The Story My Father Told Me
Hazel Marion
This week, I worked on some more outlining, which is taking MUCH longer than I expected. My dad's handwriting is indeed difficult to read, and when I work, I take a lot of time to really process what is happening in the story. I often talk out loud to myself, as this helps me to understand what is going on. This week, since Wednesday, I've worked on outlining for about 1 hour each day. I hope to continue working for about this long each day in order to finish the outlining process by the end of Week 3. Another part of outlining is naming characters and places in the novel. In the original story the only named characters are the main elf family, who are introduced in the first chapter. There are lots of other characters in the original story that did not have specific names and I have been coming up with names for them as I am outlining. None of the places in the original story had specific names either and I have also had to come up with names for them. This is where the deeper meaning of this novel comes in. While thinking about the names of the kingdoms on the map, my dad and I had the idea to base each kingdom off of a different country in the world. I handed my dad the map (see the Media section for a picture of the map) and he assigned a different country to each kingdom. When he was done, we both realized that every single country on the map was a European country. I looked and my dad and said that this was a problem, because there would be virtually no diversity within the languages and people of these kingdoms. When we finished with the second round of countries, we had come up with two Asian countries, two African countries, but still four European countries. I wen to bed that night thinking about this and how we could make the novel more diverse. I had already been focusing on adding a significant amount of female characters to the story, since most fantasy novels are male dominated, but hadn't considered the races of the characters. When I was thinking about this, I realized that most novels, specifically in the fantasy genre, that I read do not have much diversity when it comes to skin color. Most of the characters are white, and the main character is almost always white. Take Lord of the Rings for example. Every single character is white, and there is only one significant female character in the book. The lack of diversity in this series is astounding, since it is so popular. I started thinking about the audience of this book. I want every child and adult that reads this book to have a character that looks like them, and that they can relate to. With that being said, my dad and I finalized the countries we are using for the kingdoms of Midland and it looks like this: Elf Nahela - Native American - "forest" Bahari - Kenya - "ocean" Sliabhan - Ireland - "mountain" Dwarf Vesturland - Iceland - "western" Samardan - Pakistan - "ocean" Mosland - Mongolia - "mountain" Human Rochedan - Brazil - "crevice" (not an exact translation, but similar) Alharu - Morocco - "hot" With these countries, there is at least one example of four of the five main races in the world: Native American, Black, Asian, and White. The race that is not represented is Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander, but one of the extremely important characters later on in this story will have Hawaiian features and a Hawaiian name. The only reason I didn't include a country from the Pacific in the map is because the countries are all islands and would not make much sense geographically to represent anywhere on the map. I also included a Hispanic country, a North African country, and multiple Asian countries, which allows for even more diversity. Obviously I can't include every single country of the world, but I tried to represent as many races and ethnicities as possible. The name of the kingdom is based off of a translation of a geographical feature in the language of the corresponding country. Sadly, I have not yet finished chapter 1 of Prism in time for this blog post. I do have a portion of it completed, which I have uploaded to the Google Doc with the final draft of the novel. Even though I did not get all of chapter 1 finished, I do feel proud of what I accomplished this week. This was an extremely long post, but I really wanted to explain the deeper meaning of Prism. I hope that the inclusion of many different representations of races in this novel will be appreciated by all of the readers. I am super excited to continue writing this novel and I can't wait to see where it goes. :) ![]() Here is a sketch of one of the dark creatures described in Chapter 1.
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This blog post is a bit delayed because I did not make as much progress as I hoped I would in Week 1. Right now, I am in Week 2 of Genius Hour and I will make a recap post for this week this coming Sunday. I want to start posting weekly on Sundays, recapping my progress for the previous week. During Week 1, I began the outlining process of the novel. This process will be crucial to my success in actually writing the novel, because I need to know what I am writing about. My dad's handwriting in his journal is not easy to read, and I would waste a lot of time trying to write by just reading out of the journal. In short, the outlining process consists of reading through my dad's journal and copying down important events that happen in each chapter. That way, I can skim my dad's journal for specific details, but I also know the major events that happen in each chapter and I won't have to waste time reading the journal. Right now, I am still figuring out a lot of details about this project. I haven't started my goal of 500-1000 words per day yet, because I haven't finished the outlining process. During this week, I did begin writing chapter 1, but I will talk about that more in the Week 2 blog post. With outlining, I am planning on what details to put in each chapter, so I can have a more organized version of the plot. However, the details could definitely change, depending on how long the chapters end up being. Reading my dad's journal and diving back into the story is really exciting for me! I've been feeling lots of nostalgia for my childhood and the great memories that this story brings back. I didn't remember everything that happened in the story when my dad told me and my brother, but reading the journal is like an oh! moment, when I remember something I've forgotten for a long time. So far, I haven't lost any motivation to work on this project yet. I'm actually spending a lot more time on it than I probably should, since working on it is so enjoyable. The biggest issue I've run into with time management is that I wait to work on my novel until after I've finished all of my other work for the day. Because of this, I end up staying up very late at night, and running out of time to do what I want. I think I need to work on the novel during different times throughout the week to see what works best for me and when I can get the max amount of work done. This week, I don't have any sketches because I haven't posted a chapter yet, but here are two pictures of my dad's journal and a page with his handwriting. As you can see, my dad's handwriting is very hard to read! Finally, I have come up with a temporary name for my novel: Prism. The name is based on the main goal of the protagonists in the story, which will be revealed throughout the novel. Stay tuned for Sunday when I post the first chapter of Prism!
![]() Over the course of 12 weeks, I will be working to write a novel. My novel will be based off of a story my father told me as a child and I will be using his notes to complete it. For the first two weeks of my project, I am going to use his journal to outline the plot of the novel and specific events that I want to happen in different chapters. After the outline is done, I am going to begin writing. I am planning on writing at least 500 words a day, but hopefully more. This story is quite complex and long, so I am not planning on finishing the story in 12 weeks. However, I want to build my motivation and drive to complete this project, since it is something I have been wanting to do for several years now. After the 12 weeks are over, I hope to continue writing until the novel is finished. Each week, I want to update my blog with excerpts from the story that my classmates and teacher can read. The link to the google doc with the final copy of the story will be embedded in the "The Story" page. I will update this google doc weekly for your reading purposes. For now, I have completed the prologue to the story, which gives a short history of one of the characters in the story. With this project, I also want to include drawings my father has done that go along with the story. For each blog post, I will upload a new picture that corresponds to what is happening in the story that week. The first picture that I will be sharing is a map my father drew of the fantasy world where the story takes place. All of the images will be saved to the "media" tab for easy access. Lastly, my dad and I have not come up with a good name for the actual story, or the fantasy land. Right now, the island is known as "Midland," which we think is too close to Middle Earth, from The Lord of the Rings. If anyone can think of any good ideas for the name of the book, or the island, please feel free to share them in the comments!! Thanks for reading! This is so exciting for me and my dad, and I am very happy to be able to share a part of my writing process with this class!!! |
Hazel MarionI am a sophomore at Davie High School, participating in the Genius Hour Project for Mr. Barker's English class. Archives
November 2020
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