creative writing about a war

28 Writing Prompts About War

So you wanna write about war, but… war already feels written about, right?

Yeah, it’s a heavy topic with a long history.

From epic poems to gritty modern novels, war’s been dissected a million times over. But fear not, fellow wordsmiths! There’s always a fresh angle, a unique story waiting to be told.

This post is here to spark that fire. We’re diving into war-themed writing prompts right now.

Let’s check them out.

Writing Prompts About War

In the throes of World War II, a soldier writes letters to his beloved. Fifty years later, a young woman stumbles upon these letters in an old trunk and feels an irresistible urge to respond, attempting to heal old wounds and bridge the chasm of time. What messages does she pen, and what mysteries unfold as she delves deeper into the soldier’s life and times?

The physical damages of war are evident, but the emotional and psychological scars are often hidden. Your protagonist returns home from the warfront only to find that the war has followed him in haunting memories and triggering situations. How does he cope, and what strategies does he employ to help heal himself and his relationships?

Twin siblings are caught in the turbulence of a civil war. While one chooses to join the rebels, believing in their cause, the other remains loyal to the ruling government. How do their paths intersect throughout the conflict, and what choices do they make when they come face to face?

Not all roles in the war are about fighting. A nurse in a military hospital faces the harrowing task of tending to the wounded, both allies and enemies alike. As she documents her experiences in a diary, she uncovers a secret about one of her patients. What revelations await her, and how do they reshape her understanding of the war?

A pacifist is conscripted into a raging conflict. On the battlefield, he discovers not only the grim realities of war but also his own latent potential for leadership and strategy. In a world painted in shades of grey, how does he reconcile his personal beliefs with the brutal necessities of war?

Amidst the din of war, a soldier hears a haunting melody being played from the enemy camp. Enchanted, he risks his life to meet the musician and learns about the stories and hopes that inspire such beautiful tunes amidst chaos. How does this shared love for music influence the choices they make in the midst of a brutal war?

Children growing up in a war-torn city develop an intricate game that mirrors the strategies and battles they witness daily. Through their innocent eyes, the reader gets a fresh perspective on the complexities of warfare. How does this game affect their understanding of right and wrong, and what lessons do they offer to the adults around them?

In a world recovering from a long and devastating war, a journalist is tasked with interviewing the last living veterans. As she collects their stories, she’s also grappling with the war’s impact on her own family’s history. What truths does she uncover, and how do they shape her understanding of peace, loss, and memory?

In a besieged city, a renowned violinist plays nightly from the remains of a shattered building. His music captivates both sides, eventually leading to a ceasefire during his performances. What power does this music hold, and can its notes forge a path to lasting peace amidst the war?

Soldiers from opposing factions find themselves abandoned by their units in a vast, unknown terrain. To survive the harsh environment, they must rely on each other. As they journey together, how do their perceptions of the enemy change, and what bond, if any, emerges between them?

A cartographer is tasked with mapping out territories in a rapidly shifting war zone. With each change in boundary, he realizes that his maps are inadvertently influencing the course of the war. Faced with the weight of his creations, does he remain neutral or try to change the tide of conflict?

Amidst the despair of trench warfare, soldiers from both sides secretly exchange letters, sharing stories, hopes, and dreams. Their clandestine correspondence builds a bridge of understanding in the middle of chaos. How do these written exchanges affect their view of the enemy and the decisions they make in battle?

An old, dusty journal surfaces in a second-hand bookstore, recounting tales of a mysterious soldier whose actions altered key events during the war. As a historian delves into the pages, they start to question previously held beliefs about the war. What truths lie hidden within the journal, and how do they challenge the established narrative?

A spy disguises themselves as an enemy officer to gather crucial intelligence. Living in daily peril, they form an unexpected connection with someone on the opposing side. How do they balance their duty to their homeland with the new relationships they’ve formed, and what sacrifices will they have to make?

In a city reduced to rubble, a librarian strives to protect a secret collection of books that hold the cultural and historical legacy of their nation. As enemy forces close in, a choice must be made. Will the librarian save the irreplaceable collection or prioritize the lives of the city’s remaining inhabitants?

Using newly developed technology, soldiers at the frontlines receive holographic messages from their families back home. While these messages offer a brief respite from the horrors of war, they also blur the lines between reality and longing. How do these glimpses of home shape a soldier’s resolve and their choices on the battlefield?

In a world inundated with propaganda, a radio operator begins intercepting cryptic broadcasts from an unknown source. These messages offer a starkly different perspective on the ongoing war. As the operator deciphers these broadcasts, how does this newfound knowledge influence his role in the war and his loyalty to his nation?

After a major battle, engineers from both warring factions are stranded in a no-man’s-land. They decide to cooperate and build a bridge to their respective sides. Through their collaborative effort, do they find common ground and perhaps a blueprint for peace?

A renowned war medic, committed to saving lives regardless of allegiance, is captured and is forced to serve the enemy. With limited resources and facing dilemmas daily, how does the medic prioritize, and can healing serve as a catalyst for broader understanding?

Years after the war, a curator designs an exhibit that showcases personal artifacts from soldiers, civilians, and others affected by the conflict. Each item tells a unique story. As visitors navigate the exhibit, how do these intimate glimpses into personal experiences reshape collective memories of the war?

A soldier, unable to speak the local language, is separated from his unit and taken in by a rural family. Through gestures, shared tasks, and unexpected moments, they communicate. In the heart of enemy territory, can genuine human connection transcend the barriers of language and war?

A submarine crew, cut off from the world due to a malfunctioning communication system, surfaces years after the war has ended. Unaware of the war’s outcome and the world’s current state, how does the crew navigate this unfamiliar reality, and what legacy do they carry from their time submerged?

In an occupied city, unknown artists use graffiti to communicate messages of hope, resistance, and unity. Their artwork becomes a beacon for the oppressed. When the identity of the artists is threatened with exposure, what choices will the community make to protect their symbols of hope?

In a region torn by conflict, a village decides to come together for their annual harvest festival, inviting even those from the opposing faction. The festival becomes a temporary truce, a momentary escape from the war’s realities. Can a shared cultural celebration sow the seeds of lasting reconciliation?

An acclaimed painter is commissioned to create a portrait of a high-ranking general from the opposing army as a gesture of tentative peace. Throughout the sessions, the two share stories, philosophies, and regrets. As brush meets canvas, can art capture the essence of a man beyond his uniform, revealing the complexities of the human soul?

A photojournalist embedded with a unit captures the raw and unfiltered moments of the war, focusing not on the battles, but on the quiet moments in-between – a shared meal, a tearful letter reading, a soldier’s introspection. With each snapshot, what untold stories emerge, offering a poignant commentary on the costs of war?

During an excavation for a wartime bunker, soldiers uncover an ancient battleground filled with relics and writings from a forgotten civilization that once faced a similar conflict. Can lessons from a long-lost civilization influence contemporary strategies and potentially provide a roadmap to peace?

A war-ravaged city operates a train that, legend says, leads to a sanctuary untouched by conflict. Desperate civilians and disillusioned soldiers alike seek passage. As they journey together, what stories unfold in each compartment, and does the train’s destination hold the promise they all yearn for?

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31 Military Fiction Writing Prompts

By Brittany Kuhn

Are you writing a  military fiction  novel? Do you need some ideas for your book? The following 31 military fiction writing prompts will help!

General Military Fiction Prompts

1. two recruits at a military academy have a rivalry..

Choose one of the recruits as your primary protagonist and show them battling with their rival from day one. There should be some big event or challenge towards the end of the story that brings the two together and teaches them that they are better together than apart.

2. A soldier’s plane is shot down on the wrong side of the battlefield.

This is a suspense story focused on whether the soldier will survive. Start with them crash landing and show how they fight and struggle to get back to their own side. End with them being rescued.

3. A submarine is hijacked while still in the water.

While patrolling during peacetime, a submarine crew is hijacked by fellow crew members whose aim is to start a war by blaming the destruction of the submarine on another country. The story should be how the rest of the crew work together to stop the dangerous hijackers to maintain peace.

4. A young recruit discovers a dangerous secret while training at the academy.

Make the secret whatever you want but make sure that it involves people at all levels of the military. The recruit is in danger just for the knowledge of this secret. Uncovering the secret would topple the academy itself, so the person must work secretly to discover and expose the details without knowing who to trust.

5. A military hostage and their captor become friends and work together to stop the war.

Start with the hostage being locked away and show the events that lead to their friendship. The hostage helps the captor realize the futility of the war and the second half of the story should be them working together to stop the war, or at least escape it together.

6. When there’s a murderer on a submarine, there’s nowhere to run!

Start the story with the murder and have the lead investigator on the submarine investigate it. End with the investigator ousting the murderer, either by death or by bringing them to justice on land.

7. The rise and fall of a secret government operation during wartime.

This could be as common as trying to create a ‘secret solider serum’ that backfires. Or you could write about something more paranormal, like telekinesis. In either case, show the beginnings of the program, the rationale for it, how it damages the soldiers, and end with it being discovered and abandoned.

8. A disillusioned military officer gets reassigned as a drill instructor for new recruits.

You should start with the event that gets them nearly dishonorably discharged and show them reluctantly take on this new post as a drill instructor. The story is about how learning from the younger crowd, being outside of the war machine, helps them grow as a person.

9. A group of battle buddies hear about a hidden treasure while in the middle of war.

Start with the lead friend roping the others into searching for the treasure. The story is about them working together as a military unit to find this treasure amidst the war happening around them.

10. A new soldier wants to see battle.

Begin with the soldier going through training and really buying into the hype of war. Follow them as they keep trying to go into battle (or for something to always stop it from happening). End with them finally getting their chance to do something heroic in battle but choosing instead to preserve life rather than take it.

11. A deployed military unit does everything in their power to get sent home.

This is more of a comedic story focused on all the antics the military members do so they can get sent home early. Start with them already deployed and deciding they want to go home early. End with them either getting sent home or realizing they really are where they need to be.

12. While deployed abroad, a chaplain struggles with their faith during a time of war.

The conflict of this story is about the purpose of war when the message should be peace. Start with an event that causes the chaplain to start questioning their faith. The rest of the story should be them engaging with other soldiers whose stories further question or prove the faith. The point should be that the chaplain realizes they’re there to help the unit not themselves, regardless of their faith.

13. An ex-soldier is hunted down by the very military they used to serve.

Have your soldier be completely isolated because of the traumas they endured in the war. Because of something they’ve seen or experienced, their home gets attacked and they must use all the military training they acquired to stop the attack.

14. A military unit is lost in the jungle and must find their way back.

During a routine operation, a military unit finds itself lost (or abandoned). The story is them fighting their way through wartime enemies and their own fears to find their way back home.

Historical Military Fiction Prompts

15. a soldier helps start what would become known as the world war i christmas soccer game..

Write a fictionalized account of how the famous soccer game happened during the Christmas Armistice of World War I. Make your protagonist the person who suggests the soccer game and describe how he felt in the battles leading up to the Christmas Armistice. What happened after that night? How were the soldiers changed by the sense of togetherness they felt in that one night?

16. Brothers in the American Civil War fight on opposite sides.

Start with them fighting over which side is ‘right’ and going off to war. Show how both brothers experienced many of the same hardships and personal struggles, regardless of who they were fighting for. You can end it with one brother choosing to support the other one, or you could have one brother die in conflict, maybe even fighting their own brother’s regiment.

17. A young spy aids the fight against Napoleon.

Write a fictionalized account of a French citizen who wants to stop Napoleon from taking over the world. This would probably work best if you chose a period early in the Napoleonic wars, before the Battle of Waterloo (his first loss and ultimately the start of his decline).

18. The Cold War is avoided when a brave soldier steps in.

Similarly, this could be about a soldier who stops an almost nuclear holocaust. Make the story about the soldier trying to convince his superiors to stand down from attacking the other side preemptively. End with the presidents nearly turning the key but deciding not to.

19. A small village decides to stand up to Genghis Khan’s military horde.

Imagine if a village within Genghis Khan’s Asian empire had chosen to stand up to him and his horde. Describe how they prepared to fight against him and whether they won.

20. The Battle for Cleopatra and her Egyptian empire.

This should focus less on Mark Antony and Cleopatra and more on the battle that led to their deaths. Show how Mark Antony fought his way across the Mediterranean to seek refuge with Cleopatra and end with their deaths.

