ENGL161 Creative Writing I: Imaginative writing| The Holiday

Imaginative short story based on studied literary theory (Eco criticism)  

Please write a short story as instruction below:  

The main character is an American lawyer. He’s middle aged and wealthy.  He takes a holiday after winning a tough case.  

He decides to visit Vietnam for one week because of his secretary’s suggestion.

The first few days might be his discovery of Ho Chi Minh City, which includes nightlife, street food, people’s friendliness, yet there is a bad traffic jam and pollution.

The main part of the story is when he decides to visits Ly Son island, a popular place for tourists due to its peaceful beauty. The story will explore his first few days on the island and later then he finds out that the island is covered with solid waste which piles up heaps on land or floating in the sea (please read the attached article for more information regarding the issue).  He’s shocked when seeing local discharged waste into river/sea. He might talk to someone (maybe another travellers, or tour guide to know the reasons.

The story is open ending when the lawyer is shocked by what he’s experienced and how people mistreat the environment.

mming pool. “Hey girls, can I join you?” Douglas asked as he approached two girls that were sitting near the swimming pool.  The girls looked at each other before they simultaneously nodded as a sign of acceptance to his request. He introduced himself to the girls who in return introduced themselves. They informed him that they were from the Ho Chi Minh City. They were also on holiday as him. It was the first time for Douglas to hear about the city. He got to learn from the girls that the city was full of nightlife, friendly people as well as good street food though pollution and traffic jam was a menace in the city. The night was approaching fast, and Douglas was feeling exhausted after the long day traveling. He bid goodbye to the girls as he went back to his hotel room. Back in the room, he rested as he browsed Facebook.

The following morning, Douglas decided to take a walk around the Da Nang city. The city featured lawned grounds a thing which made Douglas very happy. As he was walking along, he came to a place where he found a gang of special motorbikes which really looked different from the motorbikes he was used to at his home place in US. He approached one man who was comfortably sitting on his motorbike as if he was waiting for something. The man introduced himself as Gregory. Gregory informed Douglas that the special motorcycles were referred to as “chopper” as by the look they all had a greater angle on the front folks than the ones Douglas had been used to in his home area. The man who was a Vietnamese by his look was very friendly to Douglas. His friends also looked very friendly as they continued telling Douglas more about the special motorbikes. Gregory offered to give Douglas a free ride on his chopper on a promise that Douglas was to buy for him lunch since the times were hard due to what Gregory and his friends termed as the recent pollution of the Ly Son Island hence scaring away tourists who were there major source of livelihood. They went to a hotel which was roughly five kilometers from where the motorbikes shed were. Douglas really enjoyed the ride on the special motorbikes. What even amazed Douglas more was the nature of food in the city. It was very delicious. The waiters in the hotel were also friendly. They were served with vermicelli noodles with grilled pork.  The food was extremely enjoyable.

Early the following day, Douglas decided to take a walk around the Ly Son Island after learning about him from his chopper cyclist. However, the place was not as fascinating as he thought it could be. Everywhere looked messy, solid waste was pilling along the roads stretching far away as his eyes could manage. The smell in the island was as foul as that of rotten eggs. As Douglas was walking along, he decided to take a narrow path that was winding round some storey building hotels; he got to a place which completely made him nauseated. It was like the entire city was using the place as a toilet. There was a human waste all over which was stretching all the way to what looked like a makeshift toilet made of cartons. He could see some of the waste floating in a pool of water that was in a fishpond that almost fifty meters ahead of Douglas. The place smelled more than rotten eggs. There were even rotting items thrown there. Douglas could not hold himself, and he began vomiting.

“Why are there no dustbins in this area?” Douglas asked his driver the next day as they were resting on some seats that were beside the hotel James had booked a room in. Gregory told him that most of the people were not educated in the area and thus they saw no need to have some dustbins. Just as they were talking, a bag full of Kitchen waste fell beside them. From the look of the situation, it was like someone threw it from a window in the nearby five star hotel building. Douglas preferred going back to his house and rest. He opted to spend the rest of the day in his room.

