Week 6 Lab: Creative Writing and Style

From this group of videos, I enjoyed the first two videos the most. I liked these videos because they correlated more with my interests in life. The first one was about reaching limitations and finding new ways to surpass them, and the second one was about heroes. The first video called The power of creative constraints by Brandon Rodriguez from the Story Lab: Style playlist really got my attention because of the scientific approach they took to explaining their concept. In engineering, I often have to use my creativity to figure out a way to make something work if I even have any idea how to start. This video was also pretty cool for me because they mentioned rovers. Since I am on the rover team, I actually learned how the top engineers of the time approached dealing with realistic constraints in creative ways. Their ideas in theory did not sound super great, but they definitely did get the job done which is what mattered. Their innovation and new ideas helped to bring about the landing of multiple rovers that have now explored another planet for years.

The second video that caught my attention was What makes a hero? by Matthew Winkler. This was a really neat video to me because of all of the animations that brought the lesson to life. We learned about the monomyth and how this pattern for heroes is used constantly for the majority of our most popular heroes in fiction. The person narrating the video brought up examples like Harry Potter and Katniss from the Hunger Games to prove how theses heroes follow the same storyline. The basic storyline is the hero starts in their ordinary world, they are called to adventure, they have help from an older mentor, they head out to action, face their biggest enemy, and then eventually head back to their old life but with new hero status.

Bibliography

The power of creative constraints by Brandon Rodriguez

What makes a hero? by Matthew Winkler

Story Lab: Style playlist

Image Information: Harry Potter, Pixabay

Reading Notes: Turkish Fairy Tales, Part B

The second story that I enjoyed from this unit was The Wizard and his Pupil. As for many people, magic is an item of intrigue. This was what began the series of events for the main boy's story. He was drawn to a wizard and wished to be this wizard's apprentice. The wizard teaches the boy a good deal and then teaches him his best trick. This is the trick that is really a con. The wizard turns himself into an object to be sold. The boy sells the object and transforms himself back into a human and leaves wherever he was taken after being bought. This way, the cunning wizard is able to make a lot of money with the only cost of it being transforming himself. The only catch is that the boy must keep watch over a specific item each time the wizard transforms to make sure the wizard is not lost forever as that object. 

The young boy left the wizard's house after the wizard had changed into a horse that was sold and went home to his mother. Here at his mother's house, the boy convinced his mom to help him pull off this same trick that the wizard had shown him. This all went well until the wizard showed up to buy the boy, in his house form, that was for sell. The wizard was upset because the boy abandoned him. Once the wizard bought the home and took the key which was the boy's way back to himself, the boy transformed into a bird and flew away. This led to a series of transformations that I thought were clever whilst the wizard was chasing the boy trying to be undetected. At one point, the boy even changed into a rose. I would like to incorporate magic into my stories, and maybe characters that can transform are a nice way to do so. By the end of this chase, the apprentice had outperformed his master, and the apprentice lived to see another day whereas the master did not. I can understand why the master was upset, but this tale expresses that sometimes it is better to leave things alone than try to get revenge.

Bibliography

The Wizard and his Pupil, Forty-four Turkish Fairy Tales by Ignacz Kunos, with illustrations by Willy Pogany (1913).


Image Information: Rose, PxHere

Reading Notes: Turkish Fairy Tales, Part A

The story I read this week was called The Fish-Peri. This was an intriguing read because I have not read many stories with shape-shifters in them, so I was not fully expecting the twist in the story. The story opens up with a man going fishing. He ends up finding a fish that was so much better than the rest that he decided to keep this fish. I do not go fishing very often, so I have never quite thought myself that I would want to keep a fish that I had just caught from the open water. This was where the story got a bit odd to me. Since he did not have a tank, he put the fish in a well which seems a hard place to observe the nice fish. 

When the man leaves and comes back, he realizes that his house had been clean, but he did not know who would have cleaned his house since he lived alone. We as readers probably already assume that the fish is the one that cleaned the house, but how? This continues to happen for multiple days until finally the fisherman decides to pretend to leave but stays hidden by the house. He then sees the fish turn into a beautiful woman, and he grabs her fish skin and throws the skin into the fire where she is freed from turning into a fish. For some reason, the woman that was a fish agreed to become the fisherman's wife. This woman was quite a beauty to all men that saw her, so eventually the Padishah wanted her to be his.

The Padishah asked the fisherman to do several impossible tasks to keep the woman as his wife, and reasons unknown to myself, the woman helped the fisherman. There are many possibilities as to why she helped him, but if I were her, I would not want to help him. The fisherman had captured her, burned her fish skin, and then asked her to be his wife. All of these events combined would make me want to leave that man as soon as possible. Maybe she agreed to help him, so she would not be owned by the Padishah whom was a stranger to her.

Since the woman decided to help the fisherman, this led to many unbelievable things that happened. I am curious as to the magic she had possessed. She was able to transform, and she had a powerful friend that could be asked to complete each impossible tasks that the Padishah asked of the fisherman. These hints of magic are what I would want to incorporate into a story. I would want to try to explain the magic of each event a little bit more though, so the reader gets a better understanding of what truly is possible in that world.

Bibliography

The Fish-Peri, Forty-four Turkish Fairy Tales by Ignacz Kunos, with illustrations by Willy Pogany (1913).

Image Information: Fish, Pixabay