Blog Day 4

Today we moved from looking at world-building to character-building. Starting off the day by reading Ken Liu's  "Paper Menagerie", a story about a young boy's struggle with racism and family life, we got into what it takes to make believable, interesting characters who progress the story and make the world believable as a result. As we learned, the best fiction writers know their characters deeply and personally, including many details that never even show up in the story. One trick we learned to help us achieve this and to write realistic characters in general, was to base them off people we knew in real life.

All this we put in to practice in the second half of the day when we created detailed character profiles started from scratch and built up worlds around them, occasionally imagining them in extreme situations to gauge their reactions and get to know them better. This led to a discussion of characters cliches or stereotypes, and how we can break free of them or accept them to improve our writing. All in all, it was a day full of learning, and I think all of us are now equipped with new character building skills.

Excerpt Day 3

After years of legal footwork and cutting red tape with machetes, animal rights organizations were finally able to get congress to vote in favor of amending the bill of rights to apply to every living animal. This of course means chickens have the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, dairy cows have the right to bear arms, a bear that mauls a hiker is innocent till proven guilty by a jury of his peers and pigs have the right to free speech through the government appointed animal to english translators.

With all these changes in the world, the dark reality is that people are abusing the new legal system, as people tend to do. Corporations are beginning to hire rats and mice as full time employees and training illegitimate animal to human translators in order to frame the animals of embezzlement that is actually being committed by high level executives. In the trial of the accused rodents, the jury of various small mammals will nearly always find the accused guilty, because the translator of the accused will immediately admit guilt.

-Tom

Blog Day 3

This morning's writing prompt, "...and they lived happily ever after," kept us busy for the first part of the morning. It set us in the mood for fairy tales and fantasy, which was the focus of the day.

We read On Fairy Stories by Tolkien to help us gain an understanding of what a fairy tale is. We realized that many stories typically categorized as fairy tales don't have the attributions that would fit the original qualifications of one. This reading was our guide that we could refer back to as we looked at traditional fairy tales and the characters, elements, and story arcs associated with those stories.







After learning about fairy tales from On Fairy Stories we watched the pilot episode of Once Upon a Time as an example of how a fairy tale world could be represented. 

This afternoon's writing prompt, "Pick a character from a fairy tale (not the protagonist or antagonist) and go..." resulted in stories about side characters that had little to do with the fairy tale of their origin.

Then we watched the first episode of season one as opposed to characters knowledge of the world, Most of us found that Grimm was more intriguing because we learned about the world along with the protagonist and we are thrown into the story right away. While the episode of Once Upon a Time felt more like an "information dump" because much of the world is explained to the audience when most of the characters were still oblivious to the supernatural properties of their environment. Storytelling from different perspectives can effect how the audience receives the story.


We watched a short video of Kurt Vonnegut describing the "Shapes of Stories" based on the fluctuations of "good fortune" and "ill fortune" and how they would be translated onto a graph. We took several popular fairy tales and attempted to plot them in the way that Kurt Vonnegut had. Then we altered two aspects of the fairy tale to and plotted the new story to compare to the graph of the original version. We concluded our discussion by explaining how the changes would take effect in the story.

Excerpt Day 2

"Sparkles in a Glowstick"

“I don’t care about bioluminescent lakes, dad. I like my sparkles in a glowstick,” I stated, crossing my arms as I sat in the passenger seat of his Jeep, my dad in the drivers’.

“What?!
How could you not care? They’re so cool! I mean, they are lakes that glow!” my father responded, throwing one hand up in the air in disbelief at my lack of amusement for what he was so uncontrollably excited about. “Well, once you see it, I think you’ll change your mind,” Dad stated with a tiny grin on his face, eyeing me.

I just shrugged and sat in my seat with my arms crossed, glancing at him, then looking away after I saw him watching me. After a few moments I looked again, and still there he was. “Why are you staring at me?!” I groaned and rolled my eyes, my dad laughing. I hated it when he did this. He knew how easy it was to get a rise out of me, and he thought it was funny. It wasn’t so funny to me, though.