21. Captains from the British navy and Spanish armada act out their rivalry in the Caribbean.

Choose whichever side you want as your ‘good’ side and start with them already in a rivalry. The story is about the many battles and run-ins they have over a period of a few months or a year. End with one side sinking the other’s ship once and for all.

22. A solider in the Nazi military decides to help Jewish prisoners during World War II.

Start with the Nazi soldier making friends with some of the prisoners he is supposed to police. Show how he helps train them to fight against the other soldiers and ultimately helps them escape.

Military Romance Prompts

23. a soldier must fight to save their love..

You can set this in a historical war or a general, unspecified one. What your story should focus on is how the soldier longs for their love during the war and does everything they can to get back to them safely.

24. Soldiers from opposite sides of a war fall in love.

How you bring the two soldiers together is up to you but have them fall in love quite early on. The story is then about how they are trying to overcome their opposing sides to be together.

25. A soldier and nurse find love amid all the death.

Start with the soldier getting injured and waking up in hospital. Have the first half of the story be about them falling in love with each other. The second half of the story is them trying to stay in love once the soldier has returned to war or they have returned home.

26. Two ex-soldiers discover love in their shared trauma.

Have two soldiers meet at a post-traumatic therapy group and bond over their experiences (or their lack of belief in the therapy). Over time, they learn to love each other. But when one gets called back up to fight, how will they deal?

Military Science Fiction Prompts

27. in the battle for earth, who will win.

This is an ‘alien invasion’ story with a focus on the military element. How would the planet coordinate their attacks? Which country’s military would you choose as the main protagonist? You can either start with the invasion or begin with it already in play, but be sure to end with a battle that decides Earth’s fate once and for all.

28. Discovering new planets isn’t always peaceful.

A spaceship lands on a new, uncharted planet and is suddenly, immediately attacked. The story is about who is in the ‘right’: the unsuspecting spaceship or the natives defending their home world.

29. When an advanced race from a distant galaxy suddenly appears, it takes a coalition of planets and their armies to take them down.

Start with the arrival of the advanced race. Focus the conflict on how the other planets learn to work together to stop this threat.

30. Can we stop cyborg soldiers in a futuristic war?

Two opposing sides have independently discovered successful cyborg technology. Your story is about the ‘good’ cyborg soldier trying to stop the ‘bad’ one from destroying society as we know it.

31. Simulations aren’t real, right?

Your story should be based around a recruit who uses simulation technology to learn wartime tactics. Eventually, though, they realize that the technology is less ‘simulation’ and more ‘real life scenarios’ with remotely guided machines. Will they carry on, knowing the damage they are doing is no longer just a game?

Creative Writing Prompts Inspired by Historical Events

by Melissa Donovan | Oct 24, 2023 | Creative Writing Prompts | 12 comments

Creative writing prompts inspired by historical events.

Today’s prompts include selections from the book 1200 Creative Writing Prompts . Enjoy!

Nonfiction writers are obviously inspired by the real world, but fiction writers and poets also take inspiration from real people and events.

Wars, scandals, scientific advances, and famous figures in history have all been represented in every form of writing.

Works of fiction that resonate best with readers contain a kind of truth, a reflection of our own real experiences. That’s why looking to the events of history for story ideas is a great way to inspire a writing session. And of course, poetry takes inspiration from everything in the universe. While personal experiences may be more popular sources of inspiration, some incredible poems and stories have been triggered by real events throughout history.

Writing Prompts

You can use these creative writing prompts to write anything you want — a poem, a short story, a blog post, or a journal entry. The idea is to find the prompt that speaks to you and then start writing.

• In a country that rants and raves about freedom, the government decides that its people should not be allowed to drink liquor. Write a story set during Prohibition in the United States.
• The Great Depression filled the space between America’s Prohibition (which was still in effect during the Depression) and World War II. The Depression affected the entire world. Well-to-do people lost everything and found themselves standing in food lines. Ordinary people went to extraordinary measures to get a meager meal. Meanwhile, someone, somewhere profited.
• World War II gave rise to what journalist Tom Brokaw called “the greatest generation.” Create a cast of compelling characters and write a story showing how circumstances forced them to become great.
• The entertainment industry boomed in the twentieth century. Technology changed entertainment from an attraction you paid to see in a theater or other public setting to something you could enjoy from the comfort of your home. Every home had a radio. Black-and-white silent films evolved into Technicolor talkies. Now we have the Internet. Write a story centered on entertainment technologies of the past.
• Spaceships, planes, and men on the moon: We started out traveling around on foot. Then some clever Neanderthal invented the wheel. Now, we soar through the skies and tear through space. Write a story about a long journey set in an era when planes, trains, and automobiles weren’t readily available.
• The 1960s gave us Civil Rights, Woodstock, and the space race. What happens when a nation’s people are divided? What happens when minorities of people are oppressed? What happens when ordinary kids decide they don’t want to grow up and become just like their parents? Mix in the fact that there’s a war nobody understands and most people don’t believe in. Add drugs, flowers, and peace signs, and you’ve got the sixties. Write a story set during this iconic decade.
• Write a story that is set around the assassination of an important, benevolent, historical figure: for example, Gandhi, Martin Luther King, JFK, or John Lennon.
• Revolution could be defined as a war between a state and its people. Revolution often occurs when people are oppressed to the point of mass suffering. Choose one such revolution from history and write a story about the people who launched it.
• Throughout history, people have emigrated across land and ocean. Choose a time period of heavy human migration. Then choose a starting place and a destination and write the story of a character or group of characters who take the voyage. Focus on the journey, not the place of origin or the destination.
• The 1950s are often painted as a simple and idealistic time in American history. One income could support an entire family. Jobs were plentiful. Moms stayed home with their kids. Divorce was scandalous. Write about a protagonist who didn’t fit the mold, whose life was difficult because of the cultural and societal conventions of the time.

Good luck with these creative writing prompts! Have fun and don’t forget to come back and tell us how they worked for you.

Got any writing prompts of your own to share or add to this list? Leave a comment.

12 Comments

Great ideas for prompts. I’ll be stealing these for my Creative Writing class. Here’s one I came up with for a poetry class I’m teaching this summer. Feel free to try it and give it a more thorough explanation here, if you like it. essentially, the writer goes through his or her twitter feed or Facebook status updates and writes a list of the interesting verbs and nouns, then puts them together in interesting ways to form found poetry or story ideas. Here’s the list I came up with:

http://unapologetic-conjecture.blogspot.com/2011/06/fun-with-words-from-twitter.html

Hi Benjamin. I like the idea of getting word lists from Twitter and using them to prompt a writing session. Thanks for sharing!

Almost every time when I read scientific news I get ideas for my book set in far future. Or when I look at space pictures from Hubble. Sometimes I simply can’t enjoy reading the articles itself – ideas, ideas are coming! 🙂

I know the feeling! I was researching outer space just this weekend. Sometimes, I get so many ideas, it takes me a few days to work out which ones I should use!

I found this very interesting. Woodstock caught my eye because although I was not there the music is from my generation. My mind is overflowing with possibilities………….

Ooh, cool. Woodstock was before my time, but I’m fascinated by the Woodstock culture. There are definitely stories to be told there! Good luck with yours!

And isn’t it convenient that history just repeats itself? 😉

I suppose it could include events in one’s own life? Pretty potent events inspired my entry into fiction.

Of course. Some of the best inspiration comes from real-life experiences.

Speaking of cultural movements, does it seem to anyone else that America has entered a sort of post-Romantic era?

This is from Britannica : “Introspection was inevitable in the literature of an immediately Post-Romantic period, and the age itself was as prone to self-analysis as were its individual authors.”

I don’t think I’d use that description to describe what is happening in America right now. I would call this a divisive era. Dark, dystopian works seem to be popular juxtaposed against commercial art that could be construed as shallow or meaningless ( Hunger Games v. Fifty Shades ). In fact, one might say that there is a struggle between materialism and meaning. We could also call it the post-technology age, where we are challenged to adjust to a new system in which we rely heavily on technology and it has cost lots of jobs.

What a great question, Jesse. It’s given me much to think about. I do believe we are on the cusp of some new era. We live in fascinating times!

Great ideas. Many thanks. I’m filing this.

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60 historical fiction writing prompts

by The History Quill

We’re delighted to share this list of 60 historical fiction writing prompts to inspire your creative writing. We’ve put them on a historical timeline, starting in 399 BCE and ending in 1969. They cover a range of periods, places, and situations. Feel free to adapt them in any way you like. Enjoy!

You are one of the jurors at the trial of Socrates, who is accused of corruption and impiety. After the verdict, argument ensues about an appropriate punishment. You are arguing against the death penalty, but those around you seem determined to impose it. What happens next?

In Constantinople, the emperor Constantine decrees that Christians must cut all ties with their Jewish heritage or face execution. What does this mean for you and your family? How do you react to this new law? What do you choose to do?

You are walking out on the clifftop, and you see a fleet of Viking ships on the horizon. As you watch, you realise they are heading towards the coast. What happens next?

You are a member of Macbeth’s household. When King Duncan is killed, you realise that everything is changing around you. What do you do? Do you stay loyal to Macbeth, or do you leave and join those who oppose him?

50+ top online research resources for historical fiction writers

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This project examines the contemporary war experience as reflected by writers, poets, journalists and bloggers, and interrogate how we write about war and conflict today in contrast to the writing that was written on WW1.

Thought pieces from leading contemporary UK writers are a starting point for international public discussions. Looking at questions such as: What is the role of the writer in responding to conflict? What feels like an appropriate amount of time before creating an artistic response to war? Who do we trust to write about war? What we accept as war literature today, and how this is influenced by its context and changing global situations. How do we capture the human experience of war?

Caroline Wyatt on reportage

Patrick Hennessey on memoir 

Helen Dunmore   on fiction,

Owen Sheers  on poetry

Ben Hammersley   on digital writing

Helen Dunmore was the first winner of the Orange Prize and is also an acclaimed children's author and poet. She has published twelve novels including  Zennor In Darkness , winner of the Mckitterick Prize; A Spell Of Winter , winner of the first Orange Prize; The Betrayal , longlisted for the Man Booker prize, shortlisted for the Orwell Prize and the Commonwealth Writers Prize; The Greatcoat (2012) and The Lie (2014). Helen Dunmore has also published three collections of stories, Love Of Fat Men, Ice Cream and Rose 1944 , and her stories have been widely broadcast and anthologised. Her children's novels include the INGO series, published by harpercollins and shortlisted for the Nestlé Smarties Book Prize. Her ten poetry collections include The Raw Garden, Out Of The Blue and The Malarkey , all published by Bloodaxe Books. She spoke on the theme of war in her work at events in Russia at the Krasnoyarsk Book Fair 1-4 November 2014 along with Nigel Farndale (who spoke about the research he undertook on the First World War for his novel The Blasphemer ) and Imtiaz Dharker (who talked about her response to Wilfred Owen’s Anthem of Doomed Youth in the collection of poems 1914 Remembers ).

Patrick Hennessey was born in 1982 and educated at Berkhamsted School and Balliol College, Oxford, where he read English. On leaving university he joined the Army and served from 2004 to 2009 as an officer in The Grenadier Guards. In between guarding towers, castles and palaces he worked in the Balkans, Africa, South East Asia, the Falkland Islands and deployed on operational tours of Iraq and Afghanistan. On leaving the Army he wrote his first book, The Junior Officers’ Reading Club , a memoir of a brief but eventful stint in uniform; followed by Kandak an account of how unlikely alliances can be forged in the intensity of battle. Patrick is now a barrister.

Owen Sheers has written two collections of poetry, The Blue Book and Skirrid Hill , which won a Somerset Maugham award. His verse drama Pink Mist won Wales Book of the Year and the Hay Festival Poetry Medal. Non-fiction includes The Dust Diaries and Calon: A Journey to the Heart of Welsh Rugby . His first novel Resistance has been translated into ten languages and was made into a film in 2011. His plays include The Passion, The Two Worlds of Charlie F and Mametz , which has been longlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize 2014. His second novel, I Saw A Man , is published by Faber & Faber in 2015. 

