A Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Waao by Oscar Wilde

A Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Waao by Oscar WildeOscar Wilde spent a huge amount of time on the set of The Soul of an Artist, but few of his hundreds of writing assignments contained the essay topics. These included topics such as alienation, personal integrity, crime, sex, working class, food, beauty, national living and the spiritual world.A reader could be forgiven for thinking Wilde spent years looking for essay topics to provide a lively background for his depiction of the brief wondrous life of Oscar Wao. But it's easy to see why he opted for this style of assignment. After all, the writer enjoys the act of creation.The essay topics in The Soul of an Artist would have been exciting and varied. Given the number of choices available, he could have settled on a certain topic and then collected the varied techniques that form his initial draft. Wilde had more than enough intellectual resources at his disposal to achieve this.Most of the projects seem to have been so popular that t hey became the kind of thing that can be relied upon by writers looking for ideas and inspiration. Most good writers are able to create a project of this sort and there is nothing wrong with working with a particular writer's idea if you can adapt it for your own purposes. If Wilde was going to work on a novel, why not adapt one of his essay topics?Unfortunately, there is no evidence that Wilde wrote the short fiction under the essay topics. However, there is nothing to suggest that his chosen topics were plagiarized, and it is unlikely that anyone would steal a literary work because the essay topics the writer has prepared include personal and private matters.An examination of thebrief Wondrous Life of Oscar Waao suggests that the book was largely shaped by the twelve essays written by Wilde in manuscript form. At the same time, it shows that the material was more than enough to supply an initial draft for a highly imaginative work. So, the choices appear to have been those that ma de the most sense to Wilde, whether he planned them or not.On the other hand, since short stories require less time to write and edit, many less talented writers can make mistakes and produce substandard output. If a writer doesn't know how to organise his thoughts, a little bit of thought should go a long way.One good example of a story featuring essay topics is the novel A Man in Full by Lorrie Moore. Many of her scenes involve conversation, and she writes about how her personal life influences her writing in a similar way to what we might expect to see in a poet's narrative. But this book presents essay topics in a more creative way, including literary quotes.