WEEK 1 | Creative Writing
Our task was to create dark story that would make readers feel strong emotions. We were given titles from which I decided to first explore “A Strange Day in July”. It looked interesting to work with for beginning since word “strange” can allude to terrifying action.
I made spider gram to explore the title and write story based on it.
My First Story that I came up with:
A Strange Day in July.
It was a very windy, but warm day, 14 of July. On this day my favourite musical program is on. Slowly getting out of bed I studently heard loud knocks on the door.
– Yes, yes, I am coming.
My door opened to meet intruder when felt that someone grabbed my hoodie and pulled forward. He pushed me into my room, I almost fell on the floor, while he started speaking with his hoarse and trembling voice, pointing at me with knife.
– I am going to kill myself right now!
– What?
10 minutes after, the sounds of phone beeps were heard.
– It is emergency, how can I help you?
– I would like to call police, but not for me.
Despite the interesting premise and overall comedic and satiric plot, overall there was too much of action. It couldn’t be made into shorter story, as well as a beginning of the long one. It just felt stuffed and too rushing, which became the biggest problem of all. I made decision to not continue to work with this idea and came up with new one. For exploration the next title was chosen: “The Beginning of the End”.
I created spider gram that led me to the idea of basing plot around mental, psychiatric clinic, since it associated with horror. To make scene descriptive, as if viewer was the one being in the position of the main character, I drew storyboards that helped me to understand the action, surrounding, that I want to show readers through the text.
These are photos I used as reference, to try to imagine place that characters are in:
At the end story is told from perspective of mental clinic patient that meets his new neighbor that turns out to be accidentally hospitalized. I wanted narrative to be relaxed but disturbing, leading readers towards frightening, sharp ending., which will represent the title “The Beginning of the End”.
Moreover, I drew character designs that appear in the story, mainly for storyboards to look appropriate, not some unknown people with no defined features talk to each other.
Furthermore, I created draft that was shown to the teacher. It was suggested to make a break between showing moments, when doctor talks about sedative and new patient revealing the cliffhanger.
Final PDF: