I’m back!

I haven’t had chance to blog for some time – apologies for my absence. My Uni assignments had to come first and there were plenty of them! I had the opportunity to write in a number of styles and am happy with the results (although anxiously anticipating feedback from my lecturers). I handed in four creative pieces. The first was for a module called Author Study where we had to write something inspired by American author John Cheever or the poet Emily Dickinson. Cheever was known as being quintessentially American so I created a British piece called ‘You Belong to Me’ about a housewife which is set during the great smog of 1952.  

The second assignment was for Textual Intervention where I had to write a story inspired by an existing fairy tale. I chose Beauty and the Beast and considered how Beauty would feel if when the Beast turned into the Prince he turned out to be more beautiful than her. The story is set as Beauty prepares for her Royal Wedding and details her desperately trying to lose weight and overdoing plastic surgery. 

The third assignment was a script written for television. It is about brothers who were separated at birth and reunite to avenge the death of their mother, this emerged from group work. 

Finally, for Creative Voice (a module used to inspire us creatively), I wrote a series of short stories known as flash fiction due to the tiny word count. With these, you take a germ of an idea and then expand it to create a self contained short story, often with a message. This is a style of writing I am particularly interested in and I’m planning to write my final year project in this format. It is said that Ernest Hemingway kicked off this type writing with – ‘For Sale:  Baby shoes, never worn.’