Category: General

 Hi! 

 

Welcome to the final presentation of my in-depth. I will try to briefly explain my project so I can show you what I’ve done. I set out at the beginning of this project with a goal in mind, to at least try and write a novel with some good characters and a fair amount of detail, and then to present those characters and ideas to others. I initially wanted to write ten or so chapters with multiple drafts, and I did meet that; I have 22 chapters with a single draft and 10 chapters with a second draft ( I’ve posted the draft of the first 3 chapters in other blog posts as evidence of learning if your interested in reading through them.) anyway, bellow I have posted a chose your own adventure adaption of chapter 14 of my book (I thought it was an eventful interesting chapter that would generate some actual interest in the book.) and brief list of characters in my book, enjoy! 

 

this is a choose your own adventure version of chapters 13-14 of my book as i felt they were very engaging chapters. they were slightly adapted to fit the chose your own adventure format but i think they represent the detail, character development and first person narration that i was working on. ( to access  please go to the choose your own adventure story at the top of the page)

 

 

 

 

This is a brief description of all of the characters in my book and what purpose they have. The classifications are… 

Main character: frequent dialogue, appears on nearly every page, greatly contributes to the plot 

Sub main: two out of three of the above characteristics i.e. greatly contributes to the plot and has frequent dialogue but isn’t on every page  

Side character: has occasional dialogue, often supports the main characters back story more so then they do the plot, only appears in a couple of chapters  

Back ground character: either only mentioned or has one or two lines of dialogue 

Character name                                      character type                                 character details   

Safina Dupont	Narrating main character	Narrates the whole book. after her family uproots its self and moves back to the town her dad grew up in, follow her on some pretty insane adventures around the town of black pine.   Personality traits.  Witty/sarcastic   Curious   Quirky  Creative  observant
Anniya Pavlov	Main character	A native a black pine, or so we think… she knows a lot of the secrets and the lies behind the ‘charming town’ facade. But she’ll only reveal the dark and gloomy things with time. She wants to leave because she doesn’t truly belong in black pine.    Personality traits.   Tough  Sporty  Adventurous  Reckless  Impulsive.
David Pavlov	Main character	He wants to believe he should be there. Unlike his twin sister he’s nervous to break the mold and go on adventures, he doesn’t want to admit the things he’s seen.     Personality traits  Artsy  Shy   Quiet   intelligent
Alex Dupont	Sub main character	Just the guy bagging grocery’s at the local store right? Well…probably. we actually may never know. no one gives him a second look until his sister mysteriously dies.
Evlyn Dupont	Side character	She seems to kind and too welcoming at first, but she can probably tell if your family (even if the space time continuum can’t)
Ruby	Side character	Just an ‘innocent’ girl who lost her best friend.
Thomas	Side character	Just Rubys  ‘innocent’ classmate
Mayor Dupont	Side character	The rather aggressive and toxic mayor of black pine
Mr. Dupont (Safina’s dad)	Side character	Safina’s extremely stressed out father
Ms. Dupont (Safina’s mom)	Side character	Safina’s calm and artistic mother
Ms. Edwards	Side character	The math teacher, she seems like the only thing in this town that’s moved in to the twenty first century.
Mr. Owens	Side character	The history teacher who may actually still be stuck in the nineteenth century
sheriff	Back ground character	The town sheriff.
Millie Dupont	Back ground character	Alexs sister.

  

But what exactly is black pine? 

I feel like the plot spelled out in a single (and hopefully attention grabbing) sentence would be ‘in a tiny town held together by a thin web of lies, murders and fires only the ghosts know the truth.’ But black pine is really a world I’m trying to create, one of the difficult (and unexpected) parts of writing a fiction novel is research, I’ve been trying to essentially create a magical rule book as in the book we go back and forth between past and modern day black pine.   

 

I thought that adding some visuals might make the world of black pine come more to life, I really like drawing and have read in several places that drawing your characters can help you write them better so these are some sketches I did of my characters, just in case you were curious what my characters look like. 

safina:

                                                                        Anniya:

                                                                                                                             

david:

 

if you’re interested in seeing the edited chapters of my book here is a copy ( not all of the chapter after 10 have names yet)

                                     thank you for reading through my in-depth I hope you enjoyed it!

