Self-made fear
Text 1: The Second Novel, by Adrian Kell
An original short story extract.
The first novel had taken Marion six years and been written on the kitchen table in the gaps between night shifts, on the backs of rotas. Nobody had been waiting for it. That, she understood now, had been its great advantage.
The second novel had been waiting for her for three years. It had a contract, and a deadline, and an editor called Felicity who sent cheerful emails with subject lines like Just checking in! It had, already, a cover, which the publisher had designed in advance, so that Marion could not look at it without feeling that it was watching her.
This morning she had written the first sentence forty-one times. She had counted. The rain is coming in from the west. The rain came in from the west. It was raining. Each version looked, as soon as she had typed it, like something a stranger had written to embarrass her. She could hear exactly what the critics would say. She could see the phrase, disappointing follow-up, set in small grey type on a newspaper page that did not yet exist.
She deleted the forty-first sentence and sat with her hands in her lap.
At four o’clock her daughter came home from school and sat at the other end of the table with a felt-tip pen and an exercise book, and began to write. Lottie wrote quickly, with her tongue between her teeth, crossing nothing out. When she reached the bottom of the page she turned it over and kept going.
“What’s it about?” Marion asked.
“A dragon who’s scared of the dark,” said Lottie, not looking up. “I don’t know what happens yet. I’m finding out.”
Marion looked at her screen, at the cursor blinking patiently at the start of nothing. Then she closed the laptop, took a biro from the jar, turned over an old gas bill, and wrote a sentence she had not planned, and did not count it.
Text 2: Worn Steps, by Beth Rowntree
An original contemporary memoir.
The interview was at eleven, in a room at the top of a staircase so old that the stone steps had been worn into shallow bowls by five hundred years of nervous feet. I had arrived at nine. I had walked round the quad four times, and I was now sitting on a bench outside the door in my mother’s best jacket, which was too big in the shoulders, trying to remember my own name.
Nobody in my family had been to university. My dad drove a delivery van and told everyone, the bloke at the paper shop, my nan’s neighbours, that his girl was going for Oxford. My school had put my photo on the website before I had even sent the application. I had read every book on the reading list twice, and I had lain awake for a month imagining, in perfect detail, the moment when the panel realised I was a fraud.
There were two of them. One was a small woman in a cardigan with a cup of tea. She asked me about a poem I had never seen, and I read it, and my mind went white and silent as snow.
I could not think of a single thing to say. The silence went on so long that I heard the clock on the mantelpiece, and a bicycle bell in the street below.
“Take your time,” said the woman in the cardigan. “There’s no hurry. What’s the first thing you notice? Anything at all.”
And I said, because it was the only thing I could think of, that the poem seemed to be frightened of its own ending. She put down her tea and said, “Go on.”
We talked for twenty minutes. I remember walking down the worn stone steps afterwards, and how they felt under my feet, like something that had been carrying people down from that room for five hundred years, whatever had happened inside it.
‘In both texts, the fear of failure is something the characters create for themselves.’
How far do you agree with this statement?
In your answer you should:
Support your response with quotations from Text 1 and Text 2.
40 exam-style questions on OCR GCSE English Language 3.3.4 Interpret meanings and effects across texts. Each one has a worked solution and a mark scheme showing where the marks go.