Ben Hammersley is an author, futurist and technologist specialising in the effects of the internet and the ubiquitous digital network on the world’s political, cultural and social spheres. He enjoys an international career as a trends and digital guru, explaining complex technological and sociological topics to lay audiences, and as a high-level advisor on these matters to governments and business. Ben Hammersley is a Fellow at The Brookings Institute in Washington DC, a fellow at the Robert Schuman School of Advanced Study at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy, and Innovator-in-Residence at the Centre for Creative and Social Technologies, Goldsmiths, University of London. He is contributing editor of WIRED Magazine and writes regularly for the international media including The Financial Times .

Caroline Wyatt became the BBC’s Religious Affairs Correspondent in August 2014, having been a BBC Defence Correspondent from 2007. Prior to that, she covered UK operations in Iraq from 2003 and in Afghanistan from 2001. From 2003 - 2007, Caroline was BBC Paris correspondent, and before that spent three years as Moscow Correspondent, charting Vladimir Putin's first term as Russian President. She also covered NATO in Kosovo in 1999, and Russian operations in Chechnya, as well as working in Gaza and the wider Middle East for the BBC in the late 1990s and early 2000s. She is also an occasional presenter for R4 The World Tonight and Saturday R4 PM. She contributed to 'The Oxford Handbook of War', R4’s ‘More from Our Own Correspondent’ and ‘Only Remembered’, a children’s anthology edited by Michael Morpurgo looking at the literature of WW1.

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Essays About War: Top 5 Examples and 5 Prompts

War is atrocious and there is an almost universal rule that we should be prevented; if you are writing essays about war, read our helpful guide.

Throughout history, war has driven human progress. It has led to the dissolution of oppressive regimes and the founding of new democratic countries. There is no doubt that the world would not be as it is without the many wars waged in the past.

War is waged to achieve a nation or organization’s goals, but what is the actual cost of progress? War has taken, and continues to take, countless lives. It is and is very costly in terms of resources as well. From the American Revolution to World Wars I and II to the Crusades and Hundred Years’ War of antiquity, wars throughout history have been bloody, brutal, and disastrous. 

If you are writing essays about war, look at our top essay examples below.

1. War Is Not Part of Human Nature by R. Brian Ferguson

2. essay on war and peace (author unknown), 3. the impacts of war on global health by sarah moore.

• 4.  The Psychosocial Impacts of War and Armed Conflict on Children by Iman Farajallah, Omar Reda, H. Steven Moffic, John R. Peteet, and Ahmed Hankir

5. ​​Is war a pre-requisite for peace? by Anna Cleary

5 prompts for essays about war, 1. is war justified, 2. why do countries go to war, 3. the effects of war, 4. moral and ethical issues concerning war, 5. reflecting on a historical war.

“Debate over war and human nature will not soon be resolved. The idea that intensive, high-casualty violence was ubiquitous throughout prehistory has many backers. It has cultural resonance for those who are sure that we as a species naturally tilt toward war. As my mother would say: “Just look at history!” But doves have the upper hand when all the evidence is considered. Broadly, early finds provide little if any evidence suggesting war was a fact of life.”

Ferguson disputes the popular belief that war is inherent to human nature, as evidenced by archaeological discoveries. Many archaeologists use the very same evidence to support the opposing view. Evidence reveals many instances where war was waged, but not fought. In the minds of Ferguson and many others, humanity may be predisposed to conflict and violence, but not war, as many believe. 

“It also appears that if peace were to continue for a long period, people would become sick of the monotony of life and would seek war for a changed man is a highly dynamic creature and it seems that he cannot remain contented merely with works of peace-the cultivation of arts, the development of material comforts, the extension of knowledge, the means and appliances of a happy life.”

This essay provides an interesting perspective on war; other than the typical motivations for war, such as the desire to achieve one’s goals; the author writes that war disrupts the monotony of peace and gives participants a sense of excitement and uncertainty. In addition, it instills the spirit of heroism and bravery in people. However, the author does not dispute that war is evil and should be avoided as much as possible. 

“War forces people to flee their homes in search of safety, with the latest figures from the UN estimating that around 70 million people are currently displaced due to war. This displacement can be incredibly detrimental to health, with no safe and consistent place to sleep, wash, and shelter from the elements. It also removes a regular source of food and proper nutrition. As well as impacting physical health, war adversely affects the mental health of both those actively involved in conflict and civilians.”

Moore discusses the side effects that war has on civilians. For example, it diverts resources used on poverty alleviation and infrastructure towards fighting. It also displaces civilians when their homes are destroyed, reduces access to food, water, and sanitation, and can significantly impact mental health, among many other effects. 

4.   The Psychosocial Impacts of War and Armed Conflict on Children by Iman Farajallah, Omar Reda, H. Steven Moffic, John R. Peteet, and Ahmed Hankir

“The damage done by war-related trauma can never be undone. We can, however, help reduce its long-term impacts, which can span generations. When we reach within ourselves to discover our humanity, it allows us to reach out to the innocent children and remind them of their resilience and beauty. Trauma can make or break us as individuals, families, and communities.”

In their essay, the authors explain how war can affect children. Children living in war-torn areas expectedly witness a lot of violence, including the killings of their loved ones. This may lead to the inability to sleep properly, difficulty performing daily functions, and a speech impediment. The authors write that trauma cannot be undone and can ruin a child’s life.  

“The sociologist Charles Tilly has argued that war and the nation state are inextricably linked. War has been crucial for the formation of the nation state, and remains crucial for its continuation. Anthony Giddens similarly views a link between the internal pacification of states and their external violence. It may be that, if we want a durable peace, a peace built on something other than war, we need to consider how to construct societies based on something other than the nation state and its monopoly of violence.”

This essay discusses the irony that war is waged to achieve peace. Many justify war and believe it is inevitable, as the world seems to balance out an era of peace with another war. However, others advocate for total pacifism. Even in relatively peaceful times, organizations and countries have been carrying out “shadow wars” or engaging in conflict without necessarily going into outright war. Cleary cites arguments made that for peace to indeed exist by itself, societies must not be built on the war in the first place. 

Many believe that war is justified by providing a means to peace and prosperity. Do you agree with this statement? If so, to what extent? What would you consider “too much” for war to be unjustified? In your essay, respond to these questions and reflect on the nature and morality of war. 

Wars throughout history have been waged for various reasons, including geographical domination, and disagreement over cultural and religious beliefs. In your essay, discuss some of the reasons different countries go to war, you can look into the belief systems that cause disagreements, oppression of people, and leaders’ desire to conquer geographical land. For an interesting essay, look to history and the reasons why major wars such as WWI and WWII occurred.

In this essay, you can write about war’s effects on participating countries. You can focus on the impact of war on specific sectors, such as healthcare or the economy. In your mind, do they outweigh the benefits? Discuss the positive and negative effects of war in your essay. To create an argumentative essay, you can pick a stance if you are for or against war. Then, argue your case and show how its effects are positive, negative, or both.

Many issues arise when waging war, such as the treatment of civilians as “collateral damage,” keeping secrets from the public, and torturing prisoners. For your essay, choose an issue that may arise when fighting a war and determine whether or not it is genuinely “unforgivable” or “unacceptable.” Are there instances where it is justified? Be sure to examples where this issue has arisen before.

Humans have fought countless wars throughout history. Choose one significant war and briefly explain its causes, major events, and effects. Conduct thorough research into the period of war and the political, social, and economic effects occurred. Discuss these points for a compelling cause and effect essay.

For help with this topic, read our guide explaining “what is persuasive writing ?”If you still need help, our guide to grammar and punctuation explains more.

How To Write A Book About War: 8 Tips To Authentic Prose

Ever wondered how to write a book about war? I don’t know where you were that summer night in July of 2017, but hopefully you found a few hours to sit in a dark theater and watch the new film release, Dunkirk . With a 92% tomatometer score , Rotten Tomatoes describes it as an “Extremely powerful and exciting war movie about the evacuation during WW2.” 

Writers long to craft powerful, exciting plots that bring in readers and garner standout reviews. In this article, I show you how to write a book about war and provide an eight point, step by step guide to help you. Let’s get into it!

Need A Fiction Book Outline?

Table of Contents

Defining a war book.

Often termed a war novel or known as military fiction , a book about war has its central focus on the battlefield or the home front. Laura Hillenbrand’s Unbroken is a classic, nonfiction example of surviving during war. 

Kristin Hannah’s The Nightingale is a bestselling fiction of life on the home front during World War II. 

And Unbroken: Path to Redemption is the film sequel displaying Louis Zamperini’s struggle to return to normal life with PTSD and the countless complications that follow soldiers home from war.

When you decide to write a book on war, you do not need to pigeon hole yourself into one time period. Instead, you can choose to write about life on the battlefield, the home front, or returning from war. 

Fiction Versus Nonfiction

While fiction and nonfiction vary greatly in most genres, when you write a book on war, both categories should include a factual recounting of historical events.

While Kristin Hannah can create characters of her own, they need to live in environments that could have, or did, actually exist during the war time setting she places them in. In the same way, Laura Hillenbrand had to include strictly factual details about her real-life protagonist’s story. Whether you write fiction or nonfiction, facts are key.

How To Write A Book About War: Things To Include

Just like every genre, there are key factors to include when learning how to write a book about war. I dive deeper in the coming guide, but keep these three aspects top of mind for fiction:

• Include multiple types of conflict 
• Include realistic battle scenes 
• Include humanized character

For nonfiction, your list is quite similar. Be sure to include:

• The primary conflicts your protagonist faced
• Realistic depictions of their experiences 
• Multiple facets of their character 

Next up, your step by step guide.

Step By Step Guide

With the above in mind, let’s dive into eight steps you can take as you write a book about war.

#1 – Define Your Primary Focus 

There are so many factors to consider when you decide to write a book about war. In fact, it can feel like an insurmountable task to even begin to include every important detail. Instead, focus on the primary goal of your story.

If you write nonfiction, how can you best share an individual’s story or an event? For fiction, what should you focus on most to drive the action? 

#2 – Don’t Forget About All Types Of Conflict 

Second, when learning how to write a book about war it’s important to understand that your conflict doesn’t only include the setting. There are many types of conflicts you can include: Man against self, man against man, and man against nature. 

While a book about war is primarily focused on man against man, consider how you can develop a deep point of view by including the conflict of man against self. This applies for both fiction and nonfiction. 

#3 – Use The Senses To Showcase Emotion 

It may feel difficult to include the five senses when writing on the topic of war, but it’s important to accurately portray it. Resist the urge to sugar coat the experiences of veterans and those who gave their lives, and instead, use the five senses to realistically display your scenes. 

Of course, keep your target audience in mind and recognize that no matter how many edits you make, you can never replicate the experience itself. However, you can do your best to tell an honest story. 

#4 – Understand What You’re Writing And How To Write It

Unless you’re writing your memoir or autobiography, you likely don’t have first hand experience about what you will write about. To aid you in this process, consider watching movies about war to visualize battle. 

Steven Spielberg’s 1998 film, Saving Private Ryan is a great place to start. Spielberg depicted the Normandy landing so well that the film triggered PTSD in the veterans who watched it . If you write a book taking place on the battlefield, learn how to write battle scenes well. 

#5 – Add Humanity To Common Tropes

Every genre has tropes, but when you write a book about war, don’t forget the humanity in the individuals and characters you write about. Louis Zamperini was not only a prisoner of war, he was a living, breathing individual with feelings, fears, hopes, and dreams. 

To strip your protagonist of their humanity, particularly if you write nonfiction, is to lessen the weight of their sacrifice. 

#6 – Resource Other Books

Simply writing this article is a reminder of the gravity in choosing to write a book about war. It is not an easy topic, so be sure to learn from authors who have gone before you. Read as many books in the genre as possible to get a grip on how to write well. 

#7 – Remember You Can Always Edit

With tip number six in mind, remember that when you write a book about war, or any topic, you can always edit your manuscript. Until you send your final draft to the publisher or click publish you can make changes. Do your best to create a great first draft, but you can always:

• Edit your battle scenes
• Add layers of humanity 
• Write in more senses 
• Include internal conflict 
• Fine tune your central focus

Edit, edit, edit.

#8 – Check Your Facts

This should go without saying, but fact checking is so crucial I can’t do less than include it. While you can take some creative liberties when writing fiction, your nonfiction should exactly reflect the details that truly happened. 

For instance, if you cover an individual’s experience during the Bosnian War, fact check every detail of both their experience and the events that occurred. For fiction, you can take liberties with your characters’ experiences, but not with the events that occurred. 

