Hey, hemlock!
I'd love to have a read of your story once you've finished it! Even if it's too late to provide you with any feedback, it'd be great to just see what your final piece looks like and how we can build on it leading up to the final exams next year
I'm doing a piece about a young woman named Edith who works as a receptionist for the Company. Her encounter with Marlow who has returned from the Congo plants the seed for her investigation and instigates the beginning of challenging the values that colonial Brussels adheres to and that she works for.
Over the course of the response, she slowly unpacks the exploitation of the company by snooping around its filing room. She discovers the pamphlet written by Kurtz and its scribbled annotations, as well as an unpublished journal entry by Kurtz or maybe a newspaper article which was prevented from being released, detailing his own realisations of colonial imposition that lead him to cry "The horror, the horror! + his description of the grove of death.
I love the revised premise and how you have reimagined the characters! Make sure you still keep a great focus on setting because the module is centralised on literary worlds. Your character interpretations and reinventions are quite compelling and this will be really effective if you balance it well with your descriptions of place!
I need help with form here - should I have segments of the journal littered about the piece that reflect her stages of discovery? Like maybe she doesn't discover them? I'm not sure.
Her perception of Brussels and members of the company begins to change - maybe a parade/rally occurs in Brussels when she's on the street.
Edith gradually self-reflects; will she continue to be a proponent of idealism that the Company and Kurtz champions, when in reality she is aware of the core of darkness that hides behind noble ideas of civilisation + commerce? I want to parallel this idealism that I think Conrad challenges - and let her come to a realisation that the darkness exists in Europe, coated by surface-level idealism. I'm thinking of making her unable to choose what to do; torn between both worlds and it ends ambiguously? I'm not sure, I need help here.
It really shows how much you have considered your ideas and how you wish to represent them! I like the idea of scattering the journal segments throughout your creative writing to keep the reader on their toes. You could look at
a fragmented approach to writing and using hyphens or asterisks to signal where you have shifted from narrating to the journal entries, as shown below. This is an extract from my earliest Ext 1 creative draft (I ended up taking a completely different route and loving that story much more but you can just use it as a structural example) where I used fragmentation to interchange between present and past tense. You could give the reader a break every fragment to absorb your character's self reflection and to let them know that you are shifting to a journal entry or, conversely, going back to the main narrative.
Spoiler
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His hands had that fighting spirit and it was apparent from the way they remained clenched, adjacent one another on the cable. It was beautiful in all its twisting, its twisted coils filling in the creases of his palm like the bodies fixed in the plasters of Pompeii. Some likened the barbed wire below to vines but he saw it as veins; how they were intricate, how they intertwined and flowed together.
Sometimes, they were still but not still enough. Other times, they were still but far too still.
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“Lass’ sic nach Berlin Kommen. Let them come to Berlin.”
Cheers erupt and they invite but the men around me patronizingly clap too, in their own ironic way. They seem to mock the man, speaking on behalf on none when they think with their eyes,
“Nobody wants to be here, not like this.”
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A refrain permeates through his mind;
“You are suppressed, not oppressed.”
Steel was cold but not frightening. He grasped with less force, relaxed his fists and tamed it.
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“Freedom has many difficulties and democracy is not perfect, but we have never had to put up a wall to keep our people in, to prevent them from leaving us.”
Inside kindles a newfound respect. When one recognises flaws in oneself, the flaws of others become equally apparent. The people are listening and so are the authorities surrounding the vicinity.
They hardly do that.
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Patrolling guards were unable to tell the difference between the swaying of the winds and the swaying of an acrobat. There was a distinct rhythm to his act- to, fro and up on the ropes when the arms began to sore. It was far from the unpredictability of the gushes from the East of Berlin, but they failed to notice.
They always had.
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“Freedom is indivisible.”
I watch as a child’s fingers encapsulate around his mother’s.
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He could see the fringes of the West and it was in that moment that the fall had hit him. His body was broken, but he was whole somehow.
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“I take pride in the words "Ich bin ein Berliner".
In those seconds, he was lost in the applause because for that moment, it was if they were for him and every other Berliner who had escaped the other side of the wall,
And who was yet to escape.
The entries will assist in your intense characterisation as well and allow you to offer the feminist lens you have chosen to place on the original text. It also combines this well with post-colonialism and the movement away from portraying characters such as Edith as subalterns or side characters serving only the purpose of forwarding the plot and the lead's agenda. Choosing to reimagine the world of HOD from an unlikely perspective, such as hers, will be a huge advantage if you execute it with conviction and demonstrate the research you have put into it in your writing
All I can suggest now is to start writing
Your ideas are very well-developed and all you need to do now is get them on paper. Once you have done that, you can come back to all of this and evaluate; you can see much clearer what areas you think you did really well and where you might like to revise elements of your story to reflect certain aspects more thoroughly. I hope that helps and do let me know how it goes
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