Grade 11 Creative Writing: Ten Model Compositions

Ten model compositions of about a hundred and sixty-five words, at Ordinary Level standard. The set mixes the three kinds of writing the paper actually asks for: narrative, description, and an opinion argued out.

That mixture is deliberate. A class that has only practised stories loses marks the moment the question asks what they think, and a class that has only practised arguments writes stories with no life in them. Four here are narrative, three describe, and three take a position.

I was told on a Thursday that I would give the vote of thanks at the prize-giving on Saturday. The pupil who was to do it had chickenpox.

I am not a confident speaker. In class I answer questions in six words and sit down.

My English teacher wrote the speech with me on Friday afternoon, and then made me say it eleven times. The eleventh time she stopped correcting me and only listened.

On Saturday the hall held about six hundred people. The chief guest was a doctor from Colombo. I could hear my own voice in the microphone, half a second behind me, which nobody had warned me about.

I forgot one sentence in the middle. I do not think anybody except my teacher knew.

Afterwards three teachers said well done and my mother cried in the car park, which was embarrassing and also not.

I am still not a confident speaker. But I know now that being frightened and doing it anyway are not opposites.

My grandmother's kitchen is at the back of the house, down two steps, and it is darker than any other room.

The walls above the hearth are black from forty years of smoke. There is a shelf of glass bottles with no labels, and she knows what is in every one of them. The coconut scraper is screwed to a low stool and the handle has worn smooth and pale where her hand goes.

It smells of three things at once: woodsmoke, coconut oil, and the dried fish that hangs in a basket near the window.

She cooks sitting down. Everything she needs is within the reach of an arm, because she arranged it that way long before her knees gave trouble.

My mother's kitchen has tiles, a gas cooker and a window that opens properly. It is a better kitchen in every way that can be written down.

Nothing cooked in it has ever tasted the same.

The hall is the school gymnasium with the nets taken down. There are two hundred and forty desks in twelve rows, each one with a number card stuck to the corner.

It is very quiet before an examination, and it is the wrong kind of quiet. Two hundred people breathing and nobody speaking. Somebody's shoe taps. A fan clicks each time it turns.

The invigilator walks up and down the row and his shoes are the loudest thing in the building.

When the papers come round face down, everybody reads the number on the card again, which is pointless because it has not changed.

Then the bell, and the sound of two hundred and forty papers turning at once, which is like one long breath.

After that the hall is not frightening any more. It is only a room where you have three hours and some questions.

It is the fifteen minutes before the bell that nobody prepares you for.

Mr Ranjith has parked at our junction for nineteen years. He is the person our lane telephones at two in the morning.

He took my grandmother to hospital in 2019 and waited outside until four o'clock without being asked. He has taken pupils from our lane to the O/L examination hall every year for as long as I can remember, and he does not charge for that.

He knows every shortcut between here and the town. He also knows which houses are having difficulty, and he says nothing about it to anybody.

During the fuel queues in 2022 he stood for nine hours and then used what he had for a woman who needed dialysis twice a week.

He is not a rich man. His three-wheeler is old and the back seat is patched with grey tape.

People talk about wanting to serve the country. Mr Ranjith has never once used that word, and I can name eleven people in our lane who owe him something.

Our last day was a Friday in November, eleven days before the examination began.

There was no ceremony. The timetable said Sinhala, mathematics and two periods of revision, and that is what happened.

At interval somebody produced a marker pen and started signing shirts, which is not allowed, and by the end of the day about forty of us were wearing our whole class on our backs. Our class teacher saw it and went back into the staff room without saying anything.

The last bell rang at half past one as it has rung four thousand times.

Nobody wanted to leave the classroom. We stood in it for twenty minutes talking about the examination because it was easier than talking about anything else.

I walked out of the gate at two o'clock with my bag on one shoulder.

I had been through that gate twice a day for eleven years. It is a perfectly ordinary gate and I have never looked at it properly since.