The Key Is To Begin The Process

If you feel a bit overwhelmed after all of this, simply focus on your first step. What can you do after exiting out of this blog to further your manuscript? Do you need to:

• Decide what perspective character to write from, or what point of view to use ?
• Research important dates? 
• Interview an individual? 

Every book begins with the first step. You can do this! Feel free to reference this eight-step guide as often as you need to, and if you need further guidance, you may want to watch this video.

Remember, take it one step at a time. Best wishes as you set out on your journey!

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Nonfiction Books » Politics & Society » War

The best war writing, recommended by kate mcloughlin.

War writing extends to all sorts of genres, including blogs and Twitter. Oxford University's Professor Kate McLoughlin , author of Authoring War: The Literary Representation of War from the Iliad to Iraq recommends some of her favourite books of war writing.

Interview by Beatrice Wilford

Charlotte Sometimes by Penelope Farmer

The Iliad by Homer

War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy

Catch 22 by Joseph Heller

If This Is a Man by Primo Levi

1 Charlotte Sometimes by Penelope Farmer

2 the iliad by homer, 3 war and peace by leo tolstoy, 4 catch 22 by joseph heller, 5 if this is a man by primo levi.

Y ou’ve chosen three novels, a memoir and a poem. Which other genres come under the umbrella of war writing?

Does writing about war, in the vein of someone like Hemingway, ever glamorise it? And is there a vein that does the opposite?

Yes. It’s possible to split war writing into pro-war writing and anti-war writing and that can depend on the culture at the time, or it can depend on the individual’s view.

Hemingway obviously thought war was a great thing. Outside war, he liked hunting, fishing and shooting. Killing things was his thing and a war was a natural environment for him. That’s not to say that he thinks that war is an unmitigated good. For Whom the Bell Tolls and A Farewell to Arms show the human cost of war as well, and the political cost of war, and the futility of it.

“The blog has taken over from the epic as the war-writing genre of choice.”

I suppose it’s rare to find anything that says war is a good thing without it being questioned at all. But some of the earlier texts celebrate heroism in battle unquestioningly.

How do writers deal with the horrors of war?

There is some incredibly graphic description of what goes on in war and among the most graphic is one I’ve chosen, the Iliad , where there are descriptions of horrific injuries. Another way of describing the horrors of battle is by indirection. Describing, for example, all the people who didn’t get funerals in the First World War—as Wilfred Owen does in ‘ Anthem For Doomed Youth ‘—is a way of conveying death and loss and bereavement on a mass scale.

Is there a clear gender divide in written perspectives on war?

Yes, I think there is. There’s a concept famous among academics who work on war writing called ‘combat gnosticism,’ gnosticism meaning knowledge. It’s the idea that only people who’ve been in combat have earned the right to write about it. And it seems pretty unique to war as a phenomenon. You would think something like childbirth would be similar, but it seems not. It’s war: you have to be in it to be able to write about it according to some people. That has led to there being a canon built up of combatant writing. Especially, for example, the First World War and the trench poets. Of course that has implications for that section of humanity who don’t get to fight in armed combat: women.

I think there are only two armies—the Israeli and the Russian—in which women, even now, can fight as ground forces. That means women have been banished and talk about another angle: the folks back at home, the hospitals, the orphans, the widows, the more sentimental aspects of war. But you get some incredibly feisty women who fight their way to the front anyway, who don’t take no for an answer, stow away, just turn up and who write remarkable reportage—and of course that’s not to overlook the role of the imagination in all of this. Being in war, actually having that combative experience, you might get too close and need more of a detached perspective.

I think the gendering of war writing is about different kinds of experience, but not different kinds of validity of experience.

You’re currently writing about modern warfare. Your most recent book choice is Charlotte Sometimes , written in 1969. How has war writing changed in this time?

The book I’m working on at the moment is called Veteran Poetics . It’s an exploration of certain philosophical ideas—self, experience and storytelling—in the age of modern mass warfare, which I date from 1793 as that’s when the French issued their levée en masse : mass conscription. I think the French Revolution and Napoleonic wars were when war became modern, globalized, industrialised and mass.

I also think that was different from anything that had gone before. Walter Benjamin famously said in his essay “The Storyteller”, “men came back from the First World War, not richer but poorer in communicable experience.” I think he got the date wrong, I think it was actually the Napoleonic and French Revolutionary wars. He conveys this sense of having had an experience that you can’t describe because there’s literally nothing to compare it with, and I think that’s a very modern feeling. I think that’s almost a unique feeling to modernity.

The books I’m looking at for my veterans book wouldn’t necessarily qualify as obvious war writing. The most recent ones are by JK Rowling, her Cormoran Strike series, because they feature a detective who’s a veteran. I trace that figure back to Lord Peter Wimsey and to Dr Watson. I’m looking at how veterancy becomes a means of expressing a certain kind of problem solving, not the forensic problem solving of Sherlock Holmes but the more ‘university of life’ understanding of Dr Watson.

Your first book is Charlotte Sometimes by Penelope Farmer.

This book is the first war book I read and it made a deep impression on me. I read it when I was about nine or ten. It’s a book for children , published in 1969. The Charlotte of the title is a twelve year old girl who goes to boarding school and goes to sleep in a dormitory in a bed which has a funny set of wheels on it, and wakes up fifty years earlier in 1918. She has swapped places with a girl called Clare, who in 1918 was sleeping in the same bed. We don’t hear from Clare’s point of view, what she makes of 1969 or 1968, but we do hear about Charlotte, who finds herself in the final year of the First World War .

They swap backwards and forwards night after night. The plot twist is that Charlotte gets stuck in 1918. She and her younger sister are evacuated to a house where the son has gone to war thinking it was going to be a fantastic military heroic adventure, and it turns out it wasn’t. They play with his toy soldiers and the family hold a séance. It made a huge impression on me because Penelope Farmer has this incredibly deft way of making you get a sense of the shock Arthur feels on going to war and finding it was nothing like his toy soldiers and his ideas of bravery.

There is another poignant moment surrounding a teacher in the 1918 school called Miss Wilkins. She’s very bright—a little bit plump, she’s sort of birdy and beady—and Charlotte likes her very much. When she eventually gets back to her own time there’s a Miss Wilkins who’s white haired and a different person altogether, her fiancé died in the First World War. It’s a way of showing how, without being graphic in the slightest, this enormous worldwide conflict had very personal consequences. I think it’s an extraordinary novel and a very thought-provoking one, with many interesting details for children to use to think about war.

What should we tell children about war?

You don’t want to overwhelm children with the seriousness and magnitude of war, but on the other hand there are children who have no choice but to live through war. The children who are told about it are the lucky ones. But I think doing it in this way, having details of the home front, makes it extremely vivid.

There are other fantastic war books for children. Carrie’s War by Nina Bawden is another good example. That also involves an evacuation. It is dear to my heart because my dad was an evacuee. That sense of the impact of war on children comes across very convincingly, very vividly.

As you describe, this book has a very complex temporal framework. How does war alter our experience of time, and how does writing seek to reflect this?

Let’s move on to your second book, the Iliad .

The Iliad is absolutely extraordinary. I read it every so often, and from the beginning it has the most incredible evocation of place, on the beach with the camp fires and Achilles sulking in his tent. There’s such a sense of camaraderie between these warriors. It’s an ancient culture, completely foreign to us now, and yet somehow we are brought to feel their day-to-day emotions. Not just on the Greek side, on the Trojan side as well. There are poignant moments, for example where Hector’s going in to fight and his wife Andromache doesn’t want him to. It’s an extraordinarily vivid account of war and a very graphic one.

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The edition I read it in first, and still read it in, is E. V. Rieu’s Penguin Classics translation. When I’m doing my academic work, I check it against the Loeb Classic edition where it’s very literally translated. Rieu fought in the First World War. He was in the Maratha Light infantry in India and then in the Second World War he was in London in the Blitz, when he decided to start translating the Odyssey . He did the Odyssey first and then the Iliad . This is a veteran in war, translating the great book of war.

How has the Iliad influenced and shaped the genre of war writing?

It continues to inspire. There have been so many writers who have been influenced by it. For an epic, it manages to do both things: it has an enormous scope, but then it really focuses in. To write vividly about battle you need that human interest angle. Monomachia or hand-to-hand fighting comes out in other much later works of war literature, which focus on a single individual and their fate in war.

I’m thinking now of C.S. Lewis in Surprised By Joy . He fought in the First World War and when he got to the western front he said, “This is war, this is what Homer saw.” I’m sure it was nothing like it actually, it’s dubious whether Homer was one single person and it’s unclear whether he could see. But it still carries the weight of all these centuries of cultural baggage.

Having influenced war writing; do you think the Iliad influenced the way people fought in wars?

Book number 3 is War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy . Don’t people only read it for the peace bits? Because the war bits can be quite boring, people say.

The last hundred pages are dull, but if you can stick out the first 1200, then you might as well stick out the last. For the first 1200, it’s a kind of ebb and flow between war and peace, and I think each is equally engaging. When you get to the war parts, Tolstoy is always having the characters think about how they can talk about war. So Nikolai Rostov has these very heroic ideas of going into battle, but then it’s not quite as heroic as he imagined, it doesn’t go as well as he thought, and then when he’s asked to talk about it he realises his listener seems disappointed, so he very quickly slips into a standard heroic war tale. Tolstoy didn’t fight in the Napoleonic wars, but he did fight in the Crimean war, so he drew on his experiences in that when he wrote War and Peace .

Yes, it’s not about the time that he’s writing in. How common is writing written post conflict? What difference is there between this and writing written in a conflict?

That’s true of most of the choices here. Tolstoy is writing in the 1860s about the beginning of the nineteenth century, Homer is writing about an imaginary war, Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 is published in 1961 and it’s about the Second World War . Penelope Farmer was writing a good fifty years after the First World War . I think people do write about previous wars and partly it’s a way of avoiding contemporary rawnesses.

Let’s move on to Catch 22 , tell me about this book.

This is the great war book of the twentieth century. It’s laugh-out-loud funny. He’s talking about the Second World War , which is thought of as the good war. He picks up on an aspect of war which has gone on since Homer. You have an overarching war strategy which might make sense, but, for the individual, the things they’re asked to do can seem absolutely ludicrous — in this case to fly death-defying, practically suicidal missions. It’s completely illogical, being in the war zone. He captures that brilliantly: through repetition, through completely farcical situations and through extremely harrowing moments as well.

Is comedy antithetical to war, or is it a useful lens through which to look at the experience of war?

Laughter and war are almost natural companions. But I wouldn’t say laughter implies funniness or a lack of seriousness, and nor does comedy. Catch-22 gets you to the point where you can’t apply your reason any more and laughter takes over. It’s the laughter of the absurd which might not be to do with funniness, but is to do with preposterousness or incongruity or disbelief. It’s that kind of, “I can make no sense of this,” laughter and I think evoking it is incredibly skilful.

Another person who does it is Spike Milligan. I love his war memoirs. The first one is Hitler: My Part in His Downfall . Just the title conveys the ridiculous. He is one person who mostly spends his Second World War in Bexhill-on-Sea doing maneuvers.

Catch 22  also has some very visceral descriptions of the horrors of war. How successfully does he convey those experiences and what are their purpose in this book?

He does convey them graphically. He makes it absolutely clear that man is mortal. A character gets chopped in half and there’s someone else who’s horribly wounded in an air accident and you find out the contents of his stomach. It’s literally visceral, his kidneys are there with the tomatoes he had for breakfast. He’s very good at conveying that sense of the absolute mortality and carnality of the human body.

“There’s nothing like war to show the fragility of the human body, its destructibility.”

There’s a recurring character called the Soldier in White, who’s a soldier in the hospital completely encased in white plaster cast. In another scene the characters discover the solder in white is gone and an identical one is in his place. Although his arms are different lengths and his body’s a different length, he’s still encased in white, so there will always be a Soldier in White. People become absolutely indistinguishable from one another, which conveys this sense of man as organic matter. There’s nothing like war to show the fragility of the human body, its destructibility.

There’s the amazing description of the Blitz in Kate Atkinson’s Life after Life . The narrator sees a body that she thinks is clothes on a coat hanger because it’s just hanging there.

I was stunned by Life After Life . I think that idea of the world turned upside down, and particularly the house turned inside out, is quite common. I can only imagine what it must feel like to have an intimate room like the bedroom suddenly on show in the street, and have all your possessions out in the street. It’s the complete opposite of civilized living. Writers use it quite often, “ The Land-Mine ” by George Macbeth described how the war has ripped off the front of houses.

