Grade 9 Creative Writing: Ten Model Compositions

Ten model compositions of about a hundred and thirty words. This is the year a composition can begin to think as well as describe: something happens, and the writer ends up understanding something they did not understand at the start.

The English is still plain. What has grown is not the vocabulary but the shape - a clear opening, a middle that moves, and a last line that is earned rather than announced.

The wind started at about nine o'clock and by ten it was frightening. We could hear the coconut trees and then something metal moving on a roof somewhere down the lane.

My father put us all in the middle room, the one with no windows. He sat in the doorway with a torch and did not use it.

At some point there was a very loud crack. Nobody said anything for a long moment.

In the morning we saw that the jak tree had fallen across the lane, not on our house. The kitchen roof sheets were in the neighbour's garden. Our gate was bent flat.

By eight o'clock six men were cutting the tree and by noon the lane was open.

I had always thought of our neighbours as people who live near us. That morning I understood that they are something else.

Twenty-two of us applied to be prefects and eleven were chosen. The interview was in the principal's office on a Wednesday.

I had prepared answers about discipline and responsibility. I had practised them in front of a mirror, which sounds foolish and was useful.

The principal asked me one question I had not prepared for. He asked what I would do if I saw my own friend breaking a rule.

I said I would report it. He looked at me and said, "Are you telling me the truth, or telling me what I want to hear?"

I thought about it and said I did not know.

I was selected. Two of my friends who gave the confident answer were not.

I still do not know whether I would report Dinesh. I am glad I did not pretend.

My mother's sewing machine stands near the front window because that is where the light is best.

She has had it since before she was married. It is black, it works with a foot pedal, and it makes a sound like a long whisper.

For nineteen years she has sewn school uniforms for the children in our lane. In December and January she works until midnight because school reopens in January and everybody remembers late.

She charges very little. Once I asked her why, and she said that a mother who cannot pay still sends her child to school.

Two years ago my father wanted to buy her an electric machine. She said the old one has never once failed her.

I have grown up to the sound of that machine. When I am away from home I notice the quiet.

There is a boy who sells newspapers at the junction near my school. He is about my age.

For two years I walked past him every morning and never spoke to him. He had a blue cap and a plastic bag of change and he was always there before me.

In March our teacher gave us an essay on child labour. I wrote four paragraphs about it and got eighteen out of twenty.

That evening I saw him at the junction again and I felt something I did not like.

The next day I bought a paper and asked his name. It is Kavindu. He goes to school in the afternoon session and sells papers in the morning.

He does not need my pity. He was in the top ten of his class last term, which is better than I have ever done.

In Grade 8 I copied a friend's mathematics homework for a whole term.

It began once, on a day I had not finished, and then it was easier to keep going than to stop. My marks for homework were good all term. My marks in the term test were not.

The teacher called me after the test. She did not shout. She put my homework book and my answer paper side by side on the table and waited.

I have never felt worse than in that silence.

She made me do the whole term's work again in the holidays, and she checked it herself, page by page.

I was angry with her for about a week. Then I understood that she had given me the holidays instead of giving me a punishment I would have forgotten.

An old lady lived alone in the house next to ours. Her children are in Italy and they send money every month.

She used to call me over the wall to help her with small things: a bulb, a jar she could not open, a form she could not read.

I did not always want to go. Sometimes I pretended I had not heard.

In May she was taken to hospital and she did not come back. Her children came for the funeral and stayed for nine days.

The house is locked now. There is a padlock on the gate and the garden has gone wild.

The jar and the bulb took two minutes each. I cannot stop thinking about the times I pretended not to hear, and there is nothing at all that I can do about them now.

Our school reached the zonal netball final for the first time in fourteen years. I was in the team.

We trained from half past five every morning for two months. Our coach is a mathematics teacher who played for her university long ago.

In the final we led by four goals at half time. Then their tall girl started scoring and we could not stop her. We lost by two.

In the changing room nobody could speak. Our captain cried, which made it worse, because she never does.

The coach came in and said, "Fourteen years. You are the ones who came back."

There is a photograph of our team in the corridor now, under the word Runners-Up. I walk past it every day and I am not ashamed of it any more.

When my brother went to Korea to work, I was eleven and I was angry with him.

He had promised to teach me to ride a motorcycle in the April holidays. Instead he left in March with two bags and everybody crying at the gate except me.

I wrote him a letter that week. It was two pages and most of it was unkind. I kept it in my mathematics book and did not post it.

He telephoned every Sunday for three years. He sent the money that built our kitchen and paid for my sister's classes.

He came back in June. He is thinner and he laughs less.

The letter is still in the book. I read it again last month, and I was glad about the only good decision I made when I was eleven.

Our Sinhala teacher is the strictest in the school and nobody has ever seen her upset.

One Monday she came to class and taught the lesson in a voice we did not know. It was too soft. She did not once ask anybody to stand up.

Somebody had told us before the bell that her mother had died on Saturday.

For forty minutes forty-two pupils sat absolutely still. Nobody passed a note. Nobody asked to go out.

At the end she said, "Thank you, children," and went out quickly.

We talked about it at interval and decided we had done nothing, because we had only sat quietly.

I think now that it was not nothing. Sometimes the only thing you can give a person is one hour in which nobody makes it harder.

In August my father was transferred and we moved to Gampaha. I had lived in the same village for fourteen years.

The packing took four days. Our house looked much bigger empty, and much smaller than I remembered at the same time.

My friends came on the last evening. We did not do anything special. We sat on the culvert as usual and talked about nothing, and then it got dark and they went home.

In the lorry I did not look back, because I had decided in advance not to.

Gampaha is better in most ways. The school is bigger, the bus comes every ten minutes, and there is a library.

I have made friends here and I like them. But nobody in this town knows what I was like when I was six.

• Cover the last two lines and ask the class to write them. Then compare. This is the single most useful exercise with a model at this level.
• Ask what the writer believed at the beginning and at the end. If nothing changed, the piece is a report, not a story.
• Ban the phrase "it was a memorable day". It is what a pupil writes instead of an ending. None of these use it.
• Look at where the short sentences fall. They are almost always at the moment of greatest weight. Length is a tool, not an accident.
• Set one of these titles as a speaking task first. A pupil who has told the story aloud writes it twice as well.