ‘forever’ and ‘now’, to stop chasing things that had either already passed or had not yet existed.”

In this second example, despite it being slightly more ambiguous than the first in terms of its meaning, it feels much more effective primarily because it has subtlety (something a lot of skilled writers can do because the meaning of the sentence will be derived from how it interacts with other important elements of the work itself like the plot, characters, setting etc.).

2.     Always consider the elements of narrative and how you will utilise each of them to represent your idea

Although this seems like a rather straightforward tip, students tend to forget the basic building blocks of creative writing. We need to appreciate that success in creative writing fundamentally springs off one’s understanding of narratology i.e., how we use each element of storytelling to represent the overarching ideas of our work.

Considering this, we need to think about what characters we are going to create and how each of them will embody some part of our larger idea or concern, our plot, and the progression of the story itself (i.e., what happens within the story and how this represents the idea at the core of our creative piece), as well as the setting (i.e., how will we create a setting or landscape that helps in the representation of our purpose).

In addition to this, we need to think about the specific language devices and literary techniques that will assist the portrayal of our concepts (e.g., metaphor, simile, extended metaphor, symbolism, motif, allusions, paradox, contrast, self-reflexivity, syntax, diction, lexical chains etc.).

3.     Keep things simple

My final tip would have to be the most neglected pieces of advice in English – which is to ‘keep it simple’. Whilst writing their imaginative pieces, students often get carried away by the complexity of their language, driven by the belief that the more ‘impressive’ their language is, the more marks they will gather from their teacher.

Take it from me – this is not the case. Based on experience, and the many stories I have read from students over the past five years, a consistent trend I have noticed is that full mark creative pieces aren’t necessarily those which have the most complex language. Rather, ‘good’ stories are typically fashioned with relatively ‘simple’ words, with the differentiating factor contributing to their success being the uniqueness in how they actually combine these words together.

Put simply, the words in isolation aren’t that impressive, but the coordination of these words and the way they are joined together to represent ideas is what is distinct (whether that be in how certain words are incorporated into metaphors or in figurative expressions, used as motifs, or even objects being used as symbols). An example of this is given below:

Verbose language but ineffective articulation: “We are miniscule entities, both confounded and spellbound by the nature of existence, yet continuously seeking to decrypt the answer to life.”

Notice how this sentence feels as though the student has simply looked up a synonym for each word. The sentence feels very unnatural and quite clunky since each word is so long. Whilst the vocabulary, in isolation, is great (and there is nothing wrong with having a very diverse and far-reaching vernacular), we want to avoid this in our creative pieces.

This is because imaginative writing is not a competition in who can implement the most difficult words into their stories but is rather a game of how we can represent an idea in the most effective and unique ways.

A more effective sentence might look something like this: “We’re just humans, I thought. Tiny creatures roaming around on a spinning ball, confused and perplexed, but always hopeful that there is something better out there to reach out our arms for.” Notice how the language here is much more simplistic yet captures the underlying idea of the previous sentence in a much more unique and interesting way.

Overall, creative writing can be a tricky form to navigate. Since we cannot escape this form of writing in both junior and senior high school, as well as the HSC, it is vital we have a firm understanding of the dos and don’ts. That way, we will be able to better articulate our stories and craft narratives that are effective and powerful.  

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Three big mistakes to avoid in your English creative

Lily Dalton

English expert at Atomi

And of course, what to do instead.

Okay, so here’s the lowdown on your Discovery creative writing. Everyone has to do one in the HSC, it makes a lot of students stressed AF and it’s an awesome opportunity to nail your Paper 1 English exam.

See, if you have a killer English creative up your sleeve or a really solid plan, you can adapt to any stimulus/instruction you’re given, bang it out in 30 minutes and give yourself 10 extra minutes for your essay. Win.

But for some reason, we basically see the same mistakes made over and over again. So, you know, maybe we should stop making them?

Here are the three biggest mistakes so lock them into your memory and make sure they aren’t happening in your creative!

1. Not writing about discovery

Look, this seems obvious but it’s the biggest make or break and people still forget to do it properly. Heaps of students write out their story and then just tack on some kind discovery in at the end (this ends up being really obvious to the markers and you’re defs going to lose marks).

So, just like an essay has a thesis, your creative should too. Before you really get started on the whole writing bit, come up with one solid idea about discovery (simpler than your essay) and use it as the foundation for your story. If you’ve got 0% inspo right now or just some major writer’s block, this kind of approach will also help you find the idea for your writing.