Your final book is If This Is a Man by Primo Levi.

I first read this in my twenties. It was my introduction to the Holocaust . This is when I began to understand what the Holocaust had been. Primo Levi was an Italian Jew and an industrial chemist who was sent to Auschwitz. It is about his existence in Auschwitz. Reading it, horror follows horror. It’s hard to believe that the human frame can survive under such circumstances, let alone survive to write something like this.

There are two moments in it that particularly struck me. Auschwitz is in Poland and it’s winter. The hard labour is extremely difficult and it is very cold and bitter. The prisoners are going to be synthesizing rubber in a factory near to Auschwitz, so there is a chemistry exam. And it’s the most infernal exam in the world. This person who has been reduced to something that is almost sub-human now has to try and remember his chemistry from his degree. If he can remember he will be able to work inside in the warmth, and he won’t die. There’s something about being a scholar and thinking about your knowledge under such circumstances that is very powerful.

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He does get to work in the factory, which probably saves his life. There is a scene in which he is going with a very young prisoner to get soup and suddenly a line from Dante’s Inferno comes to his mind. It’s the Ulysses canto, where Ulysses is saying, “I’m not meant for men like these but men who strive after excellence” and Primo Levi tries to remember it. Trying to remember it is this moment of confirmation that he’s still human. The young man he is with is French and doesn’t see what he’s talking about, but senses that it is really important. Levi doesn’t remember the whole canto, but he remembers enough snatches of it that he’s just about got it. I’d like to say that this proves the enduring, humanising power of literature, but I’m not sure you can. George Steiner has pointed out in his great book Language and Silence that people who read Goethe and listened to Schubert in the morning then went out and did their work as guards at Auschwitz. So I don’t think literature improves you.  Nonetheless, it is a moment worth registering because it is this remembrance that means so much to him and he says, “I would give my day’s soup ration to remember that line.” You’d have to read this account to know how much a day’s soup ration matters.

This makes me think of Elaine Scarry’s The Body In Pain and her idea that if you reduce somebody to just a cipher or symbol of your own power through causing them pain it involves that removal of self. I think it’s a very coherent way of thinking about that loss of humanity–you remove the inner life and you make them simply a body.

Yes, I absolutely agree with that. The writing of this, and similar Holocaust memoirs, is a reaffirmation, it goes back to combat gnosticism. It’s hard for anyone who hasn’t been in that situation to talk about reaffirmation, because it’s hard to imagine just what you would have to come back for.

How does he approach the writing of the truly unspeakable?

He writes with extreme candor and a remarkable lack of self-pity. I think there’s this sense, in theories of representations of the Holocaust, that if you deviate even slightly from the truth then you risk letting in the deniers. And so the place of literature in relation to the Holocaust is a very delicate subject. As readers, we have to be very, very aware of the potential of slipping into sentimentality, or trying to make something good out of it that just isn’t there

Does our knowledge of his suicide in any way alter the experience of reading his writing?

In a way it just makes the bravery of the writing—not only of If This Is A Man but all his other works, which never leave this subject—the more extraordinary. There is something about surviving to bear witness, it is an incredibly brave thing to do. He strikes me as an absolutely heroic person.

You’re writing now about literature and silence, how can silence creep into literature? Might it be the purest expression of a horrific event?

My next project is going to be about literature and silence. It grows out of the last chapter of the book I’m writing on veterans which is called “The End of the Story”. The penultimate chapter is about veterans who never stop talking about the war as a model of literary creativity. And the final chapter is about veterans who won’t say anything or can’t say anything or don’t say anything.

We neglect the silences in literature. I’m interested in the acoustic use of silence in poetry or drama and in things that aren’t said, and how we know they’re not said. It’s terribly difficult if you’re not going to say something or write something in protest, how do you register that? You’ve got to sort of hedge it round with words. But I think we can try and listen to those silences.

And silences, as we know from the two minute silence, are incredibly powerful. I want to try and understand this better, and understand how we can see silences in texts that are there, and also maybe texts that aren’t there, or texts that aren’t as they would have been. It’s looking into the realm of the subjunctive, into the hypothetical, into the not said.

February 12, 2016

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Kate McLoughlin

Kate McLoughlin is Associate Professor of English at Harris Manchester College, Oxford.  Her books include Authoring War: The Literary Representation of War from the Iliad to Iraq (2011) and Martha Gellhorn: the War Writer in the Field and in the Text   (2007).  She is a former government lawyer, an Associate of the Royal College of Music in piano performance, and a poet: her collection  Plums came out in 2011.

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7 Ways to Get Students Writing about the War in Ukraine

Between this post and my last, a war began. And we shouldn’t be surprised. Like the rise of Nazi Germany after WWI, the conflict in Ukraine has been building for more than twenty years. Putin and his post-Soviet ancestors have been playing a game of Hungry Hippos with the Ukraine and former Soviet satellite states since the fall of the Berlin Wall. Now, Europe is facing its biggest crisis since WWII.

My students are obsessed with the War in Ukraine. I’m not sure if it’s the heartbreaking Tik Tok content, the surreal threat of nuclear war, the fact that Zelensky has us all ready to write a new Taylor Swift album, or that this is the most televised war in human history. Regardless, they are invested; they want to talk about it. So, let’s let them. 

Here are seven ways for students to write about the War in Ukraine in your class tomorrow:

#1 Map Analysis

An understanding of Eastern European geography is integral to understanding what’s going on in Ukraine. In addition to illuminating the historic geographic ties between Russia and Ukraine, it also provides crucial context for NATO, the UN, the European Union, and the United State’s reactions to the Russian invasion.

The plan: Grab one, two, or all of the maps from this Washington Post article and put them on a slideshow. Project the maps to the class, and ask them to write their answers the following questions:

• What do you notice?
• What do you wonder?
• What historical events/context would be helpful to understand in order to interpret this map?
• What does this map reveal about the war in Ukraine?

Discuss afterwards as a class. Stop there, or use this as a building block to more complex analysis of the crisis.

#2 Editorial Essay

This one needs little to no explanation for all of you ELA teachers!

The plan: Choose an editorial relating to the Ukrainian crisis– The Atlantic has been knocking it out of the park– and assign it as a flipped classroom reading. Create questions for students to answer questions that analyze the writer’s moves, argumentation, and ideas. As a class or in reading circles, ask students to discuss their answers and generate noticings about the mentor text

These are some of my favorite reads about the war so far:

• Scarily predictive editorial: The U.S. Is Naive About Russia. Ukraine Can’t Afford to Be.
• Cultural editorial: SNL Serves up a Disgusting Highlight ( https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2022/03/snl-changes-subject-war-meatballs/626572/?utm_source=feed )
• Historical editorial: Russia’s at war with Ukraine. Here’s how we got here
• Philosophical editorial: How War Became a Crime ( https://www.vox.com/22959938/crime-war-kellogg-briand-ukraine-conquest )

Students can write their own editorials in response to a specific aspect of the War in Ukraine using the mentor text as their guide. If they can complete their essay in 450 words or less, students can even submit their writing to the NYT Student Editorial Contest !

#3 Reflection Warm-up

My students are not just interested in the War in Ukraine, they are stressed about it. Though located on another continent, the internet makes the conflict feel close. The Ukrainian Crisis along with the pandemic are shaping up to be the 9/11 of this generation. They need space to express their concerns and fears.

The plan: Consider assigning this Vox mini-documentary , which provides primary-source footage and well-summarized facts about the War in Ukraine in less than 10 minutes, as a flipped classroom assignment. Then, ask students to write their answers to the following questions:

• What do you know about the War in Ukraine?
• What media have you been exposed to so far that has covered the War in Ukraine?
• How does the War in Ukraine make you feel? Frustrated? Sad? Scared? Explain.
• Do you feel connected to the War? If so, how?
• What are some ways you might help people affected by the War?

Stop there, or ask students to discuss their answers in small groups.

#4 Primary Source Found Poem

As a social studies teacher, I didn’t learn about found poems until a couple of years into my teaching career. Essentially, students take a piece of writing and pull words or short phrases (30-100) from it to rearrange into a poem of their own creation. It’s a great way to analyze a text for ideas and themes. It also bolsters students’ creativity. I use found poems in my social studies classes exclusively with primary sources.

The plan: Ask students to read a speech by Ukrainian President, Volodymyr Zelensky. (Here’s one from the Munich Security Conference and one to the European Parliament .) Students will then identify a theme from the speech that they wish to create a poem about (e.g., international solidarity or Ukrainian resilience). Ask the students to read back through the speech, circling or writing down words or phrases that connect to their chosen theme. Students will create a poem about their chosen theme using the words they selected. (My students will write their final poems on Ukrainian flags that we will make out of construction paper. We’ll hang the final poems all over my room. Pics soon to come!)

#5 An Editorial Cartoon

Anyone who’s ever taught with me knows I love getting my students to create editorial cartoons to study current events. Editorial cartoons encourage students to be creative, make clear arguments, understand historical context, and to be clever. It also encourages them to evaluate current events for themselves.

The plan: Students should find a news article relating to the War in Ukraine from an accredited news organization of their choosing. After reading the article, they should create an editorial cartoon providing their opinion on what the author discussed. The cartoon should have one, central image and a caption.

#6 Use “We Lived Happily During the War” as a Mentor Text

In his viral poem, “We Lived Happily During the War” , Ukrainian poet Ilya Kaminsky grapples with the discomfort of being an onlooker to conflict and crisis.

The plan: Give students Kaminsky’s poem to annotate. Encourage them to look for moves that relate to style, diction, and sentence structure. Students might notice that Kaminsky plays with personal pronouns to create distance or intimacy and that he uses repetition to broaden the geographic scope of his point of view.

Feel free to stop here or use this as a starting point for students to create their own poems with Kaminsky’s as a model.

#7 Thesis Statement Practice

If I feel crunched for time, I like to use current events as practice topics for writing claim statements. It is such a great way to kill two birds with one stone– current event study and thesis development. Use this as a quick warm-up activity for your students.

The plan: Choose an article or video on the War in Ukraine to give students as a flipped classroom assignment (or no need, if you have already brought them up to speed on the crisis). Then, as a class or as part of the flipped assignment, watch this video on how to create a Big Idea Claim:

Ask students to write their own Big Idea Claims in response to what they have learned, read, or watched about the War in Ukraine. Have students switch their claim statements with one another and provide feedback based on the techniques and strategies highlighted in the Mini Moves video.

As a social studies teacher, I can find myself sticking so rigidly to my curriculum that I forget that history is not just the study of the past– history is actively creating itself around us in this very moment. I need to remind myself to give students space to write, discuss, and create in response to current events, because in this way, too, they can be historians.

I hope that by my next post the War in Ukraine has ended and Ukrainians can safely return to an independent, democratic nation.

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Several links on this page don’t work, like the Vox documentary.

Thanks for letting me know! I think there is an issue with hyperlinking to Vox. It is now updated and both Vox links should work 🙂

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How to Write Authentic War Stories: Really Useful Links by Lucy O’Callaghan

Lucy O'Callaghan

• 25 April 2024

Although fiction is making things up, there are sometimes places where we need to get the facts right. Writing stories set in war times is one of those. People have to believe in the authenticity of your war time story. It may be a fictional story but things within the story must ring true – the smell of dug outs or what crowded bomb shelters were like, and the timeline of events throughout the war. I have put together some articles and podcasts with advice on how to write authentic war stories.

• 7 Tips For Writing Realistic War Stories (UPDATED 2024) (writersrelief.com)

This article gives advice on how graphic to be when writing battle scenes. Violent scenes can be offensive if they are overdone or unnecessary. If you are writing about violence, make sure you are aware of your choices and the reasons for making them. Often using a panoramic lens on a scene can give your reader a chance to look around and see what’s going on. Another tip shared is to pay attention to the details of everyday life at that time. It’s not all the smell of bombs, but often the smell of certain foods that can place us in history. While every genre has it tropes, falling back on liches is sometimes the easy way out. Try and add your own unique perspective. And last but not least, read widely non-fiction in your chosen area, check your facts and do your research. Doing this will further strengthen your story.

