This was harder than part 1.  I didn’t have a clue what to put, so just made it up and wrote what I thought they wanted to hear.

The brief

In about 300 words, describe and give reasons for your choices of:

• the narrative point(s) of view
• the tense
• any particular genre it might be written in
• the point at which your story begins
• the particular emotion or overall mood you are trying to convey

15 years is written in the first person.  I chose this narrative viewpoint as I like the directness of it and wanted to express first hand the boredom and dissatisfaction Rachel was feeling in her marriage, and how she was hankering for the past.  I felt this would come across clearer than if written in the third person.

It’s written in the present tense as I wanted it to be set in the here and now and for the action to be moving along in the present day, creating a sense of immediacy.

As the main character, Rachel, is a 30 something wife and mother who hangs out in wine bars with her best friend – Jo – the genre would be chick-lit/women’s fiction, appealing to women in their 20s/30s/40s, probably working and/or living in a big city and who will relate to the characters/situations/environment.

It begins in the middle of the story – Rachel and Jo have met for lunch in a wine bar, Rachel hasn’t received the letter yet.  I played around with different beginnings, i.e. at the very beginning when she received letter and at the end after she’d received the letter, then going back to telling the story from earlier, but this way worked best for me.

The emotion or overall mood I was trying to convey was that of dissatisfaction and a yearning for the past.  This is illustrated by Rachel feeling sad and nostalgic as she remembers the party 15 years previously when she met Jake and also when she looks in the mirror and no longer sees her 20-something year old self.  She wants to recapture some of her youth and have fun again.