 

 Chapter one  

Progress reports  

Progress report  

I have actually made a lot of progress in this last week, I have completed the rough draft for chapter4-6 and have sent out my rough draft of chapters 1-4 for a peer read through by my mentor and a classmate ( Bana) and am awaiting any critiques, plot questions or character development issues from them. I am happy with my progress right now, my progress plan ( which has been altered slightly) is to finish the rough drafts for (minimum) chapters 1-10 by march 23 to leave myself time for a final edit and a final read over. 

 

Mentor information. 

 

So far me and my mentor have met 3 times in these meetings, we have discussed adding detail, character development, how to make the book easier to read, grammar, paragraph structure and the how to have a beautiful mind topics. 

 

 Chapter two 

Frustrations, obstacles and resources  

Frustrations  

So far it’s been smooth sailing with all outer issues ( my computer or other people) my main frustration is with the general layout I did for my book, as I’m writing I’m finding continuity errors or obvious other solutions to issues that shorten or lengthen the story, and I actually turned my chapter 4 out line into two chapters, while this may seam like it wouldn’t be frustrating and like it saves my work, it means it pushes the climax by one chapter ( since chapter 5 becomes chapter 6, 6 becomes 7 ect) so I have to cover for that and add other elements which means a partial reconstruction of chapters 6-8. 

 

 

Resources  

OWL 

A website about grammar that specifically relates to novel writing  

https://owl.purdue.edu/site_map.html 

Book editing.com 

A website manly about paragraph structure in creative writing and how to make conversations and descriptions more evident  

https://www.book-editing.com/start-paragraph-fiction/ 

 

All the wrong questions 

A book that well illustrates the type of writing I want to do ( first person/action narration) 

 

Harry potter and the philosophers stone. 

A book that shows the heros journey style of plot development and character development well  

 

Me and Banksy 

A book that shows the type of conversation rich paragraph layout I want to use   

 

Mentor quotes 

‘change paragraphs when you would want the camera angle to change if you were filming a movie’ 

‘add more description to areas the audience would never experience, like supernatural events’ 

Plus others through out. 

Obstacles 

Honestly everything has been going pretty well obstacles wise, we can do everything virtually and just as an added bonus, me and my mentor are in the same learning cohort for our drama class so we’ve been able to discuss a few things during class breaks ( following appropriate school rules such as social distancing and mask wearing). 

 Chapter 3 

 evidence  

Evidence of progress 

 

The first part of the rough draft of chapter one  

 

                                                                             Black pine  

                                                   (  Rough draft )  Chapter 1  

                                                  House of boxes  

 

I jumped over a brown cardboard boxes, ducked behind a full-length mirror and crawled into my room under stacks of “junk”. home, it smelled like my mom’s flowery perfume and paint.  

 

I entered my room, light poured in from the large window that was partially covered by navy blue curtains and on to my sky-blue wall, black dresser and shined off my silver loft bed. 

 

 the only special thing about my room was the bookshelf it was tall, taller than I was. 

 it was made of dark oak wood and was covered in not only books but everything important to me, soccer medals, a few polaroids of places I’ve been, post card of places I want to go. 

 

 except this wasn’t really my home anymore. 

 

 I know I should have packed my room days ago like the rest of the house, but the moving truck wasn’t coming for– I checked my watch 37 minutes?! that wasn’t enough time to pack up everything I’d ever owned! 

 

 I grabbed a few boxes and started shoving stuff in, nothing was folded, and it got messy. 

 

 At this point I didn’t know why I didn’t want to leave, I hated my school, I had no friends, I got bullied constantly it was just….. home I can’t explain it. 

 

 but back to packing. I shoved in jeans and the button downs and t- shirts I wore to school, 

 till finally I got to the band tee’s , nirvana, 21 pilots, Metalica, and not the cropped fake ones you get from h and m these were real, of course they were banned at the prep school I went to, but me in an object would be my band tee’s kind of overlooked but special in some ways, I loved’em. 

