During the second year of my degree, I took a module called Writing After Beckett where we did our own creative writing which was initially inspired by Samuel Beckett. For our final performance, we created vignettes. Vignettes are short pieces of writing about an event. This was inspired by the work of Caryl Churchill’s Love and Information (2012) which is a series of vignettes that don’t follow on from each other and with no specific characters, or number of characters, but all under the theme of love and information. We decided to go with a theme of “Playground Politics” which allowed our pieces to be fun yet have a serious message behind them all. This module allowed me to be as creative as I wanted. Although we had a theme, all of our vignettes didn’t have to follow it. One of my favourite ones I created is called Birthday:
Happy Birthday!
It’s not my birthday
Is it not?
No
I enjoyed writing this one as it was silly, completely out of my comfort zone at the time. It allowed me to be creative and to fully understand that I don’t have one specific genre of writing. I could write whatever came into my head at the moment of writing, no matter the genre or the theme exploring.
Bibliography
Churchill, C. (2012) Love and Information. Nick Hern Books, London.