So, if your thesis is something like: discovering new things about the world around us is significant for discovering new things about ourselves , then hey, there’s a story. Your idea might end up looking like this: a person goes to a new part of town (or the world) and discover something about themselves. Boom.

Your job obviously isn’t over yet but this is a good start. Let’s keep going.

2. Trying to fit a novel in the space of 1000 words

As much as you like to think that NESA can be kind of unfair sometimes, they do actually know that you’re school students and are only asking you to write a piece of creative writing, not a novel and not even a full short story.

So basically, you shouldn’t try and do too much to seem impressive because you just don’t have the time to do it well in 40 minutes.

Instead of writing a creative that covers a massive chunk of history, try and just focus on one snapshot in time - you’ll be able to do a lot more with your ideas and writing techniques. Instead of trying to dig deep into the mind of 5 different main characters, try and keep it to one (or at most, two) character’s internal thoughts and feelings.

It’s also usually a bit too ambitious to write a plot that’s all about the action. If you spend all your 1000 words writing about what people are doing , you’re probably not putting out any ideas on discovery or creating any kind of emotion to your piece.

So check your crazy ambition at the exam door and focus on what you can pull off really well.

3. Taking crazy risks

Just go sky-diving or something, your English creative isn’t the time to take a crazy risk.

See, just like you shouldn’t use super pretentious words in your essay to try and sound fancy, you shouldn’t be taking crazy risks in your creative because you want your marker to be able to really clearly understand and appreciate your work (because it will obviously be amazing).

So, unless you’re 100% confident, don’t try and experiment with any weird genres, crazy fantasy worlds or a super weird post-modern format. Non-linear structures are sweet but try not to make things too confusing by switching between different times or viewpoints without making it really clear to your marker.

It’s also a bit of a risk to write about something you just don’t know that much about. Whether it’s a different culture, a specific job or a really niche historical event, if you can’t capture the context perfectly, it’s going to detract for the other things you’re doing really well.

Obviously, there are no rules in creative writing so you can definitely write about a historical event and try an interesting genre or structure but the secret is to make it much less of a risk but being as clear as possible and doing a lot of research so you know how to pull it off!

English creatives are so important because basically every single one of us has to do it and because it’s English, this subject is going to count towards your ATAR. So, if we keep seeing the same mistakes made over and over again, now is the time to wake up to those mistakes and just stop them. Remember to check your essays for: a discovery theme, a manageable idea and an idea that you are 100% you can nail. 👊

Published on

July 11, 2017

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Creative Writing Discovery – Part 1

The Creative Writing section of the HSC Paper 1 exam offers students the chance to display their understanding of Discovery by using their imagination to construct a short fictional piece. As enjoyable as this is, similar words of caution made about the comprehension section apply a propos of creative writing, for pitfalls abound in preparing for this part of the exam as well. Yet surely they can be avoided, surely the daunting task of attaining artistic revelation can be attenuated with right effort and preparation, a right mind? Of course! ( Just don’t call me Shirley ).

In my experience as a tutor, it’s common to observe students being held back by a few different but equally stultifying attitudes towards their creative writing, and indeed creativity in general. The first is that creativity, and therefore creative writing, is wholly “subjective” (whatever that means – entire PHDs have been devoted to the question of relativism in aesthetic judgment). The most extreme version of this attitude sees the student object in principle to the possibility of the marker arriving at a justifiable mark for their story.

It’s incredibly important to dispel such a fiction. Even relativism, a tenuous stance that can be held on such questions as morality and aesthetic judgment, is more subtle than this assertion. All art, like beauty, lies in the eye of the beholder, yet the beheld must display elements of craftsmanship in order to be considered. Take music for example. At the very least, out of tune instruments, playing out of time, in different keys, will be deemed vulgar and deficient, for they lack something which is easily discernible in all great art: mastery. What makes for a pleasing response in art is the obvious display of mastery over melody, harmony, rhythm, composition and performance. All these aspects can be, and are, judged by everyone from critics to casual listeners.