 

 “ Safina we Gotta go” my mom yelled out to me “ the trucks nearly here” 

 

I went into panic mode, my mom could get scary at times plus I knew her and my dad were already on edge for the move. 

 

 Okay: clothes and junk box down, bed sheets and books to go, I assumed the movers would be packing up the furniture too. 

 there was one thing that I still had to do I climbed up the loft bed, checking out my window that my parents weren’t watching, ok good they were packing the car. I leaned out over the side till I barely touched the wall and pealed back a bit of the blue wallpaper behind it was a small hole in the wall. 

 

 it was where I kept the presents…. 

 

 

Chapter 4  

How to have a beautiful mind part one  

 

 

How to be interesting. I think is an especially important topic in novel writing, if you are not interesting people won’t enjoy your work and even you won’t enjoy your own book or working on it, a good way to be interesting is to add personal stories or depth ( although in book often the personal stories are altered slightly for privacy, continuity, space and relevance to the story) but people subconsciously connect with stories that add character development that are based on real life because slightly altered real stories seem relatable. 

 

How I used points in how to be interesting and how to be a good listener with my mentor. 

 

Find ways to link matters and generate interest. 

 Writing is all about reader interest, the last lesson that I did with my mentor involved ½ an hour of how to avoid skim reding due to large blocks of text. We have a shared interest in lots of writing styles and skills one way that we generate shared interest in meetings is to make connections between novels and movies we both enjoy, it gives us a better understanding of the writing style the other person is talking about since we’ve read the same books in that style.  

 

Explore, elaborate and pull out interest. 

I find writing quite interesting, so it is easy for me to pull out interest, however the fact that we were planning to do a grammar lesson worried me as I do not find that aspect very interesting, however I was able to find parts of it quite interesting like tips and tricks to avoid readers from skim reading.  

 

 

Use what if statements to create new thoughts. 

Thought our meeting I tried to use lots of what if… statements to connect thoughts and to clarify for example, while discussing paragraph structure, my mentor said paragraphs should be divided by new people talking, I said “what if it’s a rapid fire conversation” this caused her to elaborate on her point which was quite interesting in that she told me about how large blocks of description or dialogue text can cause readers to skim read part that could be important and that yes, even in rapid fire conversation, dialogue should be broken up. 

 

Ask for clarification when you are unclear or disagree with something your mentor has said.   

I did ask for clarification several times during our meeting, she was introducing me to many new ideas about book and paragraph structure and I was important to ask for clarification so that I could fully understand the topics. For example my mentor talked about describing larger scenes less, this sound confusing so I asked for clarification, she said “ if you’re talking about a war, you may not need to describe the battlefield you only need to describe the important thing or the unusual thing such as a doll lying in the street.” this statement greatly clarified the concept. 

 

Support your mentors point with additional facts or evidence/ share a personal story that illustrates the topic. 

 

One of the best points that illustrates both of these points is the same, my mentor was sharing the importance  of using paragraph separations in description, I shared that of two of my favorite books, only one of them did this well and has my mentor had said, the one book that had large blocks of  description text ( harry potter and the deathly hallows ) I was guilty of often “skim reading” parts whereas the other ( all the wrong questions) did this quite well and used short blocks of text that well illustrated where the book was taking place and only described important thing as opposed to  describing those unimportant to the plot. 

 

Modify an idea to make it more practical/ stronger. 

Often in writing you have to take other writers ideas and styles to fit your books and characters. I am currently (re)reading  the book “ all the wrong questions” in which the author utilizes a first person narration style to show both character growth and add some mystery to the story, I want to use a similar writing style with a bit of modification. The book I am reading is a detective story that is primarily focused on a single mystery with very few characters other than the main one, whereas my style of writing has to include and adapt for multiple characters. 

 

 

 

 

 

Glossary  

Skim reading  

Glancing over large blocks of text to get to the point of text that can often cause readers to miss important parts  

  

In depth blog post two

Writing a first person narrated novel.

