Week 3: Famous Last Words

Penguins! (Wikipedia commons)

Today was a really fun week in this class for me. Reading about Sindbad and his adventures was very enjoyable. On top of that, I was able to write a pretty good story exploring a very dark scene in Sindbad's fourth voyage. Unlike my stories for Weeks 1 and 2, this story had very little in the way of dialogue. However, this left me a lot of room to include a large amount of description in the narrative. As a result, I felt like the imagery in this story was strongest of the three stories I've written for this class so far. I also thought that “Gallery of Accusers”—I’m still not sure if that was the best name for it, but it works well enough—was my strongest story from a characterization standpoint as well. The other two stories I wrote were largely plot-centered, but this one was much more character-focused, and I think more thematically strong as a byproduct of that.

I read several students' stories this week as well, and I found Kelsey Link’s “My Name is Theodora” to be my favorite of the ones I looked at. The story has barely any dialogue at all, and instead is almost completely focused on the inward thoughts of a dying, regretful mother. This is not at all an easy type of story to write, but Kelsey handled it well, and produced a strong, very emotional story. I would expect nothing less from a person aiming to become a professional author.

Not much else I can think to talk about right now. I haven't hit the hard point of the semester yet when I have to write a bunch of papers all at one time, but I believe it will soon be upon me in the coming weeks. I had better start to work ahead more in this class so that I don't end up with too much of a work load as the semester's difficulty level increases.