The writing element will usually be short and most simply transcribed as a character string; the content model also allows a sequence of paragraphs and paragraph-level elements, in case the writing has enough internal structure to warrant such markup. In either case the usual phrase-level tags for written text are available.
Example
<!-- ... --><l>man in a coonskin cap</l> <writing>coonskin</writing> <l>in a pig pen</l> <writing>pig pen</writing> <l>wants eleven dollar bills</l> <writing>20 dollar bills</writing> <l>you only got ten</l> <writing>10</writing> <!-- ... -->