The big short story for my creative writing class is slowly coming and I have no idea what to write.
Well that's not true, I have ideas.
The two main ideas in my head are:
The first human being to develop higher awareness drifts through the outskirts of his "community" of nonsapient fellow hominids, feeling estranged not just from them but from the natural world and even himself, with no books or companions or even language to help him process his nascent thoughts. I guess sort of a meditation on consciousness and suffering, unlike his fellows he's fully aware of his mortality and terrified of it, he's afraid to sleep because he doesn't know what happens to his consciousness in the gap. He sees ghosts and vaguely suspects that the events of his life are being orchestrated by someone or something he can't see. At some point he gets an infection and in the fever he's convinced that he's being punished for something he did and throws his food into the night, trying to appease whatever is doing this to him.
He has no language so he can't process things symbolically. He has the same fears and ideas we do but he has no way of dealing with them, just constantly beset by vague and incomprehensible terrors.
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The other one I think would work best in a drama format to ensure the reader is just as in the dark about what's going on as the main character. I got this idea when a friend said the CDC should quarantine anybody suspected of ebola in a closed-off hotel until they're confirmed clean. A man wakes up in a hotel with only a vague idea of why he's there and finds that he can't leave (I imagine the opening scene going something like: Dude walks into the lobby and asks to check out, is told he still has X more days reserved and can't check out, and when he exits stage left to leave he enters stage right and asks the same questions as if he doesn't remember what just happened.)
The story continues in that kind of vein, the guy trying to get out of the hotel, the plot becomes increasingly disturbing and disorienting and it's not clear what's real and what's the guy's imagination (This part sounds kind of silly to me so I'll throw it out: Near the end he kills the receptionist and they turn out to be a robot, but at some point in the past he had some very lucid but bizarre conversation with the receptionist that no robot could've made. You don't know if the conversation was in his imagination or if the robot scene is his imagination or neither or both). Sequences repeat themselves, growing more bizarre and dreamlike each time, and he doesn't seem to remember that he's asked the receptionist to leave many times before.
Eventually he escapes to find the world in ruins. The CDC, now long defunct, was using the hotel as a quarantine for some unknown brain-destroying plague and left its occupants to rot as the disease spread out of control. He's been wandering the hotel for months or years as his memory fails him and he grows increasingly deranged.
This one's more surreal sort of Kafka-esque horror
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Topic: ___/The Writer's Apprenticeship\___ (Read 312818 times)