Progress report:

I have just had my second meeting with my mentor where we primarily talked about scene development, with  this  information along with the detail and character development exercises we did in our first meeting I have written the first 3 chapters rough drafts in which we meet the main characters and start to be introduced to the setting for much of the journey. As well my mentor taught me about how to “block out scenes” by making a chapter/scene with bullet points or simple sentences and I have stated doing that with my chapter 4 rough draft. In this scene lay out process you prioritize things you want to happen and add detail in the actual chapter.  I have decided to mainly follow the heroes journey writing model which is a twelve step for adventure novels and is the writing model that they’ve used in famous novel such as harry potter and for the forth chapter ( the one I’m working on) I’m on step 4 of the heroes journey, which is funnily enough called the meeting of the mentor, in most books the first four to five steps of the heroes journey happen quickly with step 5-9 happing slowly and 9- 12 sometimes being only a few pages and sometimes being half the book.

The steps of the heroes journey are

1   ordinary world, the heroes home or where they seem normal and feel comfortable

2  the call to adventure

3 the refusal of the call to adventure, which isn’t always that the hero doesn’t want to go but there might be an aspect of their life that they can’t leave

4 meeting the mentor, a teacher like figure giving advice

5 crossing the threshold/ acceptance of the call, the character goes into the unknown

6  the tests, this is when the hero meets those how help and hurt them and leaves their comfort zone

7 in to the utmost cave, the escalation to the final ordeal and what tells the audience just how bad the final ordeal ( typically the climax) is about to be there will often be a large trail of character in this step

8 the ordeal, this final terrible battle we’ve all been waiting for

9 the seizing of the sword/ reward, the hero gets a reward, whether it be gold or self confidence

10 the road back, the hero returning home this is often a stage were the hero must choose between the greater good and a personal reward

11 resurrection, this is what is truly the final battle and often a time where the hero will be put in extreme danger ( the real climax)

12 return with the elixir, the hero returns home a changed person with a different out look

Information on mentor:

My mentor is a talons alumni how also did her in-depth project on writing although hers was not focused on first person narration. So far we have had two meetings where we talked about character development, detail and scene layout.

 

Frustrations?

Everything has been very smooth sailing lately I’ve been enjoying writing rough drafts and scene layouts and haven’t run into a lot of issues yet

 

Project evidence

This is my simple sentence  layout for chapter four of my book, it has characters; safina( protagonist), david and anniya

Chapter 4  

 Starts Monday (first day of safinas school from safinas perspective) 

• She goes to class from home and walks with david and aniya  
• Gets hit in the back of the head with a note saying they should go to burnt building after school 
• – she agrees
• They continue to hang out at burnt building every day
• Anniya starts questioning why it’s there
• Safina wants answers but selfishly doesn’t want to tell others about this “escape” from reality  
• Safina eventually agrees to ask the history teacher about any burnt buildings  ( step 4 heroes journey) 
• History teacher doesn’t know of any burnt buildings
• Anniya says questioning was to vague, they need to look harder  
• David wants to leave well enough alone 
• Anniya convinces them to break into the department of records  
• Safina doesn’t fully trust them yet and says they should wait 
• They do some “team building” ( school project about invasive species)  
• – safina agrees to break into the department of records  
• They arrive at the department of records at 1 am  
• Climb on to the roof
• And break the window ( end chapter)

 

Overcoming obstacles

So far I still haven’t hit any major obstacles, having meetings with my mentor over zoom due to covid-19 doesn’t affect my project. So far the biggest obstacle has been figuring out what order to write chapters, many books are written back to front instead of beginning to end  and there are pros and cons to each, I have pretty much decided to write front to back at this point but not knowing what way I wanted to write my novel was an obstacle because it meant I delayed starting writing for a bit while I was trying to figure it out.

 

Changes to project

In my initial project layout I planned to write one rough draft a week and then the actual chapter the next, my mentor told me it would be easiest and make the best novel if I wrote a whole novel rough draft, then went back and re-did the whole thing so I’m trying to get to at least 10 rough draft chapters by the end of march.

