Telling True Stories Reading Response

There are a couple of pieces in the reading for this week that have changed the way that I think about story writing forever. I feel like these two sections on “structure” and “quality” were much more helpful to me in my writing than was Franklin's entire book Writing for Story. In the “structure” section, it was a short little piece called “Narrative Distance” by Jack Hart that really conveyed the importance of putting the reader in the shoes of the story's protagonist. Many of the pieces echoed the notion that it is important to make readers feel sympathy for the main character early in the story and Hart gives us the tools to do this. In his little blurb, he essentially rewrites the same sentence three times, but each time he zooms in the camera a little bit more to make the perspective more personal. I found that when I read the version of the sentence that was the most focused, it spoke to me much more than a disinterested narration from across the room. It was in this moment that I realized I needed to apply these same techniques to my own story. I had previously included dialog by Lillie and given descriptions of her, but I don't think I had truly let them get inside of her head. I decided to use my interview with her boyfriend, Chris, to try and figure out more about this person who he himself called “mysterious.” He told me about a few instances when he has been with her and people make comments about her hair and the emotional reactions that she has. This is something that she has never mentioned to me directly and it was great to get a new perspective. I incorporated some of Chris' dialog into my revised version of the story and I hope that it is working to improve the piece as a whole.

The piece that stuck out to me the most in the “Building Quality” section was “Sequencing: Text as Line” by Tom French. Throughout his entry, he uses writing examples from David Finkel to show what makes good story writing. I was previously familiar with David Finkel, since I read his book The Good Soldiers (about US soldiers in the Middle East) during the summer before my sophomore year. To this day, it remains one of my favorite journalistic books because he makes the scenes come alive to the reader. Example after example, French showed how Finkel chooses seemingly small aspects of a larger conflicts and puts them at the center of his story. He puts value on the small details and believes that these things can speak volumes when places within a larger context (a war, an economic downturn, etc). In my revised draft, I have tried to hone in on descriptiveness in the hopes that the story comes more to life. Having said that, I think I need to go further for the final draft. I want to select a scene from her life and describe it so that the reader can get an idea of where she comes from and how that has shaped her worldview. I am looking forward to the last revision and this week's reading have helped me a lot to re-envision my piece.