The process of writing my short story this week involved taking on both the readings and activities performed in class and combining them to start to formulate my story and being creating and choosing my genre, characters, plot etc. My short story titled ” The Bribe of a Monarch” began to really form itself and take a true structure after this weeks card game activity.
The story we created from the cards really jumped my creative streak and I took elements of characters, place and action drawn and then took real word elements I myself was already familiar with and created a fictional telling of the campaign and failure to separate the countries of England and Scotland from recent years. I applied these elements due to the first weeks class reading from Brander Matthews and his discussion of telling a story with an element of fantasy ” My take on his word fantasy meaning; mystery, intrigue and a hook for the audience. I drew the “fantasy” and point of intrigue by posing a question to my audience through my short story..
” What if the failure of Scotland trying to separate from England wasn’t just due to a lack of supporting numbers, but due to higher up influence”??
All in all I am very happy with how my short story turned out, the process became much easier once I had that source of influence and even after creating the original story with my team, drew on on own inspirations to change the story and create my own for the final product.
“To Bribe an Monarch” was a well-written, succinct, shot story. It clearly displayed ideas presented during the readings over the last few weeks, the protagonists, The Queen and Charles, both “share[d] the same desires” as McKee suggests in “The substance of story” and reflected Brander Mathews thoughts that a short story “shows one action, in one place, on one day” with “…originality, ingenuity, and now and again a touch of fantasy” (“The Philosophy of the short story”). The story was unique in the sense that you didn’t just draw inspiration from an issue currently being discussed, or simply document those current events, but you explored a current issue, with the real people involved but from your point of view and how you imagine the situation may be approached, which made it really interesting. In terms of further developments if could be taken further as a longer story (more that our word limit), it would be really interesting to see where you take the story and the characters and the consequences (if any) of their actions). A strength of this piece was that you used traits known of the characters in real life and played on it, such as The Queens stern, blunt and determined mannerisms and Charles sulking. It was a great short story!