• How To Write A Book About War: 8 Tips To Authentic Prose (selfpublishing.com)

A book about war has its central focus on the battlefield or on the home front. This article from Selfpublishing.com shares things to include when writing about war. Just like writing about any genre, there are key factors to include, and these three aspects are important: including multiple types of conflict, realistic battle scenes and humanised characters. The article moves on to share a step-by-step guide you can take as you write a book about war. These include, defining your primary focus, don’t forget about all types of conflict – it’s not always man v man, use the senses to showcase emotion, understanding what you are writing and how you write it, add humanity to common tropes, resource other books, edit and check your facts.

• Telling the Stories of War: Author Roundtable – Writer’s Digest (writersdigest.com)

Writing accurately and truthfully about war is never easy. Writing about conflicts that occurred decades and even centuries earlier is even more difficult. This is an interesting article from Writer’s Digest where three award-winning journalists discuss their unique approaches to chronicling seminal moments in American military history. They discuss their research, the challenges they faced, their writing processes, and facing structural difficulties.

• A short guide to writing war novels (firstdraftpro.com)

War novels have long fascinated readers with their gripping accounts of heroism, tragedy, and the human condition. As a writer, it is crucial to understand external content genres like the war novel in order to craft a compelling narrative that appeals to readers. This guide from First Draft Pro explores the conventions, obligatory scenes, and tips for writing a successful war novel.

• 6 Tips on Writing a War Story – Edit911 Editing Service

War stories are multifaceted, emotional, and full of conflict. War is a popular and captivating genre. However, writing about war is challenging. Whether it’s contemplating if your descriptions are too graphic or not violent enough, not knowing how much detail to go into, or writing intense battle scenes, war stories are notoriously difficult to master. While there’s no specific formula to writing a good war story, there are tips that can make the topic less intimidating. This article outlines some of these tips to ensure your war story is a nuanced and well-written one. It advises you to understand what a war story is, do your research and get the facts straight, use all types of conflict, know when to use and avoid tropes, don’t be afraid of using emotions, and write realistic battle scenes.

The podcasts this week feature stories about various wars which may help you in your research.

• 10 Best War Podcasts for Every Military History Buff (explorethearchive.com)

The Archive shares ten great podcasts on different areas of historical wars.

• WW2 Stories & Real War Stories | Listen to Podcasts On Demand Free | TuneIn

These stories are all about World War Two. This podcast dives into the untold tales of heroism, sacrifice, and determination from

“WW2 Stories & Real War Stories” is a gripping podcast that dives into the untold tales of heroism, sacrifice, and determination from the most significant conflict in human history, World War II. Each episode explores the lesser-known battles, daring missions, and personal accounts of the brave individuals who shaped the course of the war.

• Amazing War Stories Archives – Amazing War Stories

Using the latest 3D audio technology we tell inspiring true stories each taken from the museums we feature on our site.

I hope you have found this week’s column helpful. As always, please get in touch if there are any topics you would like me to cover.

(c) Lucy O’Callaghan

Instagram: lucy.ocallaghan.31.

Facebook: @LucyCOCallaghan

Twitter: @LucyCOCallaghan

About the author

Writing since she was a child, Lucy penned her first story with her father called Arthur’s Arm, at the ripe old age of eight. She has been writing ever since. Inspired by her father’s love of the written word and her mother’s encouragement through a constant supply of wonderful stationary, she wrote short stories for her young children, which they subsequently illustrated. A self-confessed people watcher, stories that happen to real people have always fascinated her and this motivated her move to writing contemporary women’s fiction. Her writing has been described as pacy, human, moving and very real. Lucy has been part of a local writing group for over ten years and has taken creative writing classes with Paul McVeigh, Jamie O’Connell and Curtis Brown Creative. She truly found her tribe when she joined Writer’s Ink in May 2020. Experienced in beta reading and critiquing, her debut novel, The Lies Beneath is out now, published by Poolbeg. Follow her on Instagram: lucy.ocallaghan.31. Facebook and Twitter: @LucyCOCallaghan

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‘Workshops of Empire,’ by Eric Bennett

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When you purchase an independently reviewed book through our site, we earn an affiliate commission.

By Timothy Aubry

• Nov. 25, 2015

Less than a lifetime ago, reputable American writers would occasionally start fistfights, sleep in ditches and even espouse Communist doctrines. Such were the prerogatives and exigencies of the artist’s existence, until M.F.A. programs arrived to impose discipline and provide livelihoods. Whether the professionalization of creative writing has been good for American literature has set off a lot of elegantly worded soul-searching and well-mannered debate recently, much of it in response to Mark McGurl’s seminal study, “The Program Era.” What Eric ­Bennett’s “Workshops of Empire” contributes is an understanding of how Cold War politics helped to create the aesthetic standards that continue to rule over writing workshops today.

Sponsored by foundations dedicated to defeating Communism, creative-­writing programs during the postwar period taught aspiring authors certain rules of propriety. Good literature, students learned, contains “sensations, not doctrines; ­experiences, not dogmas; memories, not philosophies.” The goal, according to Bennett, was to discourage the abstract theorizing and systematic social critiques to which the radical literature of the 1930s had been prone, in favor of a focus on the personal, the concrete and the individual. While workshop administrators like Paul Engle and Wallace Stegner wanted to spread American values, they did not want to be caught imposing a particular ideology on their students, for fear of appearing to use the same tactics as the communists. Thus they presented their aesthetic principles as a non­political, universally valid means of cultivating writerly craft. The continued status of “show, don’t tell” as a self-evident truth, dutifully dispensed to anyone who ventures into a creative-­writing class, is one proof of their success.

Bennett’s argument is a persuasive reminder that certain seemingly timeless criteria of good writing are actually the product of historically bound political agendas, and it will be especially useful to anyone seeking to expand the repertoire of stylistic strategies taught within creative-writing programs. That said, some sections are better researched than others. His chapters on Stegner, Hemingway and Henry James lack the detailed ­institutional machinations that make his account of Engle’s career so compelling. Moreover, he uses the early history to support his claim that creative-writing programs continue to bolster a pro-­capitalist worldview today. But a chess move made to solve specific problems can serve unexpected purposes when the situation on the board has changed. Whether or not the aesthetic doctrines currently championed by writing workshops perform the same political function they once did, now that the very conflict responsible for their emergence has ended, is a question that requires further study.

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First World War postcard published by ‘The Cairo Postcard Trust’ (© Lyn Edmonds)

We received entries from all over the world – Britain, Ireland, France, India, Pakistan, Serbia, Australia and New Zealand – and were struck by the multiple viewpoints and the wide range of styles, but also by the focus on the stories of individual people, which brought the wider history to life.

Congratulations to our winners! We hope you enjoy reading their work. Click on the PDF page next to the citations below to open the short story or poem. Here you can read all the shortlisted entries . Copyright remains with the authors.

11-18 category

Winner: ‘heat’ by constance cottrell.

Runners up: ‘The Long Road East’ by William Bowden-Ritchie and ‘Welcome to East Africa’ by Charlotte Lee

Highly Commended (in alphabetical order)

‘Lest We Forget’ by Matthew Gittleson.  The central idea of this story, that the actions of humans on the battlefield seem inexplicable and contrary to nature, is very well expressed. Using a tree as the voice of the author allows us to step back from the human experience and become more objective. The action is placed in the East African campaign and the writer picks out the extraordinary valour of the colonial soldiers who fought for the British and German empires.

‘Long Live War’ by Ishaabyha Tripathi.  As a piece of creative writing this entry focusses on one simple idea and uses this to epitomise the writer’s experience of the war away from the Western Front, where the majority of troops on both sides were colonial, and many of them – as described – not English speakers. The entry also manages to convey something of the contradictions of war, along the lines of ‘Oh What  A Lovely War’, where soldiers become ironic and fatalistic about their situation. This is all the more poignant in the choice of writer, who cannot appreciate the irony due solely to lack of knowledge of the language.

Over 18 category

Winner: ‘buried letters’ by helen parker-drabble.

An audio version of ‘Buried Letters’

Right click here to download it as an MP3 file

Runners-up: ‘The Princess Beatrice’ by Antony Dunford and ‘The Cheecha’ by Peter Susa

‘The Syrian’ by Patty Lafferty.   The simple idea that history is repeating itself in Syria is well expressed. The poem uses short lines and vivid images to take the reader through the experience of waking up after being wounded in war. The historical context is clear and the references to T E Lawrence and Feisal place the action in its time.

Our competition originally had three age categories – ’10 and under’, ’11-18′ and ‘Over 18′. Unfortunately in the ’10 and under’ category we received no entries which complied with the rules so we took the decision to transfer the value of the prizes to the other categories, and were therefore able to offer book tokens to two runners-up as well as the winning entry.

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Writing War, Writing Peace

‘Writing War, Writing Peace’ is a creative writing anthology written by students who spent a week at The National Archives, learning from our records about the experiences of Nurses in the First World War. Mentored by Melvin Burgess and Sara Robinson, the students were encouraged to explore service records, diaries and photographs to put together their own creative pieces inspired by real events. These stories and poems are the result.

Many thanks to Melvin and Sara for their support.

University of Iowa Press

Workshops of empire.

During and just after World War II, an influential group of American writers and intellectuals projected a vision for literature that would save the free world. Novels, stories, plays, and poems, they believed, could inoculate weak minds against simplistic totalitarian ideologies, heal the spiritual wounds of global catastrophe, and just maybe prevent the like from happening again. As the Cold War began, high-minded and well-intentioned scholars, critics, and writers from across the political spectrum argued that human values remained crucial to civilization and that such values stood in dire need of formulation and affirmation. They believed that the complexity of literature—of ideas bound to concrete images, of ideologies leavened with experiences—enshrined such values as no other medium could.

Creative writing emerged as a graduate discipline in the United States amid this astonishing swirl of grand conceptions. The early workshops were formed not only at the time of, but in the image of, and under the tremendous urgency of, the postwar imperatives for the humanities. Vivid renderings of personal experience would preserve the liberal democratic soul—a soul menaced by the gathering leftwing totalitarianism of the USSR and the memory of fascism in Italy and Germany.

Workshops of Empire explores this history via the careers of Paul Engle at the University of Iowa and Wallace Stegner at Stanford. In the story of these founding fathers of the discipline, Eric Bennett discovers the cultural, political, literary, intellectual, and institutional underpinnings of creative writing programs within the university. He shows how the model of literary technique championed by the first writing programs—a model that values the interior and private life of the individual, whose experiences are not determined by any community, ideology, or political system—was born out of this Cold War context and continues to influence the way creative writing is taught, studied, read, and written into the twenty-first century.

“Returning to the scene of the emergence of the discipline of creative writing in the Cold War, this book makes a valuable contribution to the ongoing debate about one of our most consequential contemporary literary institutions. While one might want to quarrel with or qualify some of Bennett’s conclusions, one can’t help but be impressed with the vigor with which they are offered, and applaud his passionate concern for intellectual and artistic freedom.”—Mark McGurl, author, The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing

  “Bennett proves that US creative writing programs were props to Cold War efforts to make liberal capitalism dominant. He shows that their vision of literature as a tribute to the individual’s complex private life and perspective was inseparable from attempts to demonize the Soviet world as one of conformity and repression. It’s an essential and fascinating book.”—Sarah Brouillette, author, Literature and the Creative Economy

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Creative writing involving war

Tom Burgess Yr 10 set 1                English Coursework

                                         Creative Writing

The wailing sirens struck fear into the struggling crowd of panicking civilians. The adrenaline rush filled me as I barged passed all the strangers and knocked an old man off his feet, he tripped into the puddle beneath him launching muddy water into the others surrounding. Nobody cared, I could not help unless I wanted the same to happen to me, but as I turned around an aircraft shot past, a thundering rumble followed and shook the ground. As the old man searched for his walking stick in the marshy ground something caused an explosion; obliterating the helpless man and propelling rock and mud towards me at unbelievable speeds. Everything went black as a heavy rock belted into my face, I lay unconscious between two mangled bodies.

I woke up to the same noise; aircraft shaking the earth, bombs breaking the earth and incessant screaming that sends a chilling sensation to your bones and then is silenced by an explosion. Only now the average volume was quieter, the loudest noise was two men shouting at each other. I kept my eyes closed to try and understand exactly what was going on and listened intently.

        “Open the door what are you doing!?” yells an Arabian man,

The other person responded calmly, “We have enough people in here and we don’t need anymore blood around the place.”

