We are heading into the final weeks of Michaelmas Term, and for me its the final stretch of my year at Oxford University. The pressure is ramping up as assignment season gets underway again and I am working hard on my last Oxford essay. I've really enjoyed this term and I think it has been my favourite one so far. I have found the work to be both interesting and constructive and I can see how it will prove useful to me in the future. I haven't always had that feeling at the end of a course, so to know that I have learnt new skills and processes that I can use for advancing my ambitions is very rewarding.
This term we have been focusing on writing from our own experience, which is something I have always done anyway, but its nice to be actively encouraged to do this! For me its just an aspect of being a writer. Everything is raw material that I can use in my work, writing about the places, experiences and encounters that I find the most telling. It pays to be nice to authors, or they could make you the villain of their masterpiece!
One of the things I have most enjoyed this term is that we have been encouraged to fictionalise our experiences and turn our real-life nemeses into equally vile characters on the page. This has been tremendous fun as you can probably imagine!
That is the whole premise of our final assignment - to fictionalise a difficult encounter and dramatize the whole thing, creating characters from circumstances we have experienced. I have chosen to write about the time I was working in a nursing home back in my early twenties, and the toxic factions and spiteful behaviour I experienced there because ambition was thought of as a dirty word, unless of course, you had ambitions to be a nurse. That was acceptable, but if your ambition was for anything outside of the care sector then you were basically viewed as a pariah! It was as if I should have been content to empty bed pans and work in the sluice for the rest of my life. As if!
I've been having a great time fictionalising these events: pinning down vile, two-faced behaviour and exploring bitterness and resentment through characterisation on the page. It's been a really fun assignment to write because the main character gets to watch as her nemeses prove to be their own downfall. Of course, that's the point of fictionalising negative encounters and events - as the author you get to create the outcome you prefer, to change the negative experience into something more positive and fun to write, which is why this technique is often used in therapy too. Our student discussions certainly seem to suggest that most of us have found this assignment and style of work extremely cathartic!
If you have ever worked in a nursing home, or anywhere there are large groups of women thrown together, then you will know the kind of thing I'm talking about here - the back-stabbing, sabotage, spiteful gossip; the cliques and family groups who work to exclude everyone else, at the same time as envying or judging anyone who tries to get ahead or change careers. It's the "Who does she think she is?!" mentality at work. The Australians call it tall poppy syndrome and most of us have experienced some version of it, which makes it a topic worth writing about - in a fictional sense, of course - because so many people are able to relate to it.
This assignment reminds me of a similar one I had to write for my Psychotherapy degree a few years ago, where we had to imagine a situation with a person who had hurt and overpowered us in some way, then rewrite the incident so that we had all the power instead. It's a bog-standard therapy exercise, but it was fun to to explore the concept of re-writing your personal history to better suit yourself. It's a great journal exercise too.
This final Oxford assignment has the same vibes. Take something that really happened and that was unfair or unpleasant and turn it into a piece of fiction. Characterise the people from your past, then let your imagination run free and turn them into whatever you want - sociopaths, narcissists, bank-robbers, murderers, anthropomorphic snakes etc, then create a main character who can deal with them and bring about some kind of justice on the page. If we were to take the anthropomorphic snake as an example of the nemesis, then the main character could be the vet who euthanizes it, or the anthropomorphic eagle who hunts and kills it. Problem solved. Catharsis achieved by the power of the pen!
So it's a really great assignment to end the course with and I must say I'm having a lot of fun writing this one! I'm about half-way through the essay itself and I still have the supporting work to go through and link up. I have competed all the Unit based course work, so its just this last assignment to finish and submit by the deadline. There are still a few classes to go but I can see the finish line just up ahead. I'm trying not to rush and race towards it because I very much want to enjoy what is left of Michaelmas term at Oxford, in the run up to the festive season. I do believe that a glass of bubbly will be in order though, once my final assignment is finished and handed in to the Don.
Serene Blessings
Marie x
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