Novella writing project : exploring personal communication within, and external communication around a creative writing project

Abstract

This dissertation is an endeavour to explore grief through the production of a creative nonfiction multimedia novella. It documents the writing of Love Letters and Eulogies and analyses the book through the lens of academic research. Intertextuality, the use of music in narrative storytelling (with special reference to aural and visual punctum), and how grief interacts with creativity and genre theory, are of significant importance in this project. Since the novella was written before the literature research was conducted, this write-up acts as more of a review and analysis of how grief presents itself in the narrative, the creative decisions, and the design choices of the production. The story of Love Letters and Eulogies follows a narrator documenting his emotions surrounding his boyfriend’s suicide in a grief journal. This is supported with carefully chosen song lyrics that act as chapter titles, and QR codes for their respective songs. These allow a reader to interact with the story auditorily, adding an extra dimension not common in more standard novels and novellas.