Chronilogical Topography....

I found it interesting to highlight and talk about the amount of time phrases put in some extracts that we looked at. I now realise just how much you react to subconsciously when you're reading, and automatically paint the picture and produce the time line in your mind. I liked the extract 'Bird song' that we read, and the prologue was simply '1948. Before...'. creating tension even before you've read the book!

A crumpled piece of paper....

Ok, so for homework we were asked to think of 5 or 6 possibilities of what a crumpled piece of paper could mean in a fiction story to show how things can be interpreted in many, many ways (just like the 'this is not a pipe exercise') :

1. I think it could mean that someone angrily screwed it up and were too cross to pick it up afterwards, maybe after repeatedly failing to write a letter to someone very important or significant to them in the story
2. Another possibility is that someone was extremely bored and started to play football with it to pass the time, maybe they are being punished for something they did wrong and stuck in their room!?
3. They could also have walked into a room and found nothing but this piece of paper, but giving the persons' history, are too afraid to pick it up and discover the contents
4. Someone could do what I do on occasions(!) and put pieces of paper on the floor because they find it really entertaining to watch their dogs walk around with pride with it in their mouth, then shred them, to later wait for their parents to come and clear it up :)
5. It could be a really extravagant persons' piece of art work, and they are waiting for someone to accidently stand on it and then sell it on for £1,000,000,000!
6. My final thought that springs to mind is that a younger brother could be playing a practical joke on another member of the family, and when one of the family come to clear up his mess, he jumps out from behind the sofa  and consequently gets told off! 

These aren't the best examples ever I know, and I'm sure that other people from my class will have done much better! 

Sequence....

So we also did about sequence today, in period 3. I learnt all about how sequence affects the story and has a big affect of expectations. For example, in a murder, if the story started just after the murder had happened it would creates millions and millions of questions from the reader as to why this murder happened, why was the person killed? etc... However, if you were to start the story leading up to the murder, it would make the reader want to read on for entirely different purposes e.g. will the murder actually happen?

We also learnt about analepsis - a posh word for skipping time or a flashback, that I found really interesting. This links into the Kite Runner, and although only studying a page and a half of the book so far, 3 time zones have come into the 2 paragraphs - December 2001, 1975 and Summer 2000. To be honest, I failed miserably to notice it to start off with, and if we hadn't done the lesson before which linked into it, I still might not have done, but now that I have, I am far more conscious of the fact that I want to know what's going to happen next :)

Suspension of Belief....

So, in period 1 today we were discussing suspension of belief. Suspension of belief, in my opinion, is about the reader believing in the fiction thing they are reading, whether it be a magazine, novel or poem; the readers suspends their judgement regarding the 'impossibility' of the narrative. I think that if the reader believes in whatever they are reading, they will not only be able to empathise more strongly with the passage, but I think the story will have a greater effect on them as they will have a better understanding. 


For example, we looked at the 'memoirs of a geisha' and the translators note at the beginning of the book implies that it's a journalist from New York writing the book, when actually it's written by a completely different author - perfectly demonstrating suspension of belief :)


I didn't realise how often it happens - even the phrase 'based on a true story' makes you believe the novel is true, when it probably based on something minor like the street name. But nevertheless, I'm sure i will continue falling for it every time!