VI: The Letter That Never Arrived

For this session we looked at creative writing. We were given a list of prompts in the previous session and set a task to take one of these prompts or anything that interests us and create some text around it. An example of some prompts are:

• Text on a piece of cardboard.
• Text written in condensation.
• A letter written at 3am from war.
• Text to a love one who has died.

With having an interest in both World Wars I took inspiration from the one regarding a letter written at 3am from the front line. Knowing about soldier’s letters home to those they loved I took my knowledge of this era and applied it to the task. I created a fictional soldier with a fictional address and recalled common experiences he would have faced in his time in the trenches.

While writing I related the text back to the title and dropped hints of why the letter might not have arrived but never confirmed. This meant the audience would be able to make their own opinions on what happened to the soldier writing this letter.

As I wrote this I tried to embody the emotions and thoughts that would have been going through this individual. Being passionate about the subject I have done a lot of in-depth research over the past few years so I was confident enough to portray this. I wanted this young Englishman who hid his fear behind humour when writing to his girlfriend back home. He has a guilty conscious and nobody to talk to. Whether he would have sent this letter at all I don’t know. It could have been an escape to put it down onto paper when he couldn’t express his feelings to anyone, it could have been intercepted or he could have been killed.

I debated erasing sections of the letters that he would have regretted putting down but I feared how this would have come across in spoken word. However it has given me thought of how to experiment with something like this in future. I also considered whether to actually name Jamie or list him as soldier due to the fact so many letters similar to this would have been written from both sides. If I were to develop this I would strip back the personal details and make it a more conventional letter which could apply for any soldier fighting in any war across history.