Prompt of the Day #5
What is freedom? People fight for it, people die for it, people march down streets proclaiming their right to it; in fact, we all seem to believe that we're free and feel terrified when our autonomy is threatened.
Write about Freedom.
Be it to do with the abstract, a character, society or something else entirely. This week is all about Freedom.
Freedom today is a massive issue, particularly when it comes to things like Freedom of Expression, Intellectual Freedom, Free Speech and such. When you think about it, it seems like its constantly under threat, think about things such as CCTV which are already an everyday aspect of our lives, or the Congressional attempt to introduce SOPA. Think about how debates rage over whether or not we have the right to know about the lives of football players or whether they have the right to privacy. It's about the freedom of the press - shouldn't they be able to publish whatever they see fit? Surely a super injunction impinges on the freedom of speech and expression? But then what about the right of the subject in question - are they not allowed to live their life the way they wish to without worrying about it being splashed across international news stands?
Novels such as Orwell's 'Nineteen-Eighty-Four' build off the fear of what would happen in a world without freedom of anything, where autonomy is a vague dream. Both the film and the original graphic novel, 'V for Vendetta', continue along a similar idea, where totalitarianism grows out of human greed and fear and overwhelms society. Banksy, the elusive British street-artist, frequently alludes to a belief in the power and necessity of freedom.
When poets such as Owen, Sassoon, Pound, Lowell, Yeats and Eliot were writing, free verse was an expression of freedom too. Many of their writings reflect the deterioration of society, a breakdown in structure and hierarchy. Lowell's poems 'Memories of 5th Street and Lepke' as well as 'For the Union Dead', look at how, on the one hand the writer and others like him were prosecuted despite acting within the realms of freedom of expression, compared to the blind 'savage servility' of the modern man going about his day. His writing evokes images of acceptance - as if fatalism is our own creation. Similarly Eliot addresses this idea in his own writing with what we would likely describe as a strange sense of existentialist anxiety. To these poets, form could either instruct or undermine an idea. All of them were well-acquainted with sonnets and villanelles, iambs, trochees and anapests - they experimented with meter and verse to emphasise the conflict between freedom and society, the interplay of rules.
If you're a writer, you not only have to be somewhat aware of deep-seated, human emotions towards themes such as these (even if it's only on a vague level), but you also have to think about your form and what that will do to your writing. This latter point may seem more valid to the poet but the short story writer can play with just as many conventions - think of Joyce and the voice of the nationalistic Dedalus, or the way Dickens' characters sometimes take on the voice of the narrator and vice-versa.
So think about what you're writing about and whether there's anything deeper to the ideas that you're exploring. Think about the modern day mindset and how your themes can appeal to them. And while your at it, why not explore ways of emphasising things in a way that's subtle and interesting as well as unique.
Novels such as Orwell's 'Nineteen-Eighty-Four' build off the fear of what would happen in a world without freedom of anything, where autonomy is a vague dream. Both the film and the original graphic novel, 'V for Vendetta', continue along a similar idea, where totalitarianism grows out of human greed and fear and overwhelms society. Banksy, the elusive British street-artist, frequently alludes to a belief in the power and necessity of freedom.
When poets such as Owen, Sassoon, Pound, Lowell, Yeats and Eliot were writing, free verse was an expression of freedom too. Many of their writings reflect the deterioration of society, a breakdown in structure and hierarchy. Lowell's poems 'Memories of 5th Street and Lepke' as well as 'For the Union Dead', look at how, on the one hand the writer and others like him were prosecuted despite acting within the realms of freedom of expression, compared to the blind 'savage servility' of the modern man going about his day. His writing evokes images of acceptance - as if fatalism is our own creation. Similarly Eliot addresses this idea in his own writing with what we would likely describe as a strange sense of existentialist anxiety. To these poets, form could either instruct or undermine an idea. All of them were well-acquainted with sonnets and villanelles, iambs, trochees and anapests - they experimented with meter and verse to emphasise the conflict between freedom and society, the interplay of rules.
If you're a writer, you not only have to be somewhat aware of deep-seated, human emotions towards themes such as these (even if it's only on a vague level), but you also have to think about your form and what that will do to your writing. This latter point may seem more valid to the poet but the short story writer can play with just as many conventions - think of Joyce and the voice of the nationalistic Dedalus, or the way Dickens' characters sometimes take on the voice of the narrator and vice-versa.
So think about what you're writing about and whether there's anything deeper to the ideas that you're exploring. Think about the modern day mindset and how your themes can appeal to them. And while your at it, why not explore ways of emphasising things in a way that's subtle and interesting as well as unique.
Please note that this is the first Monday of our blog and therefore we are introducing the weekly theme for all of our prompts until Sunday.
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