Advertisement

My piece is an advertisement in the advertising genre. I was inspired by travel brochures. I also wanted a way to show how weird and unique and quirky the town is, but I couldn’t capture the full charm in the short story. I felt as if I would take away from the pithy-ness of the short story if I went into long expositional paragraphs describing the setting, as the setting does not have much importance to the story. This piece of creative writing does not have a theme other than simply selling the town. I just wanted to showcase the weird. This piece is mainly for worldbuilding. I used authorial intrusion to address the audience as if this were read aloud to the audience and to specifically target one person.

 

Letters

I wrote letters to a friend. My inspiration was that the main character’s link to the world is through their friend, but since they lost that connection, they were stuck in wherever they are. However, the main character is still desperate to have a link to their anchor, so they continue to write. My theme is panic for these letters, as the main character slowly becomes more and more overtaken with fear and paranoia as they write their friend. I wrote as if I was talking to my friends; I rambled. I tied this to my main theme based on the short story, which is death. I wanted my character to be aware that something is wrong and scared. I used a stream of consciousness to convey my character’s thoughts. I believe that stream of consciousness was best for these letters because I wanted to focus on growing paranoia and this writing technique allows for rambling and rushed thoughts.

 

Small Town in the Mountain

My piece is a short story in the horror genre. I was inspired by the Welcome to Night Vale Podcast and wanted to write something either in that universe or something similar to it. The villain inspired by Venom (the movie). My theme is inevitable death and damnation. The fog in my story symbolizes confusion, but also acceptance, as fog can cloud vision, but one cannot really do anything about fog. The lotus is a symbol of death in Asia and is mentioned in multiple instances. The color yellow, which I used to describe the buildings, is a color of death as well. I used the color yellow in the story as a path that the main character followed to find their hotel to show that they were following the path to death. The stars symbolize creation, which I interpreted as re-creation, as the main character is reborn or recreated again after dying. The circles that are on the background of the main character’s phone is a symbol of eternity, suggesting that the main character is trapped in this eternal cycle of death. I also used authorial intrusion by writing in second person and suspense to sound more ominous and to insert the reader into the story.

 

Poem

I wrote an epitaph, which is the little inscription that goes on tombstones. My inspiration was death. I was continuing with this theme of this dark, gloomy town, which symbolizes death. I took the Biblical allusion of conquering death, as Jesus had conquered death and risen from the grave. However, I turned the phrase around, saying that you, the reader, conquered life, meaning that you had died. I said “You lie here/Perhaps not now, but soon,” to point out that the town has a strange place in space-time and that everyone dies eventually. Personally, I like the concept of time being warped in this location, and I was influenced by the Welcome to Nightvale podcast, which has an emphasis on how time flows differently in Nightvale. I also included a video of an infinitely looping record player to suggest that there is a cycle of death and life.

 

Interview

I wrote an interview with a random resident of the town. I wanted to showcase how the strangeness of the town spreads to its people.

I was inspired by a project in history, where we have to interview someone close to us about a historical event. I used personification by describing the moon as some sort of goddess that rules the town and can communicate with the residents. I also used downplaying when describing the fog. Usually, if one were completely enveloped by an incredibly thick and deafening fog, they would be terrified. However, in this town, they treat the fog as a getaway, a distancing from reality. The fog also suggests that the small town is distanced from reality in a physical sense. My theme is isolation; the town is isolated from the rest of the world, and sometimes, its citizens can isolate themselves in the fog.