WRITING IN A NEW GENRE

I’m currently on this great module at university called Author Study and – as you may well have guessed from the name – it’s about the study of authors. In our seminars we’ve focused particularly on John Cheever and Emily Dickinson, and have been tasked with creating a piece of prose or poetry somewhere between 2,000-3,000 words in length, focusing not only on the themes that have arisen from those authors but also from our personal feelings on writing.

My original intention for this module was to rewrite and submit a piece I wrote while working over the summer. The short story was called 'Legacy' (viewable here) and was a completely out-there science fiction piece. But I loved the structure and had created my first official untrustworthy narrator, so I wanted to salvage it in whatever way possible.

Thankfully, I had a Eureka! moment.

Throughout my life I’ve been captivated by fiction and films that manage to fit a lifetime into a piece. I’ve always wanted to create my own, so I figured; why not? Ones that instantly sprung to mind were The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and The Notebook (both of which are both prose and film). So instantly, I knew there was a connection: they were both – with the exception of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s original short – love stories.

And I haven’t written a conventional love story before.

And this was and still is a problem.

The genesis of this piece was that it was to be a tragedy. Now, if anything, it’s growing into some twisted combination of literature in the vein of film masterpieces, Once and Blue Valentine.

Either way my upcoming piece is about a young man walking a young woman to a party on the other side of town. And through the seemingly average escalation of events, that symbolically represent aspects of their future relationship, the two begin to lament their future together and irrevocably change the lives of each other.

Fingers crossed I remember to post it to Wattpad once its done!