In this first project, you will tell a story through a series of email messages.
The messages should look and sound (deceptively) like real emails, composed in the first-person voices and styles of two or more different characters.
Like email, readers will receive these "overheard" emails in real time--similar to an episode of the television show 24. For example, if the events described in the narrative take place over two weeks, readers will receive the emails over the period of two weeks, perhaps one a day or according to a schedule appropriate to the fictional events. Or if the events take place during, let's say, the twelve days before Christmas, your readers might receive the emails daily starting on December 13.
The following are the primary goals and criteria of the assignment:
Narrative Tension and Framing
Narratives create tension and then resolve that tension over a limited period of time. Try to frame your narrative with a natural set of events: a journey, a semester, a visit, the investigation of a mystery, the lead-up to an occasion or holiday, the aftermath of some traumatic or consequential event leading to a new equalibrium.
But the frame is not necessarily the source of the tension. Cara might be on spring break, but the tension might come from her deciding she needs to change her major (against the wishes of her fiance back home). Spring break becomes a frame for a very different kind of break.
Action in Writing
Avoid the "I went back to the haunted house again last night" kind of story, where all the action happens off-stage and is reported after the fact. Instead, make the relationship of the emails' senders/recipients the center of the action: their efforts to convince, seduce, deflect, reinterpret, justify, shade, compete, conceal, soften, hint, avoid, imply, etc.
The Iceberg Effect (Suggestion)
The emails should suggest more than they say. Often, characters' real feelings are not fully expressed. Perhaps they don't know their own minds as they're writing. The truth of relationships is revealed in small gestures and words, rather than explicitly in self-analysis or open arguments. As the writer, say more between the lines than in them.
Voice
Though the emails that compose this narrative are your literary effort, you should attempt to write them in the "heard" voice of each character. This means that you will attempt to use some of the literary effects we talk about in class, but disguise them in the brief, informal idiom of email. If you write emails from more than one character, the verbal and visual style of each should be consistently distinct from one another, and become recognizable during the course of the projects.
Mechanics
The individual e-mails should look and sound like e-mails, complete with heading information, signature lines (if appropriate), emoticons (or not--again if appropriate). There should be a sufficient number of emails to represent a sustained effort (at least twelve) though what is sufficient depends on the length and, more importantly, the suggestive density of the writing itself.
The emails may contain links to other sites on the Web as well as attached pictures and other documents.
You will turn in the project in print, but keep a digital version, of course, so you can cut and paste the content into actual emails.
The project should also include a one-page prospectus (plan), which explains how and when readers would receive these emails, as well as an explanation of how readers might learn about and sign up for the performance.
Resouces
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