Behind the Pen: “mo-rose code”

For our most recent issue (Issue 4: The Literary Palette’s Box of Chocolates), Zoe Zarubin (17) submitted a flash fiction piece—“mo-rose code.” For her, this was a unique piece that involved a “very different creative process from [her] normal pieces.” 

While the title was a “creative epiphany,” Zoe had a more in-depth process for the actual creation of the piece. When she wrote the piece, she was in a “poetry unit” for her creative writing class, and was inspired to try something new. 

She began writing her piece by looking up “how to write a vignette.” Zoe found that it was meant to be “short and sweet, captur[ing] an experience, not necessarily the plot.” Additionally, she found that vignettes often broke “all the rules.” So she decided to take on that challenge. 

As a side note, Zoe also advises new writers that it’s okay to look up questions about writing online. She says that it’s not a sign of weakness, and indeed, learning from experts, whether by reading about writing or by just reading in general, is one of the few ways to get better. 

With “mo-rose code,” Zoe liked the “idea of morse code” and “wanted to incorporate it into the story in multiple ways.” In her piece, she was able to do this by including literal morse code as part of her story as well as “embed[ding]” a “coded message” for her readers. “The all caps spell out a message,” she explains. She “wanted to not only give [her] character an opportunity to decode the value of her relationship, but also give the reader an opportunity to have fun finding their own codes within the story.” Zoe thinks that readers “should be given more credit,” to read between the lines, or in her case, “between the dots and dashes.” 

Overall, Zoe “had so much fun writing” a “new medium,” even though “it was a bit of a challenge” encoding the “secret messages.”

In The Literary Palette’s Box of Chocolates, we’d love our readers to check out Zoe’s piece—a layered and decadent vignette with a bracing minty kick.