Week Two Reflections!

Alright, this will be quite a short entry as we did not have class time together. Tuesday was Hari Raya. Well, most people were enjoying their holiday and taking their well-deserved breaks. Sadly, this was not so for me. I woke up at 5am in the morning as I was supposed to photograph my friend’s wedding ceremony and lunch banquet. It was ironic because I was sad having to wake up so early and “burned” my break. At the same time, I was happy to see him happily married.

Enough of digression. I think missing one session of class time in Storytelling puts us at disadvantage. Not only did we lose whatever valuable content we could have learnt, we also did not get the opportunity to start our research on Aristotle and discussed about the presentation (I heard from a friend in another class they were given time to start researching in class). To make it worse, we do not have lectures for Storytelling. Well, I sure hope that we can cover whatever we have lost in class. I do not want to lack behind! =(

Edited 30 Oct 06 : My completed story for my buddy’s openers can be found here.

Week One Reflections!

17 Oct 2006 marked the day when we had our first ever Storytelling Techniques class. Mr Ryan, our fun and friendly tutor got us involved in an ice-breaking session, which consisted of two simple but enjoyable (they were not too bad) games.

The first was by writing 5 supposedly unknown or little known facts about ourselves. Well, mine was pretty obvious and the class guessed it effortlessly. For the second game, we formed ourselves into a circle and we had to take turns to add an adjective to our names. The adjective must start with the same letter as our first name (or so it was supposed to be). The worst part was we had to repeat those names (yes, with adjectives) of those who went before us. Lucky for me, I was in the middle of the circle, so I did not had it too bad. Well, here goes.. Rapping Ryan, Running Rebecca, Breaking Bobbie, Crazy Caleb, Killer Khai, Nostalgic Nick (myself), Greasy Gwyn, Kracking Kane, Gorgeous Geraldine, Annoying Annabelle, Sinister Sin, Lazy Louis, Kinky Qing and Hot Hari.. Yeah, there were some funny ones.

Well, after the short games, we got down to work. We were taught the proper writing format (please refer to my notes; link is posted at the end of entry).

Class Exercise

We were also asked to complete a story with the opening sentence provided. Some of us got the opportunity to share them and we all had a good laugh with Kane’s story.

I did not get a chance to share in class so I will come back here, edit my post and put it under this section of this post. Stay tuned!

REFLECTIONS

I learnt quite a lot in week one’s lesson. Other than what I have mentioned above in my notes, we also thought about and shared some questions and obstacles when trying to complete the story in the class exercise. For myself, one of my main concerns was how to give the reader(s) a more visual feeling from plain words. The second concern I had was how to make the story flow while using heavy doses of present tense and active sentences. The second was hard not because I do not know how to identify what’s present tense and active sentences, but sometimes past tense was called for while writing the story.

We were also told to ask ourselves some questions while writing. Whose story am I telling? What is the point of this story? How can I engage the attention of the audience?

The above questions were somewhat related to my reflections.

I guess I would rank Storytelling as my second favourite module this semester, the first being photography, the art form I am most passionate about. Storytelling class is fun and engaging, not presented in a lecture-like manner. I hope I do well enough in this module!

You can find my notes here.