14th October, 2024
My goals for the future haven’t always been crystal clear. It’s been more like, foggy but with a very bright red blinking light at the end. I’ve always known that I wanted to write for a living, but I’ve never really had a specific area I wanted to work in or a career path to follow. Luckily for me, careers in content creation and journalism rarely follow a straight a-to-z path these days. As a result, I’ve found myself exploring multiple mediums of content creation and styles of writing. One style that I’ve begrudgingly neglected to invest in, however, is writing fiction.
Of course, I’ve dabbled in creative writing, as one does in their 13 years of schooling. I remember writing about fairies and unicorns at eight years old and being praised for my ‘big imagination’. Unfortunately, by the time I reached the last section of my HSC English exams, I found my mind almost void of the imagination it takes to write fiction, and I’ve resented creative writing since.
However, I’m older and wiser now. I’m not nearly as crippled by my perfectionism now as I was at 17. So, I’ve decided to revisit creative writing regardless of our feud. I believe that challenging myself through creative writing this semester will be an excellent opportunity to self-reflect, give life to my imagination, and have a bit of fun trying something new. I’ll be writing a series of short stories, aiming to speculate on possible, probable and preferable futures for myself. I will focus on writing each story with a different time period in mind – that is, what I imagine my life to be like in 5, 15, and 50 years.
I will take inspiration from the lecture materials and visions of the future we are observing in class, as well as outside research, my personal life/perspectives, and my own favourite dystopian literature. Through this, I’ll be able to develop practical skills in writing creatively, which will ultimately add to and improve any form of writing I do. I will also have to think critically about the current state of the world, the past circumstances which led us here, and what the world is likely to be like in the coming stages of my life. After all, “history cannot be imagined without a concept of the past having a future”. In an interesting way, this will be a practice in goal-setting for me, and it will bring me further down the path of my career trajectory in more ways than one.
That’s enough blabber to introduce you to the idea. Now, on the more practical side, I’ve prepared this week-by-week chart of how I plan to carry out my content creation and feedback process. Check out my pitch video below, and let me know what you think! I’m extremely new to writing fiction so any advice or ideas are more than welcome!!