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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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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