Beguiled
At the start of Deborah Levy’s My Year in Paris With Gertrude Stein, a hybrid-genre book merging biography with fiction, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in June, the first-person narrator finds a silver lining to her friend’s cat going missing, noting that the drama “was a relief from writing my essay on Gertrude Stein, about whom I knew too much and nothing at all.” The narrator goes on to express her frustration while studying who Stein was as a writer and a person. “Sometimes, when I read her baffling and beguiling writing I wanted to smack it in the chops,” writes Levy. Select a writer or artist whose personality, mythology, and life story pique your interest, and write a short story that revolves around a character who is working on a project about your chosen person. Consider how the subject’s real biography might play with parallels in your fictionalized character’s life and world.
