NCERT Book Class 11 English Creative Writing

102 HORNBILL

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T HE teacher was explaining the lines in the beginning of
Shakespeare’s play Macbeth. It was a description of the battle
and the lines were:
Like Valour’s minion, carved out his passage,
Till he faced the slave;
With ne’er shook hands, nor baded farewell to him.
Till he unseam’d him from the nave to the chaps,…
The teacher asked the students what the word ‘unseamed’
meant. It was difficult. The teacher prodded them on. “What
does ‘seam’ mean? Haven’t you ever come across the word?”
One of the students blurted out “Cricket ball”.
This is an example of how each of us reacts to words
according to what our own experience has been.
When we write about factual information, all of us write
almost similarly. But when we write for pleasure each of us may
write about the same event in different ways.
One very important element in creative writing is imagination.
This is reflected in
 our view or perspective
 choice of words
 the comparisons we make
 the images we use
 the tone we adopt
 novelty of ideas.

Let us study the paragraph below.
A town is like an animal. A town has a nervous system and
a head and shoulders and feet. A town is a thing separate
from all other towns, so that there are no towns alike. And a
town has a whole emotion. How news travels through a town