Repurposing Project: The Manuscript
I'm a writer because of my grandfather. He encouraged me to follow my passion for the written word at a time when it was tempting to turn away. He said I had stories to tell.
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I learned the art of storytelling from my nana and papa, my names for my grandparents. Turns out, the story I most wanted to tell was theirs.
Final Product:
CHAPTER ONE
Linnea
Staring at the hundreds of precious letters before her, she clasped her fidgety fingers to her heart. How many letters were there? One for almost every day he’d been in Vietnam. How many letters would she receive from Iraq? She didn’t know. Enough to fill this cardboard box, she hoped. Enough to mean her fiancé was home safe.
The Original Document:
Last year, I wrote a letter to my grandparents who live in Florida for four months in the winter, asking for their correspondence from when my papa was in Vietnam. When my papa was 19, he joined the army and was sent to Vietnam. He had just met my nana, and they kept in touch by writing back and forth the entire time he served. My papa was injured in the war, and when he returned home, my nana and papa were married on New Year’s Eve. My letter to them expressed my interest in their love story and my hopes of writing a story based on them.
Repurposing Idea:
For my repurposing project, I wrote the prologue and first chapter of a longer piece, perhaps to be later developed into a novella in my Capstone course. The piece is based on the true story of my nana and papa’s courtship during the Vietnam War. Their story has always been an inspiration to me. I grew up with my nana whispering stories in my ear about her and my papa meeting and falling in love and about their time apart. I wanted to honor my grandparents by telling their story, and this project finally allowed me the time and outlet to do so. I have started the work of beginning this long fiction piece now for the project with the hopes of doing more research and interview work with my papa.
The Assignment:
My Writing professor instructed us to take something, anything, we had written and repurpose it for a new audience. The goal was to expand and improve the original document.