- Kenzie Frazier

Blog Day 2

Today, we started the day with some creative writing time. Our prompt was “a 16 year old gets struck by lightning”. This was a fun and interesting experiment because everyone in the class took it in a very different direction. Some gave the subject a superpower, but some took the prompt creatively. For example, one student assumed the character died and went on to explain an afterworld.

Image: Students sit around a cluster of tables in the classroom.
They are typing on their laptops.

Image: Students sit around a cluster of tables in the classroom.
Some are turned toward each other in conversation.
One student is typing on his laptop. 

Image: This is a picture of a laptop screen, showing several images
--(1) desert plateaus, (2) sandy desert with a dry plant on top of a small
pile of dirt, (3) hilly desert with a person leading three camels, (4) a
desert with a geometric structure, and (5) a white seal cub.

Next, we focused on building worlds. We started with reading a short story and examining how the author built the world. We noted tools the author used to show the reader how the world in the story was different than the one we live in. After getting a better understanding of how to create worlds, we went on to attempt it ourselves. We broke into groups of two then began going through all of the possibilities of our new world, what could be different, and what this would affect. With our new creations in hand, we finished the day by each writing a story taking place in our new world.

-Tom

Excerpt Day 1

Cowan bent his knees to absorb the shock from touching the ground, his clothes that once fit him rippling across his now thin and wiry frame. Ever since the Dissolve (as he called it), everything had gone to hell. Then again, Texas was already probably Satan’s vacation home. Probably why I’m faring better than most. I’m used to hell, he thought with a chuckle.

The crimson rivers on the sidewalk continued slowly creeping towards the sewer, which would carry it to the Atlantic Desert. With the Dissolve, literally everything dissolved with the oceans–society, normal life, even some people’s humanity. Coastal people turned to finding new sources of sustenance before realizing people had blood flowing through their veins. The coast was the first to go barbaric, becoming a literal bloodbath before the few survivors became Drunk on the Red Rum flowing through others’ veins. The streets were licked clean before the Drunks moved further inland. Eventually they would come across long patches of land, the Dry Plains, in which no blood existed for them to drink and the freshwater streams were merely a trickle. Deep in the heart of the USA was the last city in the USA: United Dakota.

Blog Day 1

Image: Students are sitting around a cluster of tables in their classroom.
They are typing on their laptops. 

The speculative fiction A-Term started out simply, with a room full of students writing for 30 minutes. This would start a simple tradition that would continue in the days moving forward, where every day the first 30 minutes of the morning would be spent writing a story based on a writing prompt. The prompt of the first day was "Change one thing about the world." The limits of this prompt were that it had to be something large enough to impact the greater scale of the world, but not too big. The examples of the extremes would be "dyeing your hair blue for one day" and "there are now two suns." Some of the things that the students wrote about included "What if elephants were the size of cats but had the same density?" and "What if air was hydrogen sulfide gas?" This led to a fine start for the A-Term.

From then on the students spent about an hour learning about the different assignments they would have to do during the A-Term. This translated into the next assignment, which was a presentation. Half of the class split to work on a science fiction presentation, while the other half worked on a fantasy presentation. This took us around an hour or so to complete, and the presentations themselves took around 30 minutes. By the time this assignment was done, it was lunchtime. The main homework assignment that we had to do by the end of the A-Term was an 8-15 page long short story. We also had to watch a movie series or a TV show and read a book or 5 short stories.

Image: Students are sitting around a cluster of tables in their classroom.
All are turned toward the television on which The Matrix is playing. 

After Lunch, we started on a more fun but less interactive activity, watching the Matrix. Surprisingly, most people in the class had not yet watched The Matrix, which led to an entertaining experience as after the movie they had the "Post-Matrix Mental DestructionTM" which is essentially the feeling after the matrix that you get which is simply looking at the spoon that you're using the eat your ice-cream and thinking "Is this real?" Though most people didn't like it that much, it was mainly for reasons pertaining to the time it came out, such as the number of cliches, or the dated SFX. By the end of the day, we hadn't been able to start up this blog (which is why this is coming out on Tuesday), and we were leaving at 3:30.