The Story My Father Told Me
Hazel Marion
This week, I got almost no writing done. I was bogged down by so many assignments for school, and I was never able to make time to write.
This was the halfway point of my project, but I don't feel like I'm halfway done. I think I have been working a lot, it's just the timing of my project that makes it seem like I haven't gotten anything done. For the first three weeks almost, I wasn't doing any actual writing in my story; I was just planning. The planning has made writing much easier for me, but the problem has been having so much other work to do that I just can never find time to write. This post was made a little into Week 7, so I am making more progress now, but I will post about that next week. On the bright side, I started dabbling in some composing this week. I'm really into classical music and film composing and I just thought, what better way to practice composing than to write some tunes that go along with my novel? So I've composed a tiny bit of what I'm calling it "Dain and Danira's Theme" (based on the two main characters in the book). I came up with the base line while playing my piccolo in band one day, and then I just built off of that. This didn't take me long to write down, so by next week, I'll definitely have the piece finished. I want to add some more chords to the treble line along with the melody, but I'm still figuring out how to do that with the limitations of the software I'm using. Although this isn't what I'm supposed to be doing for my project, it was definitely enriching and a nice break from writing! I've attached a picture of the sheet music from my notation software below. (Unfortunately I couldn't include an audio file, since I'm not paying for Weebly, but once I finish this piece, I'll make a YouTube video that plays it for me) Another good thing that happened this week was that I got around to posting the most recently edited portion of my story to the Google Doc linked on this site. Now, you can read up to page 30!
2 Comments
Genius Hour Week 5 was almost two weeks ago at this point, but I didn't make a post last Sunday when I was supposed to. I actually got a good amount of writing done in Week 5 and was pretty happy with my progress at the end of that week. However, Week 6 has been much more challenging and stressful, but I will talk more about that tomorrow when I post for Week 6. During week 5, I finished Chapter 2 and started writing Chapter 3. I had a lot of fun with the events in Chapter 3, and there are some intentionally funny moments in the chapter. At the end of Week 5, I was at about 10,000 words in my novel. This isn't as much as I had hoped for at the beginning of my project, however I know that I haven't been writing every single week, and I know that I will have time to write even more in the last half of my project. One issue I have run into while writing is having to change events that happen in the story. When my dad was telling me and my brother the story, he was making up details off the top of his head, and some of the events that he made up were actually from other stories. One example is a scene taken from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. The scene where Indiana Jones finds the passage into the secret temple with the witch doctor is almost exactly copied in my dad's story. The funny thing about this is that I didn't even realize it was a copy, since I've only watched that Indiana Jones movie a few times. (I think it's scary haha.) Anyway, when I get to that part in the novel, which is coming up soon, I'll have to make some changes to the original story, so as not to copy Indiana Jones. This week, I won't be including any pictures since I had two last week. As always, have a nice day!
This week I struggled to find time to write. I have plenty of motivation to write - it's one of my favorite things to do - but I just can't seem to make time to do it. The main thing that is taking up most of my time is other schoolwork - I have 5 classes and 2 AP's. I'm hoping that I can find more time to write this week because I won't have as much schoolwork to do with the extra days off.
This week, I focused on writing in Chapter 2, but ran into some issues along the way. When I began writing in Chapter 2, I had not actually finished reading the entire story that my dad had written down. The entire story was (I think!) 123 pages in his journal (see "Media" for an image of one journal page), so it did take a lot of time to read. When I finished outlining about half of the story, I wanted to stop reading and just start writing, but as it turned out, I couldn't do that. When I was reading some in the story this week, I uncovered more plot details that would not have aligned with what I had already written in Chapters 1 and 2. I realized that I had to finish reading, so that did take up a good portion of my Genius Hour work for this week. Right now, I have almost completed Chapter 2. I won't be uploading it yet, however, until my dad goes through and edits what I have written. For Chapter 1, he did the same thing. I think this is a really great system for us to have and will make the finished novel even more appealing. One thing I need to work on as I am writing is not trying to make everything perfect. I spend way too much time looking up synonyms for words in a thesaurus, than actually writing content. I need to spend less time trying to make the story perfect because I know I can go back and change things anytime. I have a couple of great drawings for this week!! These drawings coordinate with events from Chapters 2 and 3, which I will be hopefully updating later this week (crossing my fingers!) As always, have a nice week! :) I am excited to announce that I have finally completed Chapter 1 of Prism. After spending more time outlining this week, I took Saturday and Sunday (today) to finish the chapter. Last week, I posted about 5 pages of the chapter, but I have added about 8 more pages to the chapter, for a total of 13 pages to the chapter. Including the prologue, I have written about 5200 words in Prism. I am proud of my success so far and I am excited to see where the novel goes in the future. I wrote the rest of Chapter 1 in about 2 hours. Including the beginning of the chapter, I would have spent a total of about 4 hours working on this chapter. Since the chapter (including the prologue) is about 5200 words, that would be about 1300 words per hour. This rate actually seemed very fast to me and I did not expect myself to be able to write that many words in an hour. I think the main reason I am able to produce so many words is because I already know what I am writing about and I don't have to think of details and plot elements to add in as I write. This is why the outlining process was so important. I needed to refresh my memory of the story and plan what I was going to write about in each chapter. So far, I have planned for 16 chapters, covering a little over half of my dad's original story. If each chapter is about 5000 words, 16 chapters would make for an 80000 word novel, which is a ridiculous amount of words that I did not see myself writing. But miracles happen, and I am confident that I will be able to complete the 80000 word goal in the weeks remaining of Genius Hour. So what about the rest of the story? Well, I didn't want to spend any more of my Genius Hour time outlining for chapters that I might not even get to write, so I have decided to just read the rest of the story and scan for plot holes. I've already found a few in earlier parts of the story, but I just want to make sure I know where the story goes and that I don't miss out on any events later on in the story that are affected by events that happen earlier in the story that I will be writing about. Not sure if that makes any sense, but basically I need to have a full understanding of the entire plot, even though I will only be writing about a portion of it. The image for this week is one I drew! It is a larger version of the demon elf insignia seen on the horn and the creature's armor in chapter 1. It's a pretty simple design but does give off lots of evil vibes. My dad drew it in his earlier sketches of the story, and I'm just copying from his design. Yes, my drawing skills are not that of my father's but please appreciate the effort I put into this drawing haha! (Also if you saw this blog post last week, yes, it was a different drawing; I had to update it because we decided the semicircle should be facing down, not up) Honestly, I think its pretty amazing how my dad came up with such a complex story right on the spot in telling it to my brother and I, and I applaud him for his imagination. I probably wouldn't be able to finish a project like this without help from someone else, and my dad's ideas are completely filling the gap in my imagination. I just hope that other people besides my family can enjoy the story and that maybe it could be published in the future. :)
|
Hazel MarionI am a sophomore at Davie High School, participating in the Genius Hour Project for Mr. Barker's English class. Archives
November 2020
Categories |