To be honest although I’ve had two months to get on with my dissertation I must somewhat unhappily admit that I haven’t done nearly as much work on it as I wanted to. Life got in the way. Between starting a job, both me and my partner falling badly ill, the other module assignment etc… I have found it difficult to make the time for my dissertation. That is about to change. Tonight I have signed myself up for April’s camp Nano and set the word count to 10,000. Not a particularly difficult goal but I wanted to get at least a first draft of the Dissertation sorted. The first draft will invariably undergo a lot of changes, probably a disheartening number of changes, this is a good thing. To improve these changes must be made but before that I must do the leg work and write a draft, butcher and re-arrange into something okay, and rinse repeat.
So what is my Dissertation project. The plan is to take modern day political events and place them in a High Fantasy setting. The story will focus on Two characters, Fjolin and Kite. Fjolin being the Dwarven Garrison commander and Kite a human rebel resisting the laws/regulations the Dwarves are placing on her fellow refugees. These two perspectives will be the lens I will explore the events similar to Grenfell Tower, School shootings, genocide, terror attacks etc…
So that’s the plan, probably not very well explained but there you go.
What I have done on the project so far is picked some events for the centre piece of the novel and done some plotting. I have brief overview of where the story is going, what my characters will do. I have also made some decisions about what I want my characters to be like and constructed my world to a certain extent.
So my plan of action is as follows:
- To continue my reading and research, exploring the events I am using as allegory in my novel, looking at interviews, news reports etc.
- To continue my research into multi-perspective texts, looking at how authors developed two characters in tandem.
- Write a first draft that I can then learn from, workshop this piece with my writing group at some point etc.
So that’s the plan, I’ll post further updates later including snippets of world building and draft work.
Thanks for reading.
Hugh
Hugh Mccormick 