Commentary for a Piece of Original Writing Essay

For my first piece of original writing I intend to create a piece primarily written for entertainment however, I also want to portray an interest into historical and political persuasions. I aim to write this piece for an audience of teenagers to young adult who are aged from around fifteen to twenty-five and are male, I also wish to identify with those interested in political thrillers within this age range. The genre of which shall be a short fiction story consisting chiefly of narrative and written in the third person. I picture this piece as being one of a collection of short stories concerned with the political-thriller fiction sub-genre. Despite being a fiction text I aim to tie in real world non-fiction. I was inspired to write a story of this nature after watching Luc Besson’s ‘The Professional’, alongside reading material from Robert Harris, such as ‘Archangel’, ‘Fatherland’ and ‘Enigma’. I had previous experience reading this genre and being a big fan of Robert Ludlum I wanted to emulate the thrill I experienced from his work, in my own. To gain a firmer understanding of the style I would be pursuing I began to view examples of historical references from encyclopedias and journals and I also read books of historical sub-genre. This is my final draft of this piece and I have made various alterations from the previous drafts to enhance it. In general the changes were simple things such as correcting spelling and punctuation, slightly more significant was the rewording of concluding paragraphs to make it tidier and read or flow better. The most salient modification was trimming the use of figurative language; its use brings visual framework to the piece however overdoing it resulted in an awkward read. The changes I have made were a result of feedback I had attained from my friends, family and potential audiences who read my first drafts and gave me their honest opinions regarding it. I consider the changes I have made prior to completion have certainly improved the final draft of this piece; however, if I were to revise it once again I could continue to make improvements. This piece has been constructed to exploit the expectations of the reader by diverging from the conventions of traditional story telling; beginning, middle and end, respectively. By challenging this system I hope I have created an original piece that intrigues the reader. throughout the piece I have tried to maintain an atmosphere of consternation and to do so I have used many different grammatical and lexical techniques, for instance the use of certain semantic fields that are common with post cold war Russia such as ‘KGB’, ‘Prospekts’ and ‘Klashnikov AK-47’. I have also written using the semantic field of dirt and creating a feeling for the attitudes of the time. Again it can be shown here by ‘smog’, ‘sodden’ and ‘orifice’. Together these images conjure up the feeling of treacherousness and uneasiness. These words also relate to the sociolect of my political thriller enthusiasts that would have come across such words in the past. This gives them a sense of appreciation and common territory. I have chosen certain words to optimize the effect of connotation, exempli gratia I use the word ‘smog’ in place of fog or haze this is because smog has a polluted feeling, again reiterating the industrial power of Russia and the unwelcome feeling of wartime. This is complemented with the word ‘lingered’ – as opposed to ‘stayed’ – as an adverb to describe the smog. Not only have I used the emotive effects of connotation but combined with the use of figurative ornaments such as metaphors and similes; e.g. â€Å"like a sodden quilt†, and alliteration; e.g. â€Å"bald bloated body†, I have drawn a picture of â€Å"waking Moscow† through the lexis. To add some humour and variety into the piece I have played around with the pragmatics of certain situations, one of which is when Vladimir and Nikolai are talking, â€Å"he and I went back as far as Cuba and we had no secrets.† what I have tried to imply is the possibility of Vladimir being homosexual, which Nikolai picks up on and questions in the conversation. At the end of the piece I switch writing from third person into first person; â€Å"I can hear,† and â€Å"their souls†, this is so I can comment objectively on the events that had revealed themselves and stimulate the reader to resolve the story according to their own reading of it. The story is presented through narrative prose, using paragraphs to separate the text into more meaningful and accessible sections. Adjacency pairs determine the order of dialogue to replicate that of spoken text. Upon commencing this piece of writing it was my ambition to amuse and beguile an audience of comparable cultural elation to myself. The desire to write such a piece fired me with zeal and left my feeling rather ebullient. I feel I have successfully completed what I set out to do and by recording the response of my target audience to my final piece the consensus was that this was true.