My First Book

We just finished reading Whylah Falls by George Elliott Clarke in my Literary Landmarks class. It is a novel that throws together narratives, poems, pictures, and newspaper articles to tell a story. It's kind of fragmented like TS Eliot's The Waste Land, but easier to understand. I really like it and I would love to hear George Elliot Clarke read parts of it someday! He is a graduate of Dal who was born in the Valley and teaches at U of T now.

As I was getting ready for my tutorial on it, I was thinking of different ways to make the storyline of a novel and I got an idea. Wouldn't it be cool to make a story out of fictional MSN conversations? They would have to be about meaningful things. Actually! The serious conversations could be juxtaposed with random, unimportant ones. Conversations like this could be included:

-a guy telling his buddy about how much he likes this girl
-the guy and the girl chatting while they are just friends
-the guy talking to a friend or an acquaintance about everyday things
-the girl telling her best friend about a fight she had with her mom
-the guy telling the girl that he likes her and the girl telling the guy that she likes him back
-the girl talking to other people about totally unrelated things during that conversation
-the girl copying and pasting part of their conversation when she tells her best friend about it
-the guy and girl chatting while they are dating
-a few conversations that show things getting tense between the guy and the girl
-a post-break up conversation or fight
-the girl telling her best friend about how much she misses the guy
-a few conversations between the guy and the girl which show how the guy and the girl drift apart

There could even be conversations between other characters to create multiple story lines. The character's MSN names could change as the story goes on and their different display pictures (which would also be changing as the story progresses) could be artistically placed in certain parts of the text. There could also be clips from websites, Postsecret, and blog entries in the novel to help tell the story or emphasize an idea. I'd be tempted to make the conversations have correct grammar and spelling, but I don't think that would be a very good representation of the MSN culture.

I think you may have had to read and like Whylah Falls to understand how excited this idea makes me. Maybe I'll do it someday.