Ughhh this was by far my worst short story. So bad that I haven’t opened it since and don’t plan to either! We had read American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis, and Haunted: a novel of stories by Chuck Palahniuk. The theme was horror but our brief was to write with an unreliable narrator as Bret Easton Ellis did with American Psycho. FYI I do not recommend Haunted to anyone who considers themselves ‘easily disturbed’. It’s intrusive-thoughts central up in there.
Our unreliable narrator pieces were discussed during week twelve, the last class of the module. My piece was called Parasitic Pain and was overly complicated, bouncing around characters and time way too much. Such a shame it was our last written piece of the term and I didn’t ‘go out’ on a high but I learnt a valued lesson – don’t try to be too clever and don’t fuss over the particulars too much. It’s called fiction for a reason!
The books for that week were Labyrinths by Jorge Luis Borges, and Catch-22 by Joseph Heller. I started Catch-22 but didn’t get very far at all. I must have been too busy making a mess of my short story!
That’s the end of my Elements of Fiction journey, thank you for keeping up with me! You can read a summary of the module and what I learnt in this blog post from December 2016. Where does the time go??
Rachel xx
