Summary
Highlights
Creative writing is defined as writing that transcends normal professional, journalistic, academic, or technical forms. It is less technical and primarily aims to entertain rather than merely inform, expressing feelings, thoughts, and emotions. Common genres include poetry, short stories, novels, screenplays, and lyrics, but can also encompass magazine articles, essays, greeting cards, and feature stories.
Sensory imagery involves using descriptive language to create mental pictures by engaging a reader's five senses. The five types are visual (sight), gustatory (taste), auditory (hearing), olfactory (smell), and tactile (touch).
Visual imagery engages the sense of sight, describing physical attributes like color, size, shape, lightness, darkness, shadows, and shade. Examples illustrate how descriptive words help readers visualize scenes, such as 'full moon rose slowly over the trees, blanketing the farm with its pale glow' or an 'old hound dog kept watch from the safety of the rickety porch'.
Gustatory imagery engages the sense of taste, including the five basic tastes (sweet, salty, bitter, sour, umami) and sensations tied to eating. Examples include 'the sweet butter cream icing melted on my tongue' and savoring 'the richness of the warm spice cake'.
Auditory imagery engages the sense of hearing. Literary devices like onomatopoeia and alliteration can create sounds in writing. Examples are 'the clank of heavy plates drifted from the kitchen' and 'the splatters of rain on the ground was like the sound of bacon being pan fried'.
Olfactory imagery engages the sense of smell. Scent is a direct trigger for memory and emotion but can be difficult to describe, often relying on similes. Examples include comparing a bad smell to 'rotten meat' or describing the scent of 'damp earth' near woods.
Tactile imagery engages the sense of touch, including textures, sensations, and differences in temperature. It can also appeal to human emotions. Examples are 'the sudden plunge into the cool water took his breath away' and describing a troubled 'marriage felt like a beach after a storm'.
Diction refers to the writer's deliberate choice of words or language to communicate a message, establish a particular voice, or create a writing style. Its purpose is to create tone, support the setting, establish narrative voice, and bring characters to life.
There are five types of diction: formal (sophisticated language, adhering to grammatical rules, found in professional texts), informal (conversational, used in narrative literature), colloquial (informal expressions representing a certain region or time, like 'y'all'), slang (new, shortened, or modified words originating in specific subgroups, like Tagalog slang 'verba' or 'charot'), and poetic (lyrical words relating to a theme, often descriptive, with beat or rhyme).