Creative writing manuscript : the stories we could have told yesterday

Abstract

Fiction is, in its simplest form, the use of imagination to reinvent life and reality, standing by itself side by side with the world around us. Literature is at its core, the use of imagination and words to describe and create narratives and information. The use of imagination has been present since the dawn of man, allowing us to create music and mythologies since our very beginnings. Suffice to say that our imagination has shaped our arts, our history, and the way we interact with one another. This project, entitled The Stories We Could Have Told Yesterday, is an amalgam of literary genres, metaphors, social commentaries, political critiques, and explorations of our deepest feelings left unsaid. In a way, this thesis is, quite obviously, a work of imagination, trying to reconcile fiction, the future, and human nature. The main themes in the stories presented in this thesis are -in no specific order or category- death, war, man’s ability to cause the greatest pain, the proliferation and perils of technology, the effects of magic, and the philosophical pondering of the human experience. Each story of this collection closely follows the course of mankind’s errors, especially the consequences and impacts they may have on the characters’ personal lives. While most of these stories work as meditations upon death, they are also reflections on how life is both an enemy and an environment that must be conquered. Given that most protagonists die in these stories, I decided to kill the same quantity of men as I did women. The reason for this is because usually, especially in Sci-fi, women are killed in tragic ways while men die in heroic fashions. For that reason, I tried to kill an equal number of both. Most of the stories include elements of fantasy, comedy, the absurd and experimental narratological structures, sometimes combining different mediums like short story and screenplay. Adventures of the Fourth Wall is a mind-bending story breaking the fourth wall, where me as an author interact with the protagonist and a talking cat in a stream of conscience exercise. Robot Intervention is a short skit that deals with a protagonist being ratted out to the police by his robot companion and is about to be sent to a Christian rehabilitation program. The Tale of the Spirit Outside is a three-part story where a disembodied being sees across time humanity’s ability to cause pain while they meet and observe characters and their intentions while they interact and survive against the complicated, violent circumstances around them. Doudna and the Astral Hearings works as historical, biographical drama inspired by the life of Nobel prize winner Jennifer Doudna and is both an analysis and cautionary tale of biomedical and technological advances, with the female protagonist dealing with surreal, disembodied spirits that warn her about the perils of her medical discovery. The Zombie Monks are Coming to Save Us is a horror, fantasy story about a middle-aged man surviving in a zombie-infested city before being saved by individuals from another world. We’re All Cockroaches is a play that serves as an allegory/parody of Plato’s dialogues where two cockroaches decide to travel to Russia in order to dissuade Putin to stop the war on Ukraine. Uberta the Solemn is a complicated, magical biography of a witch who is about to be murdered by a demon sent to kill her; she retells and reflects upon her upbringing, her family, her role as a revolutionist, and the meaninglessness of it all. The sum of these works are, in short, an exploration of tragedy and challenges across different scenarios, whether actual or speculative, where reality is slowly fragmented by the mentalities of each protagonist. Each story, and subsequently each character, is a mirage of connections and different points of view, trying to convey as much as possible the struggles of surviving in a harsh world devoid of mercy and purpose.