tAyLoR sWiFt & CrEaTiVe wRiTiNg

It’s impossible to read ‘Where The Crawdads Sing‘ or listen to Taylor Swift’s ‘Carolina’ and not feel inspired! Our aim today is to write a description that somehow captures what Delia Owens and the inimitable Taylor make us feel!

• MUSIC FOCUS: Taylor Swift.
• TASK FOCUS: Lose yourself in the world of Carolina and ‘Where The Crawdads Sing’. The tasks will give help you 1) to structure your own descriptive writing and 2) to invest your own writing with an intoxicating sense of colour.

ACTIVITY 1

Start by filling the gaps below. It doesn’t matter if your choices don’t exactly match the choices Owens made herself – it’s just a fun activity to get your imagination up and running! (Don’t scroll past the picture directly below until you’ve finished thinking about the words that could fill those blanks).

Okay, so here are the actual quotes from ‘Where The Crawdads Sing‘:

ACTIVITY 2

Spend some time coming up with a way to describe each of the 5 images in the picture below. Use Owens’ ideas and the work you did during the previous activity as inspiration.

ACTIVITY 3

Write a description inspired by one of the pictures below.

Make a plan first. You might do this by picking the 5 sections of the picture you want to zoom in on. For example, if writing about the first picture, you may pick out:

1. the girl
2. the sky
3. the water
4. the cold
5. the sounds

When you start writing, these ideas may of course begin to overlap, but at least now you have some clear points of focus.

Also, consider your structure. Even though it’s a description, it can still have a clear beginning, middle and end. If writing about the first picture, maybe you’ll think about it in these steps:

1. Girl standing on the shore looking at the water
2. Girl stepping into the water
3. Girl wading through the water to collect whatever shells or shrimps or fish she’s going to collect
4. Girl wading back towards shore
5. Girl arriving back on shore

Focus on:

1. Using imaginative, original imagery (including the ideas you came up with earlier)
2. Using a range of vocabulary you wouldn’t normally use (there are some suggestions immediately underneath the 4 pictures)

Once you’re done, you can send your writing in! We want to publish the most exciting descriptions and offer advice.

Or have a go at writing about your experiences as a teenager with a little more help from the inspirational Taylor Swift!