Faculty of Arts & Science

Creative Writing

Zoe Oliveira

Love, Emma (Summary and Excerpt)

Emma Bradley is the girl that has it all; great friends, a supportive family, and at just twenty-two, she is a principal dancer in The National Ballet of Canada. Living the dream her and her dad have been working towards since she was four years old, Emma couldn’t imagine a better life, so when a freak-injury puts her dance career on pause, Emma has some hard realities to face: her family’s love and care is suddenly overbearing, her friends remind her of everything she’s lost, and her father is hardly as supportive as he used to be. Exhausted by a long recovery and the weight of constantly pretending to be okay, Emma starts taking daily refuge in a local Portuguese Cafe. Burying herself in books and Portuguese custard tarts will hardly solve all her problems, but Nathan, the quiet barista with oceans for eyes, doesn’t hold her to any expectations, and with that freedom, Emma finally has a chance to consider what a life outside of ballet could be like.With her lies ever-growing, and her relationship with Nathan deepening, Emma has a difficult decision to make; hold on to who she was, and risk losing love in the process, or abandon her dream, and embrace who she could be?

“When selecting a project for my thesis, I wanted to create a work that would encapsulate how much I’ve grown and improved over the course of the past four years at OCAD. What ultimately brought me to this project, "Love, Emma", was that it was the only novel I had ever completed writing. I started writing "Love, Emma" (originally a teenage romance) around 2015, and finished it nearly two years later. I had posted "Love, Emma" on the online reading platform, Wattpad, and to date, it has over seven hundred and seventy-five thousand reads—an accomplishment, without doubt. But whenever I looked back at the work, all I could notice was the many ways it could improve. Plot holes, a lack of central conflict, and a one-dimensional protagonist was all I could see, and yet, at its core, I still loved the characters. Revisiting it as I thought about my thesis project, I realized the main characters, Emma and Nathan, deserved a story fitting of what they meant to me, and the many Wattpad readers who have grown to love them. I could not imagine a better way to showcase how my writing abilities have grown and improved than to edit and rewrite my first novel.”