How to Write Question 5 Paper 1
How to Write Question 5 Paper 1
Brilliant writing from Nehal - thanks for your generosity
Where Students Go Wrong
I’m very excited when students take the time to write like real writers.
This is what I tell all my students: write the kind of description that would appear in a novel. This is very difficult for most of them to understand, because they think just chatting a load of descriptive techniques makes good writing.
So I told Nehal: Your writing is exactly like the description I recommend students should write. This is much better writing than I would expect from a 16-year-old student, because it would fit perfectly into a novel.
If you have written it yourself, you should consider becoming a writer, because it is brilliant. If you haven’t written it yourself, but can remember it for the exam, then it will get full marks.
Washed Up
Silence.
How I had wished for a morsel, a minute of silence in this cacophony of a town. But today, the only day where even the gulls seemed to hold their breath, I was deeply unsettled. I never imagined I would have ever lived to hear the echo of my own footsteps as I walked down the cobbled alley of Mar Bianco Market. Not even the whistle of salted wind through the dyed cloth sunshades above, nor the creak of safety-hazard stalls pricked the cloying quiet.
The mounds of lumpy clams, wet in their buckets, glistened in the stained sunlight which glowed through the tents. The mackerel still sparkled and dripped from their nets, and the Fat Ladies’ spiced mussel stew still gurgled on the fire which still crackled. Still. Usually, if you told me everybody in Mar Bianco had disappeared, I wouldn’t go as far as to complain- but when each and every soul vanishes on a normal morning, the kind of souls who would reach for their harpoon to protect their precious fishy goods, it meant something was gravely wrong. The market was a living instrument; the sea breeze inflated the place, tinkered hanging pots, pans and ladles like percussion, and breathed out it’s song like a patchworked bagpipe. I had to admit that it now had the musical value of a barnacle.
I could not resist looking at the unprotected goods. Pocketing a couple of oranges from Old Mario’s ghost-tent surprisingly did not summon the man. You can’t blame me for expecting him to appear behind me like a phantom; the Ghost Of Fresh Organic Produce Past. I shuddered to remember the time he had sent his mangy old terrier after me when I swiped an apple. I was only six! I ran for my life; it was all I knew how to do.
We were struggling, Papa and I, ever since that horrendous month. After that event, the Fat Ladies lowered the price of their own apples - we were the talk of the town for a painfully long time. I suppose they did that out of pity for the poor single father with a young daughter and a newly missing wife, but I really think they did it to spite Old Mario. In Mar Bianco, you can only help others if it means you can squash your neighbouring market competitors.
Before I could let out a sigh of relief that the Ghost Of Fresh Organic Produce Past did not materialise to haunt me, Mario’s squawk echoed up the bottom of the slope. It came from the docks, amplified a thousand times by the silence and the smooth pebbled street. I didn’t know what I was doing, running towards the sound of Old Mario, when I really should have been running away, with those cursed oranges bouncing in my sleeve.
I was right. Something was wrong. A crowd of every catching, cooking, skinning, gutting, boiling and dog-sending faces of Mar Bianco Market tugged and toiled in a throbbing knot of excitement at the edge of the dock, around something I could not see. I pushed my way through the people, trying to find some familiar faces. The Fat Ladies waved their ladles around madly, stirring some delicious air soup. Gloriana, Mirabella and Angelina did not care to give me the up-down stare this time. They saw something much more interesting through the wrestling feet of the crowd. Mario’s straw hat floated above the mob. I struggled through arms and legs to reach him, to make some sense of this commotion.
Old Mario’s sun-beaten face drooped in disbelief instead of contempt. His scruffy mutt, bundled tightly in his arms like a ragged purse, whimpered. There was something at the edge of the dock, a dark shape, familiarly close to the tickle of the seawater. Gut-wrenchingly familiar.
I remember when I had finally outrun Pablo's dog. The apple had not lost its way from my hands despite the winding chase. I did not stop to regain my breath as I noticed a crowd had formed by the dock. I slinked my way toward the towering men and women, expecting some washed up treasure, or a beached marlin, just like the one Mama and I had discovered that winter.
