Date: 1 September 2020
Written For: Swinburne University (LIT10003 Reading and Writing Genre Texts)
Format: Writing Exercise
Genre: Crime, Fantasy
Word Count: 318
Author’s Note: From week 2 onwards in Reading and Writing Genre Texts, each week we were given a genre and a prompt and told to write 300 word stories and put them online on Canvas for discussion. Mine are speed drafts that I’ve touched up a little bit, so they’re less refined than they could have been, and most exceeded the word count. Because I’m a fantasy nerd, I combined the weekly genre with fantasy unless the genre was already fantastical or if fantasy was incompatible with the story I thought of.
For week 5, the genre was crime, and the prompt was “lie”. For this one, it occurred to me that if you cross fantasy with detective novels and other mystery stories, if you aren’t careful with what magic is available, who can use it, and/or their relationship with the detective protagonist, it could make the resolution of all the mysteries too easy and unsatisfying for them to carry the narrative on their own. You’d need to limit your detective, take the narrative in a different direction, or throw a monkey wrench into everything to keep it interesting. So, I wrote this to explore that. As for the title, it’s a play on a phrase that has become a meme in the writing and worldbuilding guides by Tim Hickson on his YouTube channel Hello Future Me.
Sam Huffer 