I’m going to write a short story based on the concepts of love lost in Wuthering Heights and The Monk. I picked these two novels because at least one of their central themes was love and or lust. Lust being more from The Monk and love being from Wuthering Heights. Because love is more of the idea I want to go with I will use this quote from Wuthering Heights as my inspiration, “I am Heathcliff and he is me” . It embodies what I want my story to be about. That hopelessly in love feeling that overwhelms the character almost to the point of a frenzy. Love is such a powerful emotion and that it walks a fine line between insanity and true happiness.
My story will be about the ideas that are driving forces behind The Monk and Wuthtering Heights. It’s will be about unrequited love, but with a gothic twist of course. Love can be such a cruel element that can conflict and torment characters. It can drive them to madness or harm the ones they are in love with. I chose to write a short story, because writing is an interest of mine, and I would like to challenge myself to write a piece of gothic literature. I chose love as a central theme, because it, love, can be a very complicated and it can give life to a story. To keep this story more relevant to my life I will draw from personal experience. That will keep the piece more relatable and familiar to the readers. I think it’s best to try to incorporate some part of yourself in a story that way you have a central point to come back to if you lose focus.
To begin my story I will be drawing from a short short I started in a creative writing class. This short short will help me create a more elaborate story . I want to be able to write a convincing gothic story that is surprising and interesting. I also want to make sure that my inspirations, Wuthering Heights and The Monk, do not become my story. Meaning I do not want to copy their plots, obviously. That would have to be the one red flag I have with writing my own story. I want to use the novels as support, but I do not want similarities that are so obvious it just looks like I ripped off the other two novels.
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I think it really is an interesting concept to compare the love in Wuthering Heights to the lust in the Monk. Especially when comparing these two different plots to what is gothic. I think it would be interesting to compare and contrast these different approaches to relationships in a short story. I could almost see it reading as a comical/dramatic soap opera.
ReplyDeleteI am wondering how the story line would be. I am assuming it would be new character names, but that there would be the essence of love and lust occurring.
It might be tricky to tease out both gothic natures that exist between these two novels. Wuthering Heights is more of soft haunting, whereas the Monk has some brutal torturing. How do you plan to intertwine these?
You said you would be using your own personal experiences, would this be sort of a journal or biographical piece? Fictional? non-fictional? How would the story be told? First person? Third person?
I could also see this being written as more of a screenplay. I think the dialogue could help easily bring in both aspects of the novels. In Wuthering Heights there is a lot of dialogue, and explaining of thoughts and emotions out loud (He is me, I am him). In The Monk, he expresses a lot of his thoughts and emotions to himself. You read what is occurring in his mind, but there are never spoken out loud. I think using these two different styles in your project/story could help to get incorporate the flavor of both pieces of literature.
Nicole, I wish you had elaborated more on the characters/plot-line. I agree that it sounds like a worthwhile project, but I would have liked more details.
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