100 Stories For Haiti (by sarah)
I found about four hours before the deadline that there was a 100 stories for Haiti book project asking for submissions to help raise money for the earthquake victims.
So I hurriedly altered one of my stories and sent it too them last night - I was first stuck with a feeling that I wouldn't have anything to give them as they didn't want anything with Death, violence etc... it was the death one that stumped me - all the stories I have with the nice happy endings are ghost stories which were obviously out.
Anyway I found something and sent it off!
I had actually already mentioned something like this project as a possible money raiser after an argument about writing stories about the crisis itself.
Now I would encourage writing about suck heavy subjects as I feel they all to often get swept aside but I also feel you have to be careful and think before you fictionalise such a thing. Why? Becuase it would be easy to trivualise it.
How can you fictionalise a crisis why it is still going on? Unless you have actually been being there helping and are fictionalising your own experience - you need to research it or you will just get it all wrong. And I feel uneasy about writing about it whilst it is still a crisis - Apparently people felt helpless and wanted to show they cared - my reaction to this was simply - make an ebook of other stories and sell it to raise money then.
I'm not sure why I had such a strong reaction to this but Alaric thinks the same way too - he thinks you can't really fictionalise something like this until a yr or so afterwards.
Anyway they have now extended the deadline so if you have a story under 1000 words you might want to donate it 🙂
Tue 26th Jan 2010 12:09 pm 
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