Honors Project Proposal
When Renee Shadd, the troubled young daughter of millionaire Cy Shadd, takes a fatal plunge
off the balcony of her father‟s unused summer house one night, two people are left to pick up the
pieces. Rocky Vasquez, Renee‟s longtime bodyguard, and Phil Riland, Cy‟s maverick “life
manager,” decide to conceal Renee‟s death from her powerful father and a scandal-hungry public
by secretly replacing Renee with a look-alike.
Recently hired as a body double and decoy to help Renee avoid the paparazzi, Natasha Lambert
is well-qualified to step into the dead girl‟s shoes. She‟s already had the necessary makeover,
been equipped with an appropriate wardrobe, and learned to mimic Renee‟s mannerisms. But her
new role will require a more comprehensive performance—one that will convince the press, the
public, Cy Shadd, and even her own family. With help from Phil and Rocky, she seems poised to
succeed—but sustaining the charade threatens to cost more than any of them expects.
This premise, developed in the form of a novella, will explore aspects of identity, moral
culpability, and human relationships in situations where appearance and perception are
simultaneously all-important and dangerously deceptive.
The tone of the piece will be one of dark humor, operating in a satirical framework but subtly
maintaining an underlying seriousness throughout the story. I plan to seek inspiration for this
approach by reading the works of postmodern authors like Donald Barthelme, Philip Roth, and
Kurt Vonnegut. I also will bear in mind Northrop Frye‟s circular model of narrative genres as I
attempt to strike a delicate balance between comedy and tragedy that most often settles in the
middle ground of irony. My aim is to create a story that is simultaneously entertaining and
compelling, blending borderline absurdity with a serious inquiry into the consequences of
morally and emotionally compromising decisions.
Rather than pursuing these themes through a script or screenplay—which would allow less
license for access into the interiority of each character—or through a short story, which would
allow insufficient time to fully investigate the fallout of the initial premise, I choose to turn this
idea into a novella. This will give the story room to breathe, in terms of both its length and its
narrative breadth, making it possible to develop the situation and characters to their full potential.
The novella has long been an underappreciated as a genre. Consequently there is a dearth of
literary criticism and scholarship focusing specifically on the novella. It is often dismissively
defined as being merely too long to be a short story and too short to be a full-length novel. The
reality of its nature is more complex. As Warren Cariou noted, the novella
is most often concerned with personal and emotional development….[It]
generally retains something of the unity of impression that is a hallmark of the
short story, but it also contains more highly developed characterization and more
luxuriant description.
In Burning Down the House, Charles Baxter says that characters in a short story are usually
“creatures of impulse” who “keep both the past and the future bracketed and separate” in a way
that a novel needn‟t, or can‟t. Short stories thus carry with them a “heightened feeling of
immediate consequences.” This is what the novella “retains.” But because of its greater length, it
also has a greater reach. It can cover a greater expanse of linear time. Philip Roth‟s Goodbye,
Columbus spans an entire summer; Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde takes place over several months. It
can also venture, at least briefly, into the past or future. Gabriel Garcia Marquez delves deeply
into the past through flashbacks in Leaf Storm. Oscar Wilde hurries us forward in two quick hops
near the end of The Canterville Ghost. Temporal breadth aside, though, the novella has two other
cards to play: “developed characterization” and “luxuriant description,” traditional hallmarks of a
novel. In other words, the novella takes the best of both worlds and turns it into something of its
own, something that neither of the other genres can achieve. I plan to immerse myself in this
versatile form by reading and revisiting a wide range of novellas, which will help prepare me for
some of the challenges my project will pose. In addition to successfully tackling the past,
present, and future in his novellas and short novels, Gabriel Garcia Marquez also manages to
juggle multiple characters and their respective points of view—something I will aim to do as
well. Novellas like Wilde‟s The Canterville Ghost and Mark Twain‟s The Prince and the Pauper
interweave their authors‟ trademark wry humor with serious undertones—ultimately grappling
with matters of integrity, mortality, and redemption beneath a satirical surface. Philip Roth‟s use
of irony in the context of postmodern fiction (as opposed to, say, Wilde‟s use of irony in the
context of being Wilde) will also be instructive, as I will be aiming for a similar tone.