Mama -- I had missed her gravely. I hated myself for forgetting the way she looked. Each day, the warm fog which replaced her face in my memories got thicker, until all that was left was the big mole under her eye. She had been away for months, then years. Father had always disapproved of her voyages out to sea, but he knew she was the reason we could buy nice things.
As I burrowed further through the people toward the water, hiding the apple in my sleeve, I heard the excited chatter dampen, like everybody had bitten their tongues. It became harder and harder to push to the front- the crowd had begun to resist, but I slid away, the tiny, slippery girl that I was. I had stopped at the edge of the board and looked down into the water.
I don’t remember what I felt when I first saw it, but I know that my muscles, my joints, my bones had stopped working. The apple slipped from my fingers and splashed into the turquoise water, and mockingly bobbed over the image I would see in my nightmares for years to come. And then I had slipped, not caring if I followed my apple.
A familiar tightness began to grip my throat. I pierced the skin of the orange with my nails.
‘Mario! What’s going on? What’s everybody looking at? I wanna—I need to know!’
He did not notice that I was tugging on his apron. I did not notice until I let go.
‘It’s nuffin’ like what you think.’
He shook his head and held his mutt closer to his chest.
‘I never seen nuffin’ like this. No, not in me forty years of shanties n’ rum.’
His eyes were glued ahead, not bothering to answer my question. I did what I had to, shoving him, Angelina, Mirabella, Gloriana, and the Fat Ladies, dodging a soggy ladle to make sure it was not what I saw in my nightmares. That it did not wash up again like a plague, a curse of the ocean.
I finally squeezed my way to get a clear view.
It did not wash up again.
Could I call it, it?
A slimy, shaking body lay on the board. Two, bony arms splayed on either side of its torso, like it was sleeping, exhausted from a cross-dimensional voyage. Its rubbery skin was translucent enough to display a gruesome lattice of black veins which accumulated in its ribbed chest in quivering tangles. Its chest rose and fell—God, it was alive! Its spindly talons were meshed in a sort of membrane webbing, which stuck slick to the chalky wood and dried in the sun. From its head to its hollowed belly, it was a shrunken, shrivelled corpse, blue like it had frozen to death.
But below it had no legs. No -- instead it had a huge mass of meat and skin which was plastered in dark layers of pastry, a hellish biological paper-mache. At the end of its tail, there was a burst of feathery, clear spines just like the fins of Mama’s marlin.
It was a siren.
What they said had torn apart Mama's ship those ten years ago; that had only left driftwood of the glossy thing - driftwood which had haunted my dreams since it washed up on the docks that day - and nothing of the woman.
I knew I could not run away from mama's fate any longer. I was not six years old anymore. I kneeled down to the thing, blocking out the fearful uproar from the crowd, and took a good look at it's peaceful face. Everything that identified its face as human appeared to have been scoured away with a pumice. There was nothing much else than a pair of thin, black, twitching lips, bulging eyelids, and two reptilian gashes where her nose ought to be.
Then I noticed the mole under her eye.
How to Use This in Your Exam
Remember that it has a 5 Act Structure. nearly all stories do this!
The village market is suspiciously quiet and empty.
The narrator contrasts this with a flashback of how she had been caught stealing an apple when she was six.
The narrator now steals an orange, without fear of being caught.
The narrator goes to the docks, where all the market stall holders have gathered, and remembers the horror of her mother disappearing at sea years ago, in another flashback.
The narrator sees a disfigured woman, who takes the form of a mythical creature, a Siren.
We realise, because of the well placed detail of the mole, that this is not just a Siren, it is her mother.
How You Can Adapt this 5 Act Structure
You can’t copy this, of course, as it would be plagiarism, and over 3000 students will read this in my Substack. So, the examiner is likely to spot if you have the same words in your answer as Nehal.
But you can adapt the 5 Act Structure.
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