The next day his driver arrived as usual, immediately after breakfast, they decided to revisit the sea line. On their way, they met a group of people who were discharging tonnes of domestic waste directly into the environment. They seemed not to be bothered by what they were doing. One could notice how comfortable they were mistreating nature from the smile on their faces.  You could not walk even for ten meters without seeing a hip of rotting food trashes.

Solid waste was pilling along the seven-kilometre sea wall. Douglas could not breathe smoothly. He was not used to that foul smell back in the states. However, what caught him by surprise was the fact that Lucy and James were all breathing normally everything was okay. Lucy told him that the plant could only burn a maximum of ten percent of the wastes that the residents produced. As Lucy was talking, Douglas was covering his nose due to the smell that was coming from the nearby rotting heap of solid waste. Just as she finished talking, a lorry full of waste stopped right in front of them. A group of men who were aboard the lorry begun emptying what seemed like some waste from a toilet due to the nature of the smell that was coming from it. Douglas approached the lorry to know what the content that it was carrying was; it was at this time that he got to understand that it was content from a municipal toilet from the nearby city that was being dumped right into the sea. One could understand how painful that act was to Douglas from the look of the face. Douglas and his friends kept moving upwards along the sea line; it was evident that people in that area had long forgotten about taking care of the environment. As they were walking, they had to hop like grasshoppers due to rotting carcasses of different animals like dogs and other animals which Douglas never knew what they were that had been dumped close to the water.“I am shocked by the condition of this area. I have never thought people could be this heartless to the environment. This is harmful even to the health of the people around here.” Douglas exclaimed as they walked along a smelly deserted road that was heading back to the city.

Reflexive essay

“The Holiday” is an imaginative short story written based on the studied literacy theory referred to as ecocriticism in short. The character of Douglas the lawyer was inspired by the characters in the movie “Suits”. The characters in the movie are very likable and realistic. This made me to extremely like the movie a factor which helped me to create the Character Douglas, a young educated lawyer who despite his social class, interacts with other people elegantly.

For the last few years, Ecocriticism has grown from its past incarnation as a preserve of writing nature enthusiasts that were under-theorised to the present vibrant condition which is a sophisticated array of globe centred formulas to cultural criticism which mobilises and restructure theories drawn from several disciplines such as philosophy, biology, ecology and sociology. The diversity of ecocriticism extends to engage with a variety of literary forms as well as increasingly films and digital environments and music (Vincent, 2018). The central concern of the ecocriticism theory is that currently, human beings are living at a time when the ecosystem is under serious concern, and thus there is need to reassess with extreme urgency the relationship between human and the environment. I wrote the story “The Holiday” with a desire to investigate the relationship between the natural world in literature and the residents of the Ly Son Island. The fiction scrutinised how the environmental issues, the cultural issues that affect the environment as well as the attitude of the residents of the island to nature. I was guided by the island’s occupations perception and reaction towards nature and ecological aspects at the time of writing this story. I emphasised much on the increased environmental destruction at the Da Nang city as well as the sea line. I tried to freshly analyse and interpret new approaches to the field of literary as well as theoretical studies.

I represented nature in the story. The degree in which solid waste has piled up along the sea line was clearly described. I also showed how people had changed the environment through dumping of human waste, garbage as well as animal carcasses in the environment. Most people in the Da Nang city lack proper ways of dumping their kitchen waste. The story shows that some of the individuals go to the extent of throwing kitchen waste from their kitchen windows to land wherever they shall. As the story shows, the sweet and elegant shape of the once tourist attraction beach has completely turned into a foul-smelling heap of rotting waste and carcasses.

There is a strong relationship between the physical environment and society in this fiction. The society determines if the environment maintains the beautiful and elegant look that our creator gave to it or it will lose it (Nordin & Nurs, 2017). This perception guided me strongly to create the story. Da Nang city has lost its elegant look. Littre is dumped everywhere. The sweet smell that Mother Nature gives has faded away. Douglas could not breathe smoothly. A foul smell occupies the whole city due to solid waste. The sea line has been occupied by waste. The cool breeze that once came from the smell has gone. Littre is everywhere.