As for the plot of my novella, my inspiration can be most directly traced to several real-life cases
of impersonation or contested identities, especially Anna Anderson‟s claim to be Grand Duchess
Anastasia Romanov of Russia. However, the trope of a switched or dual identity also has a
strong precedent in literature. In some instances—including Edgar Allan Poe‟s “William
Wilson,” Charles Dickens‟s A Tale of Two Cities, and Mark Twain‟s Pudd’nhead Wilson—two
characters are presented as doppelgangers, sharing a strong physical resemblance which
highlights the morally significant differences in their personalities. The decisions of each
therefore have important implications for the other, making it impossible for either character to
sever the connection or to escape its repercussions. In some cases—for instance, “William
Wilson” and Robert Louis Stevenson‟s novella The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde—
the characters are actually the same person, either literally or metaphorically. The contrasts
between them merely serve to illustrate their inextricable connection; one cannot exist without
the other. The seemingly good qualities of one may be founded on the darker traits of the other,
or vice versa.
Even if two characters do not function as a study in moral contrasts or symbolic similarities, they
nevertheless can have a profound impact on each other‟s lives. Often, a switch of identity—
whether by accident or design; with or without mutual agreement—forces each character to bear
the burden of the other‟s identity as well as his own. This leads to complications that range from
the hilarious—as with Ben Jonson‟s play The Alchemist, Shakespeare‟s comedies, and Twain‟s
novel The Prince and the Pauper—to the tragic. Ultimately, exchanging places can lead either to
redemption, as in the aforementioned Shakespeare plays, The Prince and the Pauper, and A Tale
of Two Cities, or mutual ruin, as in The Alchemist and Pudd’nhead Wilson.
These precedents will guide my treatment of Natasha‟s character arc, but I will devote equal
attention to Phil and Rocky. As both mentors and manipulators of Natasha, the two accomplices
will struggle to control her, but their greater challenges will lie in coming to terms with each
other and themselves. The importance of conspirators with differing goals and perspectives is
frequently explored in plots that revolve around elaborate ruses. Works like Jonson‟s The
Alchemist find most of their drama and tension in characters‟ responses to the pressures created
by their own machinations. Phil and Rocky are no less crucial to the plot‟s substance than they
are to its basic motion. As they grapple with the ethical implications of their actions and become
increasingly entangled in the complexities of the situation, they will emerge as two thirds of the
story‟s psychological center.
As I plumb the depths of that psychological center, I plan to keep a copy of Charles Baxter‟s
Burning Down the House on my writing desk. In the first essay of this book—“Narrative
Dysfunction, or „Mistakes were Made‟”—he contends that there is “something deeply interesting
and moving and sometimes even beautiful when a character acknowledges an error” and
advocates a renewed pursuit of “what Aristotle thought was the core of stories, flaws of character
that produce intelligent misjudgments for which someone must take the responsibility.” Baxter
insists on the preeminent importance of allowing characters to make mistakes and face up to the
consequences.
This approach greatly appeals to me. It goes a long way toward avoiding the possibility that, as
Robert Olen Butler warns in From Where You Dream, “you‟ll look at your story and find it full
of abstraction and generalization and summary and analysis and interpretation.” Baxter posits
that “stories can arrive somewhere interesting without claiming any wisdom or clarification,
without, really, claiming anything beyond their wish to follow a train of interesting events to
their conclusion.” Butler further argues, “The primary point of contact for a reader is going to be
an emotional one.”
