Project Descriiption: This assignment has two components.
In the last month, we’
Project Descriiption: This assignment has two components.
In the last month, we’ve read excerpts from various epistolary novels. You’ve seen how different authors imagine characters and relationships and render them vivid, emotionally complex, and historically nuanced through word choice, tone, voice, detail, and narrative design. Now, try to do the same. Write a fictional letter of your own design (roughly 750-1000 words) from an imagined protagonist to an imagined recipient. Imagine this as a chapter in a larger novel. Keep in mind the questions of tone, audience, voice, and privacy that we’ve been asking throughout this unit as you develop your text. You can write a single letter or multiple letters back and forth between recipients; just shoot for 1000 words total, regardless of how you break that down.
Then, write a 500-word reflection analyzing the decisions you made as an author of your epistolary text. Help us understand the stylistic choices you made, and the ways you manipulated voice, tone, detail, and style to develop your characters. Your reflection must reference at least two of the assigned texts we read this semester, choosing specific examples from those texts that you tried to emulate in your own writing.
Purpose: By applying the theories and concepts we’ve explored in this unit to your own creative work, you will actualize the learning you’ve done on questions of audience, tone, voice, narrative design, and character development. By engaging creatively with epistolary forms, you will show your mastery of that form. Your reflection work will help you to tie your creative responses to the more academic, theoretical work we’ve done throughout this unit.
-We have read opening chapters of Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous and Alice Walker’s The Color Purple for the references to the two texts.