The Story My Father Told Me
Hazel Marion
I spent most of my time this week prepping for my final project. I also did write a little each day, which was a positive, although I didn't write much each day.
I'm honestly pretty disappointed with the way this project went. I didn't finish that much in my novel and I proved to myself that it's going to be super hard to finish this novel. I still want to finish it, but without the deadlines of Genius Hour, it's going to be even harder. I did learn a lot about writing though. Attempting to write a novel did improve my writing skills, so that will help me with essays and writing assignments in the future and has already helped me in English this year. I have most of the novel planned out, so writing will not be that hard if I can find the time to do it. I just wish I could have had more words and content written down - because it looks a lot better on a presentation and because it would have made me feel more successful. Since I've already done my presentation, there isn't much left to say on my blog. I might keep the blog active and post once every few weeks to update on my progress with the novel (which I WILL be finishing.) If you want to read my novel, it is still linked in this blog at "THE STORY." As always, have a great week!
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No, of course I did not write 1500 words a day. I didn't expect myself to, and yes, this is a bad attitude to have, but I never seem to achieve any of the small goals I set for myself, even outside of the project.
I actually barely wrote 1500 words this week. I'm to the point where I'm making so little progress that I'm not even disappointed in myself anymore, which is kind of sad. But, hey, at least my project is still going somewhere. I don't want to sit here and write out of the reasons why I didn't write, or I didn't have time to write, because honestly it's not important. The fact remains that I didn't write. It's definitely upsetting that I'm not making constant progress, but I'm also working at my own pace which is a good thing. This project was assigned from school, but there were not any guidelines, deadlines, or restrictions I had to follow. This project was solely my own, and I've done what I've pleased with it. While having goals is a good thing that could help keep me on track, I always have trouble sticking to those goals. When I work at my own pace, everything eventually falls into place and is fine. No, this project hasn't gone anything like I have planned or wanted it to. But it went somewhere and that's what matters. I've started something big that will definitely come together in the future and I'm proud of myself for doing that. Three years ago, I couldn't make it past the first page of this novel, and now I've got 45 pages written. Yes, it's been over twelve weeks, but I still did it right? This might be a good time to mention that my project design probably wasn't the best for Genius Hour. The object of Genius Hour is to reach a goal, which I didn't really do. I didn't even set a goal to begin with actually. All I said was "I'm going to write a novel" and then just took off. I originally knew that I wouldn't be finishing the novel, but I could have at least planned out how much I was going to do, which I did try at first actually. But knowing me, I wouldn't have really followed any of the guidelines I would have set for myself to reach the goal, so it would have been pointless. Aside from the novel, I've worked on the musical theme for the novel some more. I recorded a version of myself playing it on flute in 8 different parts and I've recorded some improv on flute and tin whistle that can be written out with the theme. After the main fast part in G major, the theme will slow down and modulate into e minor, which is where the slow theme that I've improvised starts. I like improving because I have the best ideas when I'm just making things up and I don't have to worry about following any constraints. My favorite key to improvise in is e minor pentatonic. That kind of scale can have lots of culture sounds to it, most namely East Asian music, but also Native American and Irish music. The pentatonic scale is, in my opinion, the best sound in the world and I could listen to pentatonic music for hours. Anyway I'm getting super off topic, but I've got several minutes of improv recordings that I just need to write down. Since the theme doesn't follow a strict tempo, I can't put it into a notation software and make it sound good, so I will have to just write it out on staff paper and then record the final once I'm done so people can hear what it sounds like. Going into Week 12, I want to at least finish the third chapter of the novel, which I've been working on since like Week 6 now. It's the longest chapter and has already been through multiple drafts, and I'm close to being finished so hopefully that will happen. My final presentation will be in PowerPoint format and I don't have any plans for that atm, but I'll figure it out as I go along. Anyway idk why my blog posts are always so ridiculously long; I just have so much to talk about for some reason. If you actually read this, I hope you have a great week!!!!! 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! 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! 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! 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. :)
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. |
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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