Question 1 (25 marks)
Why this question → 5 of 6, p 0.44Read the extract, then answer parts (a) and (b).
When I was small, my grandmother kept a tin marked SUGAR that never once held sugar. It held buttons, then letters, then the small hard rubble of a broken necklace. Nobody in the house found this strange. The tin said SUGAR and meant, at various times, thrift, grief, and the possibility of repair. That tin was my first lesson in fiction.
We talk about novelists inventing worlds as though invention were a matter of geography — new cities, new weathers, new moons. But the deepest invention in any story happens at the level of the word. A novelist does not simply use the word home, or mercy, or debt; she re-prices it. She builds a world in which the word trades under new management, then lets two people use it to each other and watches the exchange rate fail.
Because it does fail. Every word arrives carrying someone else's luggage. You say winter and mean the sea-fog of your childhood; I hear coal smoke and my father's cough. The dictionary holds a word still just long enough for us to shake hands over it, and the moment we let go it springs back into two different shapes. Outside of books, this failure embarrasses us, so we hurry past it. We agree to pretend we have agreed.
The writer refuses the pretence. Her work is not to repair the failure but to build a room in which it can finally be seen: a made world, small enough to hold in the hands, in which one word is worn by two lives until it splits along the seam. A story is the only instrument I know that can hold both meanings of a single word at once, without deciding between them, and remain in working order.
So when readers ask what my novels are about, I tell them: about what the word was doing before you got there.
— MARIAN VOSS, extract from The Sugar Tin: Notes on the Craft of Fiction (The author and work are fictional, created for this practice paper.)
(a) Use the ideas in the extract to compose a narrative in which you construct a literary world where two characters give incompatible meanings to the same word, object or remembered event.
In your narrative, explore the idea that 'every word arrives carrying someone else's luggage'. (15 marks)
(b) Analyse how you constructed the literary world in part (a) to explore the incompatible meanings your characters carry.
In your response, refer to specific language choices, form and narrative perspective in your own writing. (10 marks)