Week 15 Story Lab: Empoword Chapter 2

When we tell a good story we make imaginations run wild.

(Image by Tumisu from Pixabay)

Notes: Telling a Story

• There are many different ways to interpret a story
• Narration: a rhetorical story-telling mode involving the construction and relation of stories
• Techniques for narration
• Plot: refers to the actual events that take place in the story
• the primary subject of the narrative
• Scope: boundaries of the plot
• When and where? Background?
• Context
• Can be narrow or broad
• Should focus on details that fit in the bigger picture
• Sequence and Pacing: the order of events and the amount of time you give to each event
• Freytag's Pyramid
• Exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, resolution
• In Medias Res= "in the middle of things"
• Begin in the middle and circle back to the beginning
• Point-of-View: the perspective from which a story is told
• 1st person: uses "I" "me" "we" "us"
  
• 2nd person: uses "you" "your"
• 3rd person: uses "he" "her" "them"
  
• 3rd person omniscient: uses same as third person but is all knowing of every character
• Tone: the emotional register of the story's language
• Mood: the emotional register a reader experiences
• Building Characters
• Characterization: the development of characters through action, descriptions, and dialogue. Relies on specificity
• Direct= through specific description of the character
• Indirect= through behaviors, speech, or thoughts of the character
• Types of characters
• Round- very detailed and require attentive description
• Flat- minimally detailed
• Static- remain the same through the whole narrative
• Dynamic- change within the narrative as a result of the events
• Dialogue: communication between two or more characters
• often demonstrates the traits of a character or the relationship of the characters
• When dialogue is not doing more than one thing it can feel flat 
• Rhythm of dialogue should tell the reader something
• Choosing a Medium:
• Multimedia or Multi-genre: narration that synthesizes multiple different forms, like video and audio, nonfiction, poetry, and photography
• Think of how to combine mediums to effectively tell a story

I learned a lot of good things from this chapter! I thought I knew how to properly tell a story but there are a lot of elements I was not including that I should be!

Week 14 Story Lab: Overview of Mythology

Since the semester is almost over, I wanted to do something a little different for this week. I generally write stories, but I wanted to try a story lab. I chose to do the Crash Course videos for a few reasons, the first of which is that I just genuinely love Crash Course. The second is that I thought it would be fun to take the knowledge I have absorbed throughout the semester and apply it to the three videos I watched. I wanted to see what broad knowledge about myths and mythology in general I could apply to my own writings, as well as the stories I have read through the semester. 

Persephone being taken to the underworld by Hades, as referenced in the first video.

(Wikimedia Commons)

What Is Myth?

• Some myths are crazy old and exist in many different forms
• There are many different interpretations of myths
• The line between myth and religion can be blurry
• Myth: a special kind of story that that has two primary characteristics- significance and staying power
• Subject is about something important
• Stories that have survived centuries
• Myth of Persephone- Etiological Narrative
• Daughter of Zeus and Demeter, and wife of Hades
• Primitive science
• Types of Myths
• Creation
• Pantheons
• Apocalyptic
• Heroes
• Objects

Theories of Myth

• Mythology: the systematic study of myth
• Plato was among the first to equate myths with lying, but if they were philosophical myths they were rational
• Euhemerism: interpreting myths as primitive explanations of the natural world or as time-distorted accounts of long-past historical events
• Tertullian and Clement- myth as falsehood and influenced by demons
• Mythos vs Logos
• Myths as falsehood vs myths as transcended truth (base for western mythology)
• Theologies
• James Frasier and The Golden Bow
• concept of myths as primitive science
• Bronislaw Malinowski
• myth is not symbolic but it is a narrative resurrection of primeval reality 
• Freud (ugh)
• we make terrible realities palatable with myths
• collective human consciousness
• Joseph Campbell- "The Power of Myth" in the 1980s
• Mythology is a vehicle through which the individual finds a sense of identity and place in the world
• Monomyth
• Claude Levi-Strauss
• Structuralism: myths betray a complicated and underlying structuralism
• Mircea Eliade
• Sacred vs Profane
• Archaic vs Modern

The Hero's Journey and the Monomyth

• Heroes: tell us something about ourselves and a goal to find our place in society
• The Hero's Journey: Momomyth
• 3 Main parts
• Separation from the world
• Call to destiny/adventure
• Refusal of call
• Supernatural Aid
• Crossing the threshold
• Belly of the Whale
• Trials and Victories of Initiation
• The road of trials
• The meeting with the goddess
• Woman as temptress
• Atonement with father
• Apotheosis
• The ultimate boon
• Return and Reintegration into Society
• Refusal of the return
• the magic flight
• Rescue from without
• Crossing back over the threshold
• Master of the two worlds
• Freedom to live