        “What you’re just going to let them die!?”

        “It looks like it doesn’t it?” their quarrelling was silenced from a ground shuddering detonation. The screams outside were silenced for longer than normal and everybody stayed quiet listening for any life outside this mysterious room.

I stopped pretending to be asleep and opened my eyes slowly. In front of me stood a beautiful woman, leaning against the wall in silence but not depressed, there were four people other than me in this room. I watched the women and she caught my eye before the others and walked towards me, her dark hair swayed gently and she knelt beside me looking at me with those shockingly blue eyes, her face was strangely untouched, no bruises or scratches from the bedlam and had no sign of discontent from these catastrophic events.

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        “Are you alright?” she asked but I ignored the question and said,

        “What’s your name?” she giggled and replied,

        “I’m Sally, what’s yours?” I didn’t answer I just thought about what was happening, how could she be so happy at times like this? Who are these people? Where am I and what hell is going on?

My back clicked several times as I sat up next to Sally against the cold stone wall, I looked around and realised the obvious; I‘m in a bomb shelter. I saw the two men still arguing about seven metres away and asked with a croaky voice,

        “Why are they fighting?” Sally looked at them and explained,

        “The tall blonde man is John”, she gazed at him the same way I did to her. “He did something terrible…” Sally told me what happened; that John had closed the bomb shelter door on a crowd of people escaping the carnage and left them to die outside the shelter. I was shocked by what John had done but at that moment I didn’t really care; the main problem was my difficulty in breathing and the throbbing pain in my face and chest. As Sally explained the details of the event I looked around the room. There wasn’t much to look at except the women sitting in the dark area of the room crying, her tears rested on her cheeks glistening in the dim light, Sally realised I was ignoring her and stopped talking.. The girl’s weeping seemed to pollute the room, causing others to feel the same. I hadn’t noticed the women in the corner before and felt as though I should do something, her name was Felicity; I heard someone mention her name. I always felt uncomfortable in front of crying women. I left her alone and stared hopelessly at the blank ceiling.

I never thought about how I got here, all I remember was the adrenaline rush, the running for my life and the old man receive a direct hit from a missile. Somebody must have carried me here, whoever it was saved my life and must have risked theirs.

My thoughts were interrupted by a feeling of warm liquid running up my throat, I coughed loudly and everyone turned towards me as I spurted thick blood out of my aching nose and mouth. I could feel everybody looking at me and kept spitting the oozing liquid into the ground beneath me. On my hands and knees I bent over the small pool of blood and saw my reflection. There were grazes all over my cheeks; blood was seeping out of the gaping wound beside my eye. My face was battered; my left eye was bulbous and stuck out of my head like a tennis ball. I looked at my bruised lip as red saliva dripped out of a deep cut. It didn’t feel so bad; it felt like I had been thumped in the face but looked like I’d been hit by a lorry. I shifted my hands back towards the stone wall and felt a cold liquid pour between my fingers, I was lying in a puddle of my own blood, I had only just realised how severe my injuries were. I was struggling to keep conscious and couldn’t stand the shock and pain, cold ran down my body and I felt another liquid rush up my throat.

We spent hours in the putrid bomb shelter, luckily there were enough rations for at least ten people but medication was becoming scarce. Everybody knew that we would need the medicines for later and I felt like I was being greedy. I looked around the room, hoping someone would break the silence, I caught the eye of Felicity but she looked away, she seemed disgusted by my wounds and blood. I felt like a living dead body.

I could tell my wounds had healed slightly and I tried to stand up, people watched me with the corner of their eyes; obviously not trying to be rude. I pushed my hands against the walls, and felt the large scab on my armpit reopen and I let out a restrained cry. Everybody turned around feeling sorry and Sahid strolled towards me as I struggled to rise, his arm reached out in front of me offering aid. I accepted, lifted my wrist from the ground and grabbed his arm, the pressure moved to my legs as we both pulled in opposite directions, my knees stretched painfully as I rose to my feet. I looked towards Sahid with an uneasy grin on my face, he grinned back and I realised who it was that must have risked his life for mine during the bombings.

In the past seven hours I had thought and talked a lot, mainly to Sahid and Sally as John and Felicity were very quiet. My thoughts about Sally had changed, she was clearly fond of John and he seems very dangerous to be involved with.

We hadn’t heard any explosions in hours and Felicity had finally stopped crying, my wounds seemed to have healed unbelievably fast and everybody appeared to be slightly happier, I felt as though it was time to get out of this room and return to the surface. I glanced at John as he rose to his feet; he was studying the giant, thick door and reached towards it. He rested his chubby wrist on the handle for a while; probably thinking about what he had done before. The handle let out a moan as he pushed it down, he tugged at the door and it opened with a loud sucking noise from the compressed air. Everybody faced him as the strong wind from the outdoors brought a giant gust into the shelter; my nose froze momentarily from the wintry rush of air. It brought a foul smoky smell along with it, we all rose to our feet and stared at the narrow corridor, it was a relief to see an exit. John was the first to step out, he sauntered straight past the battered door, the fat metal hinges were almost completely ripped, the other side of the door was dented and black. Suddenly the door caused a thunderous groan, it toppled forward and John yelled as it came towards him. His shout was silenced and bones were crushed when the huge door landed on him; there was no chance of survival. I turned to face everyone, the walls started to cave in and floor rumbled, I fell on the ground and gazed towards the corridor, giant plates of rock fell from its ceiling burying the exit. Along with the exit our hope was buried too.

While I was lying on the cold ground the shaking finished and I analysed the room. We were completely entombed.

Teacher Reviews

Here's what a teacher thought of this essay.

Laura Gater

There are sentences within this piece that are very imaginative and successfully create very strong imagery for the reader. At times the communication isn't as clear as it could be and the structure needs to be more cohesive. 4 Stars

Document Details

• Word Count 1524
• Page Count 3
• Subject English

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Creative Writing- war

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22 February 2018

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Mosab Abu Toha

Mosab Abu Toha is a Palestinian poet, short-story writer, and essayist from Gaza. His first collection of poetry, Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear , was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry and won the Palestine Book Award, the American Book Award, and the Walcott Poetry Prize. Abu Toha is also the founder of the Edward Said Library in Gaza, which he hopes to rebuild. He recently won an Overseas Press Club Award for his “Letter from Gaza” columns for The New Yorker. His new collection of poetry, Forest of Trees , is out in October 2024.

On processing trauma through writing

I first became aware of your work when I read the essay that you wrote for The New Yorker about your experience fleeing Gaza, which included being kidnapped by the Israeli military. I was wondering if you could tell me a bit about the process of writing that essay, because it was published quite soon after that happened.

I was kidnapped on November 19th (2023), and I was released on November 21st. I stayed in the hands of the Israelis handcuffed and blindfolded for about 53 hours. During that time, I was in constant fear for my wife’s and my children’s lives—I did not know where they went. I was worried about the safety of my parents and my siblings, who I left behind in northern Gaza. And when I was temporarily placed in a tent along with other kidnapped people from Gaza, I could hear the artillery firing shells into the parts that I evacuated [from].

Thanks to everyone who wrote about me , I think a lot of pressure was put on the Israelis to release me. So, I was released and I was really surprised because it was very quick. The second day I was called by some Israeli soldiers to go out. And then it took them a few hours to drop me at the same checkpoint where they kidnapped me from, and that would be the next journey for me to find my wife and my children. I did not know where they were, there was no internet connection, there was no phone signal. So, I started to look for them and it took me about three hours to find them. And luckily they were staying with my wife’s relatives in a school shelter in the south of the Gaza Strip.

The moment I was released, I was [contacted] by The New Yorker editors, especially David Remnick , who asked me to write about this. So, of course, immediately I started writing down everything I could remember.

Did you know right away that you wanted to write about this experience?

I’m the kind of person who—I don’t know if I’m lucky or unlucky—reflects on his experiences. Because these experiences are not superficial. These experiences have been imprinted in my heart, and I felt every bit of it. So, I found myself retelling the story from the time we decided to leave North Gaza. We were, of course, scared to take the journey because the Israelis could bomb us any time. That had happened with a few families. So I started to narrate these stories of some of the bombings that happened the night before we decided to leave North Gaza. My wife’s grandparents and her uncles were in a school that was bombed in the early morning one day before we left. That was one reason why we decided to leave.

I have these stories with me. The hard part was about reflecting on my feelings, not my experience. There are two parts to any story, the experience and the feelings. The emotions that come with this experience. And this is what poetry is to me.

So, I started writing everything down. I wrote about half of the piece in [the shelter] I was in. I sometimes had to walk in the street to look for an internet connection. I was sitting in the street along with hundreds of other people. Then the second half [of drafting] and editing process took place in Cairo.

Did the experience of writing this essay helped you to process what had just happened to you?

Whenever I write, whether it’s poetry or essays, or even a short story in the Arabic language, the fact that I’m writing about myself is also representative of what other people are going through. Writing about these things helps me to relieve some of the pain that I’m feeling for myself and for others.

Writing about the collective story, the story of so many people who were killed, or who lost their parents—I know of two people who are still buried under the rubble of their house. And I met with two survivors of that airstrike, which killed at least 40 people and destroyed the building. They were in Egypt. They told me that they wanted to go back to Gaza, and I [asked], “Why? A lot of people pay money to go out in Gaza.” She said, “I want to go back and retrieve the body of my father and my sibling.” So, the fact that I’m writing about these people gives me a sense of victory that I am still alive to tell these stories. My life has a meaning not only to me, but also to other people.

It sounds like along with feeling that you’ve survived, there is also maybe a sense of responsibility to share those stories of the people who have been lost?

Yeah, the fact that I am alive is one thing, and the fact that I can continue to write is another, because many people survive atrocities. It’s not that they kept silent, but they were forced to be silent, either because they’re still traumatized. I myself am traumatized. I still have nightmares. And also my children have nightmares. For me, it’s about writing about myself, whether it’s something that happened to me last year, last month or yesterday, or things that other people experienced, but they did not survive to tell us the rest of the story. So, my position as a poet is to either rewrite the story or to complete it.

How and when did you find poetry as a vehicle for sharing your creative identity or words with the world?

I was born in 1992 in a refugee camp. I’ve never seen a foreigner who came to visit Gaza for the sake of visiting. I mean, the only foreigners that would come to Gaza were journalists, or doctors, or human rights activists. No one came to Gaza to talk to the people of Gaza. So, the first time I found myself writing, I didn’t realize what I was writing, that it had some effect on people, and it had some art in it. It was in 2014. I was posting about everything that I was witnessing, every feeling that I felt. I think having a platform [on] Facebook at the time helped me realize how important my work would be, because people started to follow me and to comment on my posts and compliment my writing.

The fact that there were some people who were listening encouraged me to continue holding my pen and penning more and more pieces of writing. I wouldn’t call them poems at the time.

When I write in Arabic, I’m talking to myself about myself. I’m talking about humanity addressing myself or trying to understand it. But when it comes to writing in the English language, of course I’m not talking to myself because it’s not part of me. I was not born with it. I found it in me later. So, writing in the English language means that I’m talking to someone else, because the people outside are eager to learn. Having that audience in front of me meant that I should continue addressing these people, and that’s where poetry came from.

You’ve emerged as one of the most prominent voices responding to the war in Gaza through poetry. Why is poetry needed in times like these?

I think poetry is one of the most successful mediums for someone to reflect on the horrors of war. I can’t imagine a painter painting something about the war these days. I can’t imagine someone writing a novel these days about the war. But when it comes to poetry, because poetry is about the experience and emotions, we are quick. I mean, writing a poem could take me five minutes or 10 minutes because it’s just there. It just needs a pen or maybe a table to start and write it.

So, I think poetry is maybe one of the only tools that emerges from under the rubble of a bombed city. Israel is not only killing houses or neighborhoods, they are killing the city itself. Because if you look at Gaza, it doesn’t look like a city. It looks like a graveyard, really. I think poetry is the most direct way of communicating the horrors of the war and the siege.

In terms of using poetry to push for change, is there any advice that you’d like to share with other writers?

I think a poet does not have too many options. The poet can find themselves talking to the human in others. So, I’m not talking about the history of Palestine [or] Israel, I’m talking about now. I’m just talking about this moment. Let’s put history aside and talk about the central issue, which is humanity. Humanity comes first here.

