Week 2: Famous Last Words

So week two marks the time when I’ve finally started to get into school mode. I’ve been a lot more successful in motivating myself to work throughout this week, and hope that my weekend will continue to be productive. I have yet to read the chapters I need to read from Steinbeck for my Oklahoma Writing class, but hopefully I can catch up  on Sunday and Monday. This class has kept me the most busy, but I’m hoping that I can use this weekend to begin the process of working ahead a little bit. I ended up cornering myself at the beginning of this week and was only able to do the half-reading, but I’m hoping to get a full reading in for Week 3.

Despite being a little bit under the gun at the beginning of Week 2, I was still able to write a pretty decent piece for my storytelling assignment. Based on “The Ballad of Saint Felix,” my story was an improvement over my first storytelling piece, as I felt I was able to get a better balance of narrative action, dialogue, and imagery. My story “How Codger Saved the World and Got  A New House” had a creative premise, but might have been a little bit too dialogue-heavy, at the cost of lacking in descriptive detail. With 1,000- stories, it really is tricky figuring out how to balance action, speech, and description in an effective way, and I hope with this week I’ve taken some steps forward learning how to achieve this balance.

I read two good stories from other students that I thought were worth noting. Kelsey Link’s “Nice for a Wife” is a retelling of the lead-up to the marriage of Rebekah and Isaac. Told from Rebekah’s point of view, it sets the Biblical character up as a very relateable young lady. Kelsey nicely fleshes out Rebekah’s relationship with her family, and interprets Eliezer’s character in a very interesting way (he comes off as a bit of creeper). Alissa’s “Abigail and the China Doll” is a modern retake on “Saint Kentigern and the Robin.” Her story stars a young girl name Abigail, a student at a French boarding school, but thematically the narrative matches up well with the source material. In addition, the prose is quite good, making the story a very pleasant and easy read.

I’m considering trying some more unconventional narrative styles in the coming weeks. Perhaps I’ll try writing something super weird, maybe write in second-person present tense (okay, that might be too weird, but it would be fun to experiment with such a looked down upon narrative style).

Wait, 2nd-person POV is only for Choose Your Own Adventure books and the like, right? (Wikipedia)