The globe is the homeland of human beings.  This perception guided me in setting the novel. In the novel, I showed how poor management decisions concerning usage of the planet's resources had affected the environment. The residents of Ly Son Island have not appreciated the environment as their source of livelihood. In this story, Douglas tends to understand that different people have different connectivity to their land. He wonders how the people in the city have been so careless to treat nature in such an inhuman way while where he came from people were very keen in preserving the environment. The degree to which physical and human systems have changed the surface of the once beautiful environment was the major guide in framing this story. People on the island had taken away the beautiful look of the island. Throughout this novel, I believed that there was a strong relationship between human culture and the physical world.

I narrated the story elegantly employing some semiotics. Technical voices were made in a view to producing the mood of the narrative in the stories verbal representation (Muhamad, 2014). Distancing and other effects were employed in the story to create the happy mood that the main character was after winning the tough case. These effects were meant to govern the information that the narrative has to provide to its readers. The narrative is all telling in that it attains no more than just the illusion of showing through making the fiction alive and real.

This narrative does not imitate the fact no matter how realistic it looks like. I narrated it as just a fictional act of language that arose from a narrative instance. There is no place for imitation in the narrative “The Holiday.” I simply employed varying degrees of telling and showing leaving a limited room for the narrative to act. I constantly availed myself across the narrative as there is no simple case where I was absent as the narrator.

Environment and literature can be studied from an interdisciplinary view through the Ecocriticism theory (Fenn, 2015). In this narrative, I analyzed the texts that illustrate environmental concerns. I also demonstrated how literature treats the subject nature. I also brainstormed some possible mitigation for the mitigation of the contemporary environmental solution in Ly Son Island.

I narrated this fiction using several narrative techniques that helped me convey my message. These strategies helped me to make my story relay the data to the readers and more importantly, the styles helped me to make the story complete, interesting and complicated (Hynes, 2014). To begin with, I applied imagery to develop my story. Readers can build mental images of several scenes in aid of the descriptive messages that I used for example, “Is there any vacant room?” Douglas asked the receptionist who was busy perusing the booking books. I elegantly described the main character using various descriptive words which implied him as a rich man thanks to his expensive lifestyle. Regarding this, Douglas freely agreed to book the hotel room which was overpriced.

Conclusion

Fictions can be composed of non-factual prose texts studied on ecocriticism. An imaginative story is always produced as a story meant to entertain or convey a message to its readers. It is true that writing short imaginative stories is not as hard as it seems if only one follows the set rules for writing stories. The story “The Holiday” was elegantly developed but not described. I was inspired by a character from a movie, but I remade the story. Employing semiotics and narrative techniques helped me to develop the narrative. It is indeed true that fiction writing is simple and easy.

References

Fenn, D. V. (2015). Roots of Ecocriticism: An Exploration of the History of Ecocriticism, A Literary Theory of the Post- Modern World. Journal of English Language and Literature (JOELL), 114-119.

Hynes, P. J. (2014). Writing Great Fiction: Storytelling Tips and Techniques. The Teaching Company, 1-186.

Muhamad, G. S. (2014). A Semiotic Analysis of The Video Music: “Indonesia Bangkit”: Comparing Audience Interpretation. Humanities and Social Sciences, 148-156.

Nordin, S., & Nurs, A. J. (2017). The Association Between the Physical envoronment and the Wellbeing of Older People in Residential Care Fascilities: A Multilevel Analysis. Pubmed, Online. Retrieved from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/28586513/

Vincent, S. (2018). An Eco-Critical Analysis of Climate Change and the Unthinkable in Amitav Ghosh's Fiction and Non-Fiction. Humanities, Online. Retrieved from https://www.mdpi.com/2076-0787/7/2/59