Date: 20 October 2020
Written For: Swinburne University (LIT10003 Reading and Writing Genre Texts)
Format: Writing Exercise
Genre: Historical Fiction
Word Count: 370
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 11, the genre was historical fiction, and the prompt was “smoke”. I opted to write about Pompeii, and looked up the key details on Wikipedia, as well as some Roman names for the characters. If there’s any historical inaccuracies, blame Wikipedia and the internet; historical fiction that’s not just a quick writing exercise should probably involve more in-depth research than that.
Sam Huffer 