My mother left for Kuwait on the nineteenth of April. She is a housemaid there and her contract is for two years.

We went to Katunayake in my uncle's van, seven of us, and we reached at eleven at night for a flight at four in the morning.

The departure area has a glass wall. She stood on the other side of it for a long time and we stood on this side, and after a while there was nothing left to say and nobody would go first.

My father did not speak in the van coming back.

She calls on Sunday mornings. The kitchen is finished now and my sister is in a nursing course, and both of those things are because of Kuwait.

When people say that our country sends its mothers away, I know they are right.

I also know that our kitchen has a roof, and I have not worked out how to hold those two facts at the same time.

The perahera passes our lane on the full moon day in August, and people take their places on the wall two hours early.

It comes first as sound: the drums from somewhere near the junction, before anything can be seen. Then the whip-crackers, and the smell of the coconut-oil torches, which is heavy and sweet and gets into your clothes.

The dancers come in lines, their silver headpieces catching the torchlight, and the drummers walk with their heads tipped slightly back.

The elephants come last and they change the street. People who have been shouting stop shouting. You can hear the chains and the feet, which make almost no noise at all for something so large.

It takes about forty minutes to pass and the lane smells of oil until the morning.

Small children are carried home asleep on shoulders. I was carried home from this perahera myself, and I do not remember which year I was last carried.

We are often told that failure is a good teacher. I think that is true only under one condition, and the condition is usually left out.

I failed mathematics in the second term of Grade 10. Thirty-four marks. It taught me nothing at all for about two months, because all I felt was shame, and shame does not teach, it only silences.

What changed was not the failure. It was a teacher who sat with my paper and showed me that twenty-two of my lost marks came from three kinds of mistake, all of them fixable.

After that the failure became useful, because it had become information.

So failure by itself teaches very little. Failure plus somebody who will explain it teaches a great deal.

This matters because we tell pupils to learn from their mistakes and then leave them alone with the paper. A pupil alone with a bad mark does not learn. A pupil shown where the marks went does.

My parents want me to do science for the Advanced Level. I want to do arts, and specifically English and geography.

Their reasons are not foolish. They have watched cousins finish arts degrees and sit at home for three years afterwards, and they are frightened of that for me. When people say Sri Lankan parents only care about status, they are being unfair to my father, who is afraid of something real.

My reason is simpler and harder to defend: I am good at these subjects and I am not good at chemistry.

We have not settled it. What has helped is that I stopped arguing about which stream is better and started finding out what somebody with my subjects actually does for a living, with names and salaries.

That changed the conversation, because it turned my wish into a plan.

A seventeen-year-old asking to be trusted should expect to be asked what the plan is.

At the end of our lane, where the culvert crosses the drain, there is a pile of rubbish that has been there for as long as I can remember.

Nobody decided to put it there. One person left a bag, and then the place became a place where bags are left. It is now about the size of a small car and it smells for twenty metres in either direction.

The council lorry comes on Tuesdays and it does not come down our lane, because the lane is too narrow for it to turn.

In 2023 some of us cleared it. Forty bags. It was clean for five weeks.

I used to think the problem was that people do not care. I no longer think that. The people who leave bags there also sweep their own gardens every morning.

The problem is that the lorry cannot turn, and nobody has ever been given anywhere else to put it.

• Name the type before reading each one. Story, description, opinion. Pupils who cannot tell which is being asked for answer the wrong question under pressure.
• Give them the plan, not the piece. Four lines of plan for each model, written on the board, is a better lesson than the finished composition.
• In the opinion pieces, find the concession. Each one admits the other side once. Examiners reward that; pupils almost never do it unprompted.
• Practise the opening sentence on its own. Ten pupils, ten openings for the same title, read aloud. It takes fifteen minutes and it changes how they start.
• Insist on the last five minutes for checking. At this level the commonest lost marks are tense slips and missing full stops, not weak ideas.