I am inspired this week by the idea of texts reflecting on each other. I came across some writing I completed for an MA in Creative Writing at UNSW a few years back. The activity was to create a text where the main character reflected on the genre they belong to.
Exercise
Take a generic form – fantasy, detective,
romance, etc. – and try to write a piece which inverts, parodies or plays upon
the recognisable conventions of the genre. Try using a narrator or protagonist
who is themselves aware of the generic expectations, ie. a self-reflexive
narrator or a self-conscious character who wants to enact his or her life
according to some filmic of fictive template.
In the modelled response below I chose a Pinocchio type character and combined fantasy with reflection. I use third person narration and interject with first person to show the character's ability to reflect on the conventions of the fantasy genre he belongs to.
Try it, it's a bit of fun. You can do anything with this.
Modelled
response
Harry pushed himself up off the ground and
brushed the gravel from his pants. All the way down the tunnel he felt his
head bounce like a ping pong ball from one side of the wall to the other. He felt a pang on his forehead and rubbed the
lump, which had slowly appeared. Harry squinted his eyes and clenched his teeth
like a Cheshire cat. Grin and bear it thought Harry. He knew that by the end of
this sentence the pain would gone and sure enough it had.
Harry looked around him. Where was he now? So
far today, he’d tackled a dragon, chopped off its tale and ate it for breakfast,
and outsmarted a talking eagle with a clipped wing. Not that it was that hard
for him. He did have an extra long nose, which doubled up as a sword when the
need arose and as you can imagine in a fantasy story, that was quite often. His
breath was a deadly vapor which could send even the liveliest of beings into a
deep sleep. They were handy, thought Harry, these special gifts that is, for he
really wasn’t that brave after all. Nine times out of ten, Harry got out of
trouble through pure accident. He would turn around at the right moment and casually
knock out his enemy with his nose. Heaven forbid he actually had to be brave
and fight for real.
By the end of his very adventurous days, Harry’s
nose would get a little bit sore. One day while he was walking back to his
village, he rubbed his nose soothingly and wondered why it had grown so big. It
wasn’t always this way. A friendly man with a grey moustache running down his chin
stopped him and said that his nose was so long because he told lies. Lies,
thought Harry. Of course I tell lies. I live in a fantasy world. Everything is
a great big lie. I tumble down tunnels, fly on the backs of eagles and body
surf down waterfalls, all before breakfast. I never expected anyone would
believe all that. But they do.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinocchio#mediaviewer/File:Pinocchio.jpg
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