In that spirit, then, rather than grasping for grandiose philosophical points to make—by turning
this story into an indictment of a system or a lifestyle or an age—I will focus on exploring the
emotions of my characters, paying special attention to their “intelligent misjudgments” and
“unwitting actions.” Regarding the latter phrase, I can‟t resist a block quote, just to illustrate the
relevance of Baxter‟s perspective in relation to my project:
What‟s an unwitting action? It‟s what we do when we have to act so quickly, or
under so much pressure[,] that we can‟t stop to take thought…[F]or some reason,
such moments of unwitting action in life and in fiction feel enormously charged
with energy and meaning.
This is precisely what I hope to capture in the story of Natasha, Rocky, and Phil: the “energy and
meaning” born of their mistakes. If this seems too modest a concept for a Macalester student to
pursue over the course of a semester, I can only summon Baxter to my defense once more: “In
fictional stories, mistakes...are harder to show, harder to hear, harder to say. For that reason, they
are rare, which causes their value to go up.”
As a creative writing major, I have taken three of my eventual four creative writing classes—
Introduction to Creative Writing, Crafts of Writing: Screenwriting, and Crafts of Writing:
Fiction. In my fiction class, I wrote and work-shopped the short story that will provide the basis
for this project. I plan to take Crafts of Writing: Novella during the fall semester and work on
this honors project separately from that class, eventually finishing it during a spring semester
independent study. This will be a four-credit project, but it will be the culmination of my
previous creative writing experience as well as of my general literary knowledge—which has
been enriched by my other English courses at Macalester, including Nineteenth-Century
American Literature and Eighteenth-Century British Literature. These classes provided me with
a strong background in literary analysis and craft. I will continue to build on this foundation
through the independent reading to which I alluded above.
In closing, I have a confession to make: I dreaded writing this proposal. I began with—and
perhaps still have—very little academic justification for my impulse to write this story. I have
not written it yet; I have only the vaguest idea of what it will end up saying, or meaning, or
being. I cannot promise that it will do justice to the ideas I have outlined here. But while I was
despairing over how to “make a case” for it, so to speak, I stumbled upon Butler‟s opening
lecture in From Where You Dream. “Please,” he tells his students, “get out of the habit of saying
you‟ve got an idea for a short story. Art does not come from ideas. Art does not come from the
mind. It comes from the place where you dream.” While I have quibbles about his heart-versushead approach to writing, I do identify with this sentiment. Ultimately, the novella I propose to
write does not come from great philosophical questions, social conundrums, or scholarly models.
It comes from the place where I dream.
I would be lying if I claimed that this honors project is about Important Ideas. This honors
project is about a story. My goal—as a creative writing major, as a writer—is to tell that story
well, whatever it turns out to be.
Bibliography
Baxter, Charles. Burning Down the House: Essays on Fiction. Graywolf Press, 1998.
Butler, Robert Olen and Janet Burroway. From Where You Dream: The Process of Writing
Fiction. Grove Press, 2005.
Cariou, Warren. Encyclopedia of Literature in Canada. Ed. William H. New. University of
Toronto, 2000.
Dickens, Charles. A Tale of Two Cities. 1859.
Frye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. Princeton University Press, 1957.
Garcia Marquez, Gabriel. Leaf Storm. Harper & Row, 1972.
Jonson, Ben. The Alchemist. 1610.
Poe, Edgar Allan. “William Wilson.” 1893.
Roth, Philip. Goodbye, Columbus. Massachusetts (Houghton Mifflin Company), 1959.
Shakespeare, William. As You Like It. c. 1599.
—The Comedy of Errors. c. 1595.
—A Midsummer Night’s Dream. c. 1596.
—Much Ado About Nothing. c. 1598.
—Twelfth Night. c. 1602.
Stevenson, Robert Louis. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. 1886.
Twain, Mark. The Prince and the Pauper. 1881.
—Pudd’nhead Wilson. 1894
Wilde, Oscar. The Canterville Ghost. 1887. Read a Book Online. April 2011.
<http://www.readbookonline.net/readOnLine/3251/>