Personal Narrative

While making some possible timelines and just generally mulling over my story, I happened upon this quick video of Ira Glass elaborating on the building blocks of a good story. It's not much but it helped to get my thoughts flowing again.
He gives two essential elements of a story - anectdote and reflection.
An anectdote is a story in its simplest form, one event leads to the next event and to the next. Even if you have the most boring sequence of events it should create some sort of suspense because it should be set up in such a way that the reader expects something to happen.
And reflection is what we've been focusing on. All these events, this anectdote, needs to mean something in order to give purpose to the story.

Chpt. 1 - part II

This is from the same chapter but I'm having completely separate thoughts. Ethnography is a word my brain is having trouble saying, but we're working on it. But to get to a point, the book presents two ideas that I guess I was always aware of but have never put them into specific terms - naive realism and ethnocentrism. Both are things tht we should attempt to avoid in our ethnographies, if not in daily life. When I read these sections I immediately thought of one day a few years ago when I saw an interview with a rabid young Harry Potter fan. She was supposed to be offering questions for the interviewer to ask the cast of the movies later. I remember that as she stood in front if the camera, clutching her Potter pillowcase, she had absolutely no problem asking with her giddy American dialect, if Dan Radcliffe had an accent, or if he "talked real like us." I'm marking that down as the attitude from which we should probably refrain.

Chpt. 1 - Culture and Ethnography

Culture is a word we hear almost every day, especially in a school as diverse as ours it ha become somewhat of a buzzword. It's a thing that seems to have different connotations, a bad thing - as in modern American culture is rotting my naive teenage brain, and a good thing - as in what makes us all different and unique, multiculturalism. So I felt that I had a good grasp on its definition. Bit this book defines culture as knowledge, knowledge that is learned and shared. I find this incredibly interesting. Culture is what a group of people know, what they hold common in their minds. It is nothing simply as tangible ad clothing or food, these are things generated by culture, not vice-versa as I had always thought.

Personal Narrative - Crappy draft

I have to say that writing this way is somewhat liberating, mainly because I know that no one will be reading it. My story is about a houseboat trip my extended family took one summer when I was about five, and it is one of those stories that is always in my little anecdotal arsenal. But the last time I actually wrote about it I was in 2nd grade, so I sort of was channeling my inner 8 year old, which was quite fun. There have been a few golden nuggets that have found their way onto the page.

Introduction - FSTI

Asian pottery was not entirely what I was expecting when I opened this book but I'm enjoying the use of such anectdotes in each of these sections, they're driving the points. The point, of course, was that good writing stems from a good process; you can't just study the work of your favorite author and then expect to be able to write as such, you have to study how that author got there. This resonated with me because so many times I've read some great and genius work of literature and then have been expected to write something of my own, but get so overwhelmed and intimidated I sort of just give up.
But in reading this intro I got to examine what my current writing process is and what I should and plan to improve on. Identifying the audience, as we discussed in class, is something I think I've always done somewhat subconsciously. It's also something I, as I'm sure many of you, have had to get good at with scholarship essays. Discovering form, or organizing my writing, is a part that I've always somewhat enjoyed. I like finding certain thoughts that flow together and seeing what happens if I stick this paragraph here, that paragraph there and playing with sentence structure.
So ultimately I've identifyed my main trouble spots as finding a way to start and having the motivation and foresight to revise and edit multiple times. The book states "the difference does not seem to lie in natural ability as much as in the initial attitude a writer brings to the blank page." I found this very true. I so often set out to write something and simply can't because that blank page is so daunting, I have no idea where to start and I can't get that mean little voice in my head to shut up. Of course, once I get it all out on paper it's either to late to revise, or I don't really think it's that important.
…oh yes, and goal three - better conclusions... The end?