Module C

Ms McCleary's Example...

She needed a break from it all, they had said. From the routine, the expectations, the pressure of her job. From the lunchboxes every morning: sandwiches in squares for one son, triangles for the other, the expiring gym membership, the mortgage, the women she had lunch with once a fortnight at the Country Club to compare their disappointments at how their lives had turned out.

“We have a cabin upstate,” they had said. “We won’t get a chance to visit until the new financial year. We could drive you, if you like. The new car needs a proper outing.”

So, here she was, watching the kites swoop and swirl over the lake in the evening, catching the light reflect and refract from the granite in the cliff-face. Sometimes it looked so hard, so sharp, at others like it had been completely smoothed over by the hand of some omnipotent creator. The water, too, changed constantly - mirror-still one minute, turbulent the next, depending on the direction of the wind and the whim of the season. One fish leaping from their school was enough to interrupt the glass surface, one fish leaping could throw a ripple for miles.

Things certainly slowed down here. There was time to think, space to breathe. She could spend whole afternoons surveilling the neighbour’s three old tortoises, each as big as a hubcap, each wheeling slowly around the lawn, nibbling the odd weed. She never saw the neighbours, only the tortoises. No one could tell her that it was a waste of time, daydreaming. No one else was there to say it. She could nurture the coals of a fire for days, controlling her own warmth. She could wake with the sun, watch the first stars of the twilight emerge over the pines, and tuck herself into bed not long after that.

The longer she stayed, the more she realised that she missed their laughter, their need for her, the charming innocence of every “but why?”.

I’ll return tomorrow, she thought to herself. She made the call, and the Audi could pick her up at 9.45, depending on traffic.

“Okay,” she said to herself, “Let’s go”.

She did not move.

* * *

My piece of imaginative writing is an exploration of the idea of disconnection, influenced largely by McCann’s “What time is it now, where you are?”. Similarly to his prose, my piece centres around the notion of a protagonist who is separated from her people, by choice, and the ramifications this has on her character, particularly in her ability to engage with the natural world and the impact this has on her potential reconnection with others.

My use of accumulation, seen in “the routine, the expectations, the pressure” enhances the contextual background of the protagonist, all the while introducing the negativity in her attitude towards her reality, ultimately suggesting a need to reconnect with what is important, a need for transformation.

This establishing mood is then contrasted with the natural imagery used to describe the retreat to the lakeside, which is significantly more positive. The alliterative use of “swoop and swirl” as well as “reflect and refract” intentionally draws attention to the way in which the protagonist is captivated by the natural world, suggesting that she is delighted by its intricacies. In the third-person narration, particularly in the fragmented phrases, we can see a shift in the protagonist’s mood as a result of her environment, from tense to far more relaxed, and far more interested in the world around her (evidenced in her musings on the kites and the ripples on the lake).

Due to the focus on the narrative on the singular character, I have used dialogue very sparingly, in a way not dissimilar to McCann, who also keeps his characters separate for the most part. The character’s only utterance is “Okay…let’s go,” spoken to herself. Here she verbalises her new resolve, however, this is in direct conflict with her lack of action.

My writing has been heavily influenced by McCann's in terms of characterisation, particularly through the use of accumulation and sparse dialogue, as well as third-person omniscient narrator. By using McCann's work as a model, I have created a complex character exploring the transformative power of nature on the individual, as she finds the comfort needed in the natural world to reconnect with her people, her routine, and ultimately with herself.