The Story My Father Told Me
Hazel Marion
I've definitely been putting off writing this blog post because I didn't really want to talk about what happened with my project for the past couple weeks. Basically, I made almost no progress in Weeks 9 and 10. I was feeling super unmotivated to do pretty much anything, from all my schoolwork to chores at my house. I just couldn't pick up my computer and write anything in my novel. In this bonus week over Thanksgiving Break, I've gotten a bit more writing done, but not much.
I'm not quite sure what has made me struggle with writing. It might be because the end is not in sight; this is going to be a very long novel, and I knew I wasn't going to finish it at the start. This is making me less excited to write, since I know I'm not going to finish anything. Another reason for my lack of motivation could be because of the editing that my dad has been doing after I write some in the novel. I've had to go back and change a lot of stuff, basically writing three different versions of one chapter. So really, I have been doing a bit more writing than my progress shows, because I've been changing and deleting large amounts of text. Writing raw material is much more exciting than editing, so getting through that process may have also slowed me down. It was necessary though, if my dad hadn't gone through and edited one part that I ended up changing, I would have had to change a lot more details, several more chapters into the book. The main reason I've not gotten much done in the past few weeks is probably because of my poor planning skills. I planned out my novel of course, but I've never had a plan of when to write, how much to write, where to write - any kind of organization that would make writing easier, more fun, and less stressful. The main reason I decided not to do this is because I am by nature a very unorganized person, and I work best that way. Organization is a waste of time in my opinion. Some people say it helps save time, but I don't like taking the time to plan things out only to not follow by my schedule, because that's what usually happens. I'll make a plan or schedule of my day and then not follow it at all. So that's kind of why I thought that planning out this project would have been useless, but it was probably worth a try. For the last two weeks of my project, however, I will be attempting to follow a strict plan and schedule. I want to write at least 1500 words a day. I really don't have much schoolwork; if I can get it done earlier in the day, I always have plenty of spare time in the evenings. (On a side note, no, I wasn't overloaded with schoolwork when I wasn't writing, I was just unmotivated and being lazy.) I want to start writing at about 2 pm (when I finish band class) and keep writing until I get at least 1500 words and feel like stopping. I typically don't write more than about 600-700 words at a time, but when I have written 1000+ words at a time, it really doesn't seem like I wrote as much as I did, which is a good thing. I'm hoping that the deadline of the project and a fresh start after Thanksgiving break will motivate me to write even more than I have ever before. Knowing me, I probably won't follow this schedule exactly, but I still want to make sure I get 1500 words a day. As of now, I have 15,684 words written in my novel, 41 pages in a Google Doc. 1500 words a day for the next 14 days would give me 21000 words, putting the novel at 36,684. This more than doubles the word count that I had before. It's crazy to think that if I wrote that much every day of my project, I would have had 126,000 words in my novel, which is a lot! Now, I really don't think I could have done this, simply because writing 1500 words a day for 12 weeks would drain all of my energy. But I think I can do 1500 for two weeks. It's a lofty goal, but it's what I need to do to be satisfied with the completion of my project. I'm really sad that I didn't get as much written in this project as I had originally hoped for. Keeping up the motivation to write without any incentives has been super challenging for me, and will continue to be as I try to finish this project and eventually, the novel. I'm going to try to think of more motivators to write in the next two weeks, and hopefully share them on this blog. Have a nice week!
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This week, I finished writing the theme for Dain and Danira. It's only about 45 seconds, but I really like how it sounds, and I will hopefully build on it in the future. I have attached a YouTube video below with the score being played. Right now, it's written for piano just so I could have all of the harmonies put together in one staff. The goal for this score is to orchestrate it, meaning to assign all of the melodies and harmonies to different instruments in an orchestra. I kind of have an idea of what I want to do with the orchestration, but that will be a big project in itself. I made slow progress with writing this week. I did start NaNoWriMo to keep track of my progress, so that has motivated me more to keep writing. I think I've resigned myself to the fact that I probably won't get more than 25000-30000 words written in the novel, but that is OK. I'm super glad that I chose to write a novel for this project, because it has built my writing skills and given me something fun and productive to do in my free time. This isn't only a twelve week project, so I will be continuing the project in the future. One thing that is slowing the actual word count down a lot is the fact that my dad is going in and editing my writing. This isn't a bad thing, but I do have to go back and change some stuff, which does take time from just producing content. However, the editing is a good thing since it has uncovered several plot holes and kept the novel going in the right direction. This process will be crucial to finishing and publishing the novel. Speaking of publishing, that is a goal, but I'm not quite sure how far in the future that will be. The novel is still in its early stages right now, and the story isn't even complete. I want to do the best work I can possibly do, so I'm going to take as much time to finish as I need to. I got a good amount of the novel written this week, about 3,000 more words. This isn't the rate of progress I had hoped for when starting the project, but I'm happy with what I have accomplished. At this point, I've resigned to the goal of 10 completed chapters at the end of the project. This isn't the amount that I have outlined (16) or the amount I planned for at the beginning of the project (12.) I definitely won't be finishing the novel (I've only outlined about half of the story) but it will be a good start, and this is definitely something I will work on after the 12 weeks of Genius Hour are over. I might even continue this blog to document my progress on the novel after the initial project is over.
To give an update on the composing aspect of this project, I've figured out how to write harmonies with different note lengths in the piano part and I've gotten 16 bars of music written! This doesn't seem like a lot, but it did take a while (probably an hour and a half or so) to come up with all of the melodies, then fill in the harmony. I really like what the piece sounds like so far, and I've included an updated picture of the score this week, but audio yet because I want to wait until I've finished the piece before going through the process of uploading it to the MuseScore website and then to YouTube. Hopefully, I will have this piece and maybe another finished by the time Genius Hour is over. I need to start thinking about what my final presentation for this project is going to be. I'm probably just going to make a PowerPoint documenting what happened throughout my project. i will include the music, excerpts from the actual novel, and some of the drawings I've been posting on this blog. I'm trying to think of some other media to include but I'm not sure yet. I've included a picture of the "hooded figure" from Chapter 4 to this blog post and an updated picture of the music. I hope you all have an amazing week! |
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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