My Personal Project - Phoenix Chapman

My name is Phoenix Chapman, and for my Year 10 Personal Project, I decided to write a novel that encompasses the events of 9/11 and the efforts, actions and thoughts of the people involved in the harrowing day through five individual perspectives. It is dedicated to the past and present victims and heroes of 9/11, who are true representations of what the human race can and should be.

I am aiming to create a 150+ page novel, equating to approximately 40,000 words, that showcases the events and people that were involved in the attacks on America by Al-Qaeda on September 11, 2001. As mentioned above, I will incorporate five perspectives of the attacks into my novel. These will each have five parts to them and will revolve around a certain portion of the attacks.

In further explanation, Perspective 1 will be narrated by a boy on a school trip to the North Tower when the United Airlines plane hit, Perspective 2 will be expressed from the view of another teenager on the same school trip, this time in the South Tower. Perspective 3 discusses the prevalent events and emotions of passengers on the often forgotten and overshadowed Flight 93, which was crashed in a field at Somerset County, Pennsylvania by four ruthless hijackers. Perspective 4 focuses on a worker in the Pentagon, and finally, Perspective 5 is told from the point of view of the husband and father who killed Osama Bin Laden 10 years after 9/11 in a CIA operation in Pakistan. These perspectives will be composed in accordance with the utilisation of multiple primary and secondary sources – they will be told through the eyes of fictional characters (aside from Perspective 5), yet the events that occur inside of them and the people that they meet will be completely authentic. My aim is to print this novel with a self-designed cover, spine and back. This cover is exhibited in the image below, along with an excerpt of writing from the second part of Perspective 4. By creating this novel, I hope to educate people on the events of 9/11 via an entertaining medium.

So far, I have completed the content for my novel and my cover designs, however, I still have a long way to go. I need to edit this content and possibly expand on certain events or add new ones that I find through supplementary research, and then send it to my chosen printing company to transform my digital copy of the novel into its physical counterpart. I have learned various things in the process of writing this novel, including specific and general events of 9/11, its notable and lesser-explored victims, and the emotions that took their toll on this day of mourning. Moreover, my writing skills and ability to be creative in the sense of a plot, description and cover design have increased, and my time management skills have improved due to the deadlines that have been placed upon the project. I have thoroughly enjoyed writing this novel, as reading and writing are both activities that I have been a passion my whole life, and I have had the chance to apply my knowledge with this task. Likewise, the events of 9/11 have always fascinated and terrified me, and having been on a trip to New York’s 9/11 memorial a few years ago solidified this. I saw this fascination and my love of literature as a perfect choice for a project, and I am very proud of my progress to this point.