Rotation: Creative Writing
During this rotation, we discussed the core components of narrative and conducted a number of creative writing exercises to put what we learned into practice. This was by far one of my favourite rotations, and that left me with a sense of confidence in my work, something I don’t often allow myself.
One of the tasks which stood out to me the most was the character creation task. We were first prompted to create a character using the prompt “I remember”. I was drawn to the idea of Catgut, the traditional material used for violin strings. I wrote my initial character prompts based on the assumption that this was literally cat guts. when I later learned that this was an abbreviation for “cattle gut”, I decided to include this in my writing.
Character Prompt: “I remember…”
150 word Short Story
I decided to use a photo as my short story prompt. I trawled through Pinterest and narrowed my selection down until I settled on this picture. I was inspired to write the story of the figure in this photo, whilst keeping the winter atmosphere and coffin of the other two photos I considered. I decided to centre a non-binary character in this story, as I am myself, and also because I was captured by the gender ambiguity of the silhouette.
My final story marries the motifs and atmosphere of my three key images, while focusing on character. I was chiefly concerned with word economy. Initially, I found it difficult to strictly adhere to the word count. However, after several revisions and cuts I felt that I was able to tell a convincing dark short story. I tried to humanise the coffin with phrases such as: groaning timbers and “fingerlike splinters”, to weave the plot twist at the end into the narrative without spelling it out in overt speech. This left me room to play with the two characters; Pallor and Hal. In order to save words, I decided to only describe them in contrast to one another. In doing so, a statement about the one would end up describing both characters. “He cut an enviable figure…” here enviable was chosen to not only describe Hal, but to betray the physical characteristics Pallor is lacking in. I reinforced this with “a wilted shoot”, which also serves a double purpose to call back to the forest setting.
Overall I am pleased with how my work turned out. I ended up continuing this story, adding characters and lore to flesh out the narrative, and submitting it to a writing competition. while I am sure the narrative is not quite at that level, I was happy that I had even the confidence to enter. Something I don’t often have.
An extended version of my final story is linked here.