 

Resources used

The everything guide to writing your first novel ( book) chapter nine: shaping scenes

this give advise about when to write certain aspect of your novel how often you edit, how much detail you should add to certain areas and writing tricks like the simple sentence scenes

save the cat

this is a resource I plan on using along with the heroes journey writing method it is a layout of what should be in scenes, as far as detail, dialogue, or story arch.

https://www.savannahgilbo.com/blog/plotting-save-the-cat

 

 

how to have a beautiful mind

How I agreed with my mentor

Are their any circumstances where the other persons view might be right?

Yes, definitely my mentor knows so much about writing and she is constantly teaching me new stuff that can only be learned from experince, one thing in particular is the fact that while we were discussing my rough draft she pointed out that every character needs an emotional wound to fill out there character, I said that I already chosen trust issues, she pointed out that my character was much to trusting for someone with trust issues, I hadn’t realized that, but she was totally right so I revised my out look for the fourth chapter  a bit based on this insight, she also gave me some tips to make the character have a subconscious emotional wound where it’s semi-obvious to the reader but still not pointed out, by saying “she had trust issues” in the book your pointing it out a little too much many people don’t always realize they have personality traits, so it’s important that my mentor taught me how to add subconscious traits and I agree with my mentor that it’s better to add these traits subconsciously.

 

Make a real effort to see where the other person is coming from

I didn’t fully lay out certain areas of my story, so when my mentor started recommending I add certain parts to my story that I wasn’t sure I wanted in my story, while I did offer another idea for my story that she agreed with, I could see why she made her suggestions and they were good suggestions they just didn’t necessarily fit with my thought process.

 

Genuinely seek to find points of agreement with what they were saying

When she talked about how important pre-planning out scenes I genuinely agreed with what my mentor was saying, the idea of bullet point planning out chapters seems really, really smart to me, and it is a strategy I plan on using.

 

 

How to disagree

Do not disagree just to show how clever you are

I really did try to genuinely listen to what my mentor has to say, she’s been writing for a long time and has developed techniques, even if I didn’t necessarily agree with or want to use certain strategy I still heard her out because she’s the expert I even tried a few strategies that while maybe I didn’t agree with at first because I’m sure she’s tried them before and even though I may not end up using some of the strategies I think it was good that I looked into it.

 

You may want to disagree to show a difference in personal experience

I personally think that disagreeing to show a difference of personal opinion can be a good thing as long as you may have a genuine issue with what the other person is saying, so if I think when I didn’t fully agree with a strategy my mentor is suggesting, it’s fair for me to disagree because my personal experiences have shaped the way my novel is going to go.

 

Distinguishing between having a difference of opinion and disagreeing with an opinion

My mentor suggested an Idea about what emotional reasoning a character should have when making a decision and that was her opinion, I had a different opinion about what the character should have and this was us having different opinions, I thought her opinion was good and I didn’t disagree with it I just had a different opinion.

 

How to differ

When a difference arises, try to figure out what this difference is based on

Most of the differences of opinion that me and my mentor were not really strong differences of opinion

more of her suggesting a potential idea and me saying that there was a different way I wanted to go, so I think most differences of opinion in my opinion simple came from us being different people with different experiences and writing styles, us having different ideas is a really good thing though, some of her ideas I will definitely include in my book and some of which I decided weren’t for me, so because of this I think differences of opinion are a really good thing.

 

How can differences be reconciled? Which difference and how can it be reconciled

I think differences of opinion can often be settled through collaboration , for example my mentor suggested that my charecter have an emotional attachment to a certain space and I agreed with that but I thought they should feel a different emotion so I took her idea of them having an emotional attachment to a certain place but used the emotion I thought was best, this was a good way to settle our difference of opinion and add a great detail to my story.

 

Do you and your mentor have a different opinion for the future?

Not really, she has a similar opinion to me on how a plan to write my novel, she agrees with my timeline and I agree with many of her writing tips and tricks.

What are some opinions of your mentor how do they compare to yours?

My mentor has suggested that I use the save the cat writing strategy after doing a bit of research on that strategy, I think it’s a good strategy I just think that I will definitely use it along with the heroes journey strategy because I do prefer the heroes journey strategy personally, however the have the cat strategy does seem like a good strategy.