So, in moments of war, and when it comes to writing about us as human beings, put everything aside. Just talk about what has been brought to every single one of us human beings, not as a Palestinian, not as a Christian or a Muslim or a Jew. Just forget about these things. These things came to us after we were born. I was not born Palestinian. I mean, I was in my mother’s womb without knowing Arabic or Islam, or knowing even my name. The priority should be to every single human being in this world. So, I think poetry’s focus should be on the I. Not on he, or she, or they, or it. I, let’s protect the I.

Yeah. It sounds like part of your advice is to find the universals of humanity that can take us beyond all the boxes that we use to define and categorize humans.

Exactly. If I’m going to read a poem about what happened to Native Americans or what happened to Jews in the Holocaust, I’m going to relate to everything. If I’m going to read a memoir that was written about the genocide in Bosnia, I’m going to relate to everything. I mean, what is the purpose of writing if we are not going to learn from it?

Our readers are largely American artists. And I was wondering if you have any messages or requests that you’d like to convey to working American artists in this political moment?

We are both part of this world. Not only are [Palestinian artists] the ones who are supposed to document the horrors of what’s happening in Gaza, but everyone. Not only artists, but everyone, everyone in the outside world who is witnessing this. Whether they’re watching news, looking at images, photos, and videos that are emerging from under the bombardment. Everyone is supposed to reflect on what they see. Because not only am I in pain as a Palestinian, but everyone who’s watching us [is] also in pain.

So, their part comes here. Everyone in the outside world needs to be part of this moment. Because this attack is not only against the Palestinian people, it’s also against the people who see value in the lives of the Palestinians.

Can you tell me about your plans for the future?

Of course, I’m writing more and more poetry. I have a poetry book that’s forthcoming from Knopf in October this year. It’s called Forest of Noise . I’m writing an essay for The New Yorker about [being] a Palestinian, trying to travel from one country to another, from one state to another. And I think my next project would be a memoir. This is a big project, but I haven’t yet started on it. I can imagine myself writing about so many things.

I have some short stories in the Arabic language, but I don’t think that I’m going to work on this right now. There is no urgency or any necessity, especially during these times. But rather, I think talking and addressing the outside world, especially the English-speaking world. I mean, I talk about the English-speaking world, because the Balfour Declaration , which unjustly promised Palestine to the Jews in 1917, was written in the English language. So, unfortunately, the English language is of course the language of colonialism, and not only for the Palestinian people, but for many, many nations.

It’s interesting to think about using the language of colonization and imperialism in an effort to combat them. It seems like is part of what you’re doing through writing in English is using it as a way to reach the people who are in those seats of colonial power.

Yes, exactly. I hope that my first book and my second book will be read by people who are unfortunately contributing to the misery and the devastation of my country. My message is peace and justice in this poetry. I think that in times of atrocities, the people who should speak to the public, speak on TVs, should be the poets and the artists—not politicians, not political analysts.

At the end of your New Yorker essay, you talked about the concept of raising hope, and likened it to cultivating crops. And I feel like when I read your poetry, I see so much resilience and hope in your work. How do you cultivate hope?

Hope lies in the fact that we are here and there are things around us that wish us to continue growing. When I see the thousands, hundreds of thousands and millions of people taking to the streets and asking, demanding a ceasefire, I can see hope here. Because these younger generations are the generations who hopefully will be leading the world in 10, or 15, or 20 years from now.

These people who are taking to the streets and who [made the] encampments give me hope because they are watching the history in front of them. They’re not reading about the past. No, they are watching the present. So, I see hope in that generation. And I see hope in the fact that Palestinians love life. I can tell about my father who planted some plants in our bombed garden, and he’s eating some eggplant, some pepper, some cabbage. I mean, we are planting this hope next to the rubble of our bombed house. [The Palestinians] continue to plant. And this is what hope is to me. They continue to plant their hope next to a bombed building. Here lies hope for me.

Mosab Abu Toha recommends:

A song by Marcel Khalifa called “My Mother,” words of Mahmoud Darwish’s poem.

Drink black tea with dried sage leaves. You will love it.

Read Out of Place by Edward Said.

Visit the children of Gaza when the genocide is over.

Eat a lot of strawberries if they were planted in Gaza. My friend Refaat Al-Areer would recommend this highly.

poet, writer, librarian

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TWRT 350 Principles of User Centered Design (5) SSc Explores the philosophy and process for developing solutions to design problems, including technical systems such as software applications and communication projects such as websites. Develops skills to identify and solve design problems through research, testing, and analysis. View course details in MyPlan: TWRT 350

TWRT 353 User Experience Writing (5) Explores the concept of writing as a design practice and process used to solve problems for users through a human-centered design process. Develops skills to research and write for inclusive user experiences, including the ability to understand and address implicit bias through strategic use of tone, voice, and language. Prerequisite: either T CORE 101, TWRT 121, TWRT 211, or TWRT 291. View course details in MyPlan: TWRT 353

TWRT 355 Usability Testing and Research (5) SSc Explores the concept of usability and research methods related to the evaluation of information and communication products as part of the user-centered design process. Develops skills to design and conduct usability studies, analyze results, and make recommendations. Prerequisite: TWRT 291. View course details in MyPlan: TWRT 355

TWRT 360 PLAYWRITING (5) A&H Introduces foundational skills in playwriting and writing for the stage including reading of scripts and analyses of produced plays to develop awareness of the playwright's process and position in theater productions. Employs workshops to provide feedback on drafts as students write and refine scripts. View course details in MyPlan: TWRT 360

TWRT 362 Writing and War (5) A&H/SSc Introduces students to the practice of multi-genre creative writing in the context of war. Emphasizes the writing of witness and explores the cultural impact of violent conflict in poetry and prose. Discusses writing as an act of peace and requires students to develop creative writing techniques in multiple genres. View course details in MyPlan: TWRT 362

TWRT 364 Food Writing for Cultural Exploration (5) A&H, DIV Examines the construction of cultural identity through the craft and structure of writing food-focused narratives. Using Latinx and Ethnic American interdisciplinary texts, students will evaluate the intersectional nature of race/ethnicity, gender, and socioeconomics in food traditions. These texts will be used as models for the creation of original content in poetry and prose. View course details in MyPlan: TWRT 364

TWRT 365 Literary Editing and Publishing (5) A&H Explores practices of literary editing, magazine design, and literary small press publishing. Readings examine history, aesthetics, funding, promotion, layout, and other issues faced by literary journals in print and in emerging online media. Student assignments reflect practices of literary editors. Credit/no-credit only. View course details in MyPlan: TWRT 365

TWRT 372 Writing Eco-Poetry (5) A&H Introduces the practice of poetry writing within the context of nature and eco-writing. Develops skills to read, analyze, and respond to seminal works of nature poems, eco-poems, and critical essays from Romanticism to contemporary poetry, then create, workshop, and revise original nature and eco-poems. View course details in MyPlan: TWRT 372

TWRT 382 WRITING POPULAR FICTION (5) A&H Teaches students to write popular fiction. Explores questions of narrative, characterization, action, form, formula, and code in popular genres. Uses primary and secondary texts to study mystery, romance, spy thriller, western, horror, and science fiction. Emphasizes peer review, revision, assessment, and reflection as methods of producing excellent written work. View course details in MyPlan: TWRT 382

TWRT 384 WRITING HISTORICAL FICTION (5) A&H Builds upon foundations skills in fiction writing and introduces elements essential to writing historical fiction, including research. Includes readings from creative and historical texts and employs workshops to provide feedback on drafts as students write and revise their own short stories. Prerequisite: either TWRT 200, TWRT 280, TWRT 380, or TWRT 382. View course details in MyPlan: TWRT 384

TWRT 388 Writing for Social Change (5) A&H Examines the rhetorical force of various forms of communication within specific social, political, and cultural contexts. Building on research and writing completed in other courses, students compose a project demonstrating their learning and which is intended for public audiences. View course details in MyPlan: TWRT 388

TWRT 389 Nature Writing (5) A&H Introduces students to the skills of creative non-fiction writing within the context of nature and environmental writing. Students read, analyze, and respond to seminal works of nature essays and environmental essays, as well as eco-critical writing, then create, workshop, and revise their own original nature and environmental essays. View course details in MyPlan: TWRT 389

TWRT 391 Advanced Technical Communication (5) A&H Explores Technical Communication concepts and skills to inform the creation of information across a variety of genres. Focuses on researching, creating, and delivering information through written and oral communication forms used in professional and technical settings. Prerequisite: TWRT 291 View course details in MyPlan: TWRT 391

TWRT 420 Rhetoric and the City: Composing Urban Landscapes (5) SSc Examines cites through an interdisciplinary lens, as texts that can be read, revised, and re-written as/through symbolic action. After reading and discussing critical theory about space and place, students conduct place-based research in preparation to compose critical essays, narratives, and visuals depicting specific experiences related to the city. Prerequisite: either T CORE 101, TWRT 112, TWRT 121, TWRT 211, ENGL 131, or ENGL 141; recommended: TWRT 320, TWRT 330, TWRT 340, or TWRT 388. Offered: Sp. View course details in MyPlan: TWRT 420

TWRT 440 Cross-Cultural Communication Design (5) SSc Examines issues that affect communication from global and local perspectives including the role culture and technology play in human interactions. Discusses the research and practices that writers and designers need to consider when internationalizing and localizing information products. Explores techniques and skills to develop effective communication products. View course details in MyPlan: TWRT 440

TWRT 450 Principles of Accessible Design (5) SSc Explores accessibility barriers, standards, and guidelines for designing products and processes such as self-service kiosks and websites. Develops skills to solve accessibility problems through video ethnographies of barriers, apply automated and adaptive technology tools for testing and analyze data for devising solutions. Prerequisite: either TWRT 291, TWRT 350, TWRT 355, TWRT 440, TCOM 320, or TCOM 420. View course details in MyPlan: TWRT 450

TWRT 464 Teaching Writing (5) A&H Studies theories and practices of writing education and the history and challenges of writing assessment. Explores learning communities. Emphasizes pedagogical questions of social class, ethnicity, multilingualism, gender, sexual orientation, disability, and nationality. Prerequisite: minimum grade of 2.0 in either TWRT 211 or TWRT 272. View course details in MyPlan: TWRT 464

TWRT 470 Advanced Poetry Writing (5, max. 10) A&H Builds upon foundational skills in writing both traditional and contemporary poetry. Includes reading of models and writers' workshops to provide feedback on drafts. Students develop a portfolio of polished writing by the end of the course. Prerequisite: minimum grade of 2.0 in either TWRT 270 or TWRT 372. View course details in MyPlan: TWRT 470

TWRT 480 Advanced Fiction Writing (5, max. 10) A&H Builds upon foundational skills in fiction writing such as dialog, narration, theme, language, and character. Includes reading of models and writers' workshops to provide feedback on drafts. Students develop a portfolio of polished writing by the end of the course. Prerequisite: minimum grade of 2.0 in either TWRT 280, TWRT 380, TWRT 382, or TWRT 384. View course details in MyPlan: TWRT 480

TWRT 487 Advanced Creative Nonfiction (5, max. 10) A&H Builds on beginning creative nonfiction skills in several genres: personal or lyric essay, literary journalism, the nonfiction "short", or prose poetry. Includes reading of models and writers' workshops to provide feedback on drafts. Students develop a portfolio of polished writing by the end of the course. Prerequisite: TWRT 287 or TWRT 389. View course details in MyPlan: TWRT 487

TWRT 492 Special Topics in Rhetoric and Composition (5, max. 10) SSc Introduces students to current and emergent conversations in the fields of/at the intersection of rhetoric, composition, literacy studies, and technical communication. The content of specific sections to be determined by individual faculty in Writing Studies in reflection of their research and scholarly interests. Sections may also reflect new directions in research methods and pedagogical approaches. Prerequisite: either T CORE 101, TWRT 112, TWRT 121, TWRT 211, ENGL 131, or ENGL 141. ; recommended: TWRT 320, TWRT 330, TWRT 340, or TWRT 388. Offered: Sp. View course details in MyPlan: TWRT 492

TWRT 499 Advanced Topics in Creative Writing (1-5, max. 15) A&H Builds on beginning creative writing skills. Includes reading of models and writers' workshops to provide feedback on drafts. Students work on developing a portfolio of published writing. Prerequisite: either TWRT 270, TWRT 280, or TWRT 287. View course details in MyPlan: TWRT 499