The same goes with literature. The canon for example, comprised of everything from Homer’s epic poetry to Milton to Auden, is judged rightly to have exhibited mastery over those qualities which make for great literature: everything from compositional form (narrative, verse structures, syntax etc), dexterity with language (imagination in metaphor etc, tantalising word combinations etc) to what is perhaps most important: a display of “heart”, of “insight”, the possibility of the light of self-knowledge which guides us through the omnipresent darkness. Literature is, as Joyce put it, the “affirmation of the spirit of man. Yet its aliveness is crafted with skill and composure. Interestingly, the ancient greeks only had one word “techne” for both art (painting, sculpture) AND craft (weaving, artisanal work etc). This shows how much they understood the blood, sweat and tears that goes into the craftsmanship of art. In short, be wary of succumbing to the temptation that William Butler Yeats warned of: of creativity without labour.

There is, related to this, the danger of resting on your laurels because of the freedom offered by the creative section. It is entirely up to you to explore the particular themes and character/situational contours. Many students take this as a ticket to wing it the night before or even on the day, to totally rely on the spontaneity of the imagination. This is folly, and as a tutor you can immediately tell when a student has done this, has not reflected and properly wrought a story. Usually this takes the form of an introduction that is far too long and then a jarring rush to end it. Total, undisciplined freedom only leads to a mess.

Another inhibiting ailment is writer’s bloc. Of being so conscious of the high levels of craftsmanship involved, of knowing your place in the pantheon of writing that not a word gets written. This stunting dissonance is part of the artist’s agony. You must relish the writing more than you indulge in the fears. But as with all arts, it can be learned and honed, and so it is important that you write as many stories as you can, and it is inevitable you’ll improve.

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How to ACE the HSC in creative writing. Year 11 & 12, 2022

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5 days of intensive preparation to allow you to ace creative writing for the HSC

Over the five days you will cover:

• Common module reading
• Common module essay writing (skills based)
• Module C - The Craft of Writing: Introduction of the module and tips from the marking centre
• Module C - The Craft of Writing: Different styles of writing and close analysis of some of the prescribed texts.
• Module C - The Craft of Writing: Practice writing and examining exemplar responses .

ABOUT  Yang Weinberger   

An outstanding , sought after English Teacher with decades of experience. Online Sessions. 10th to 14th January - 2 hours per day starting at 12pm.

Yang is an experienced English teacher with more than ten years of classroom expertise. She has previously worked at Moriah College when they ranked 3rd in the state for English in 2017 and 9th in the state in 2018. 

Previously, she was Assistant Head of English, Debating and Public Speaking Coordinator and the Literacy and Digital Coordinator. 

Yang has a Bachelor Secondary Education/Bachelor Arts (English/History) and is currently studying a Master’s degree in Creative Writing at the University of Sydney. 

The knowledge she will share over these sessions will inspire and give a huge advantage prior to the start of the 2022 school year.

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If a learner has not started a course and cannot attend it or there are not sufficient students to run the course, a credit will be issued for the next time that course will be run.

• insightenglishtuto
• Jan 25, 2023

How to Ace HSC Creative Writing

The creative form is an undoubtedly ambiguous and intimidating medium. However many students mistakenly believe that one's skills in creative writing are a fixed thing, and that one cannot achieve drastic improvements in this form of writing. Often this becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy because students don't practice enough and don't receive continuous feedback and guidance on how to exactly elevate their stories.To score a full mark creative in the HSC, it boils down to a very simply formula which when used in the correct manner, will enable you to confidently and seamlessly craft powerful and effective narratives.

Full mark creatives comprise three things:

An idea (a sophisticated idea that provides insight into the human experience)

Narrative (the effective combination of literary elements like plot, style, setting, characters etc. to achieve a coherent representation)

Language forms & features (literary techniques that deliberately and intentionally shape the representation of meaning)

Having an idea that is sophisticated and which provides audiences with an insight into what it means to be ‘human’ is key to a successful imaginative piece. Though you‘re not expected or required to have an overly complex concept, you should try and develop a meaningful idea throughout your story so audiences can take something away from your story.

After you’ve settled on an idea, you need to think about how you go about representing it in the form of a narrative. This means considering the characters you want to include in your piece, the setting and plot. Each of these narrative elements should have a meaningful and significant role in the representation of meaning. For instance, you may decide to set your story in a particular location as a means of portraying a character’s state of mind.

Once the macro elements of your work have been decided, you’ll need to start writing your first draft. During the synthesis process, you’ll need to decide on what specific language devices to use and consider the intended effect behind their use as well. It may be useful to reflect on the language forms and features of other texts you’ve studied and how they may be used purposefully inside your own work. You may want to think about incorporating techniques like motif, symbolism or extended metaphors.

If this blog post helped you or if you are interested in enrolling in HSC English classes, contact us at [email protected]

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