English has always been my favorite subject in school. I love to read and write, so when I entered Forms of Narrative I thought it would be the same as other English classes. I was prepared to read books, memoirs, and documentaries and write boring papers that were a million pages long. I was surprised, however, to find that this class allowed me to express a more creative side of myself. The blogs that we wrote allowed us to say what we honestly thought about assignments and different aspects of the class. We were allowed, and encouraged to be funny, straight forward, and unique, even if it meant not following the traditional rules of writing that have been drilled into our heads all through previous years of schooling. The class was made to be very interesting and fun. We got to analyze TV shows, computer games, and comics. To be honest, I never read comics when I was a child so while writing about “Little Nemo” and other comics came easily to many members of the class, this was one of the more challenging assignments that I completed during the semester.

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For my final project, I will write and analyze a story that I will create. In the story I will use techniques learned in class that will demonstrate my understanding of the course content. My analysis will be about three pages long and explain why and how I used this form of narrative as well demonstrate what gives the story narrativity.

For my final project, I weighed the pros and cons of both the creative option and the analytical option. I finally settled on the creative option, not because I think we've exhausted our analytical approaches in the past, but because the creative option gives more leeway into what you can produce. I chose to produce a Choose your own adventure with purely pictures. The only text on the page will be the choices, and even those will be fairly simplistic. It garners quite a bit of dissection, to interpret the picture and subsequently the event it is describing. I'm by no means an artist, so this will also present quite a challenge to both me as the artist and the reader. I may incorporate snippets of actual pictures as elements of each picture. Specifically, I may draw a person, but not the chair they're sitting in, instead I might find a picture of a chair and implement that etc.. I'm not sold on what story I intend to follow, however I don't want it to be a run of the mill abducted-by-aliens-sort of story. I hope it turns out the way I'm imagining it to, and makes sense to the readers.

A while back we talked about how narrative plays in sports media. In the continual search for intriguing plot lines, the media picks and chooses what narrative is going to be in play. They will usually try to make a story out of anything but as soon as Brett Favre chose to sign with the Minnesota Vikings, it was almost too easy. It was as if they were handed the Bible. The media, mainly Sportscenter but other media outlets as well, had a frenzy even when Favre was "retired". It was too much, taken to the extreme. Nobody had cared what he did and people were becoming sick of it. But when he decided to return to Minnesota instead of Green Bay, they had a feasible plot they could work around and spin towards the audience.
For those that don't watch much football, the Minnesota Vikings and the Green Bay Packers have one of the most historic rivalries in the NFL. The Green Bay Packers are located in Green Bay, Wisconsin (two Midwestern teams). Brett Favre has been on the Packers for 15 years (1992-2007) and became a natural "hometown hero". Setting up this plot as Minnesota as the "villain" in this story, it is comparable to Luke Skywalker going to the "darkside".

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Ever heard of the old adage, "To list freedoms is to limit them"? Essentially it means that boundless, or implied freedoms are better left unlisted, because once they are committed to paper, it's as if we will jump circles around them, trying to find loopholes in the rhetoric. The Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative controversy of 1972 presents a lucrative example. So in terms of the infamous Choose Your Own Adventure books, you're not exactly choosing your own adventure. You're choosing from the list of adventures they give you. Now, I am by no means knocking the CYOA books, they're probably the most interactive and open-ended form of fictional narrative that exists. But it's important to think about the true "freedom" that exists with CYOA books. True CYOA would imply you write it yourself. Looking for loopholes around the meaning of a word "choose your own adventure" puts me at an impasse.

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Tuesday night, instead of watching the World Series game, I experienced real-time media another way: I followed election results on Twitter, via the #Maine hashtag, which tracked the results of Maine's Proposition 1, which if passed would ban gay marriage.

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Narrative, storytelling, surrounds us wherever we go. It seems that in order to understand something, the human mind has to convert it into a story of some sort. Something happens, then something else happens.
Take even the very most basic of things and you'll find a story.
The most basic of songs have a tale behind them--a story they tell. The most simple of video games have a story--even if it's just "Aliens have invaded the Earth. Take your tank and shoot down the aliens." We even make stories out of stories--hence we get "The Making of" videos.
We often recount to one another the events of our daily lives, as stories--some of us even embellish or twist these events to our own whims for effect.
Is this just a basic function of the human mind? To turn cause-and-effect into story?
Perhaps it is just something essential to how the human mind thinks.

Whether or not music tells a story has been quite the topic of debate in class and on the blog. However, assuming that music with words can indeed be considered narrative (which I think at this point, it is safe to assume), a natural question comes to light.

What of music videos? Can they be considered part of the same narrative text? Are they paratext? Are they essential parts of the narrative text without which the story of the song isn't complete? Sure, some videos simply add to the song, extending the song's narrative, and illustrating what was previously only words, but then there are songs that take on an entirely different meaning when viewed with the video. Occasionally, one might even encounter a music video that has absolutely nothing to do (or very little to do) with the song.

In the first vein:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u4-aUiddpUo
The Kid's Aren't Alright, by Offspring. The song is about Urban Decay, and it's pretty clear from the video.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AuK2A1ZqoWs
Handlebars, by Flobots. The video follows the words image by image.

In the second vein, there are a couple:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VF2lJ5VtQbs

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So I'm into Steampunk, a subgenre of science fiction, and I'm currently reading a marvelous book called The Glass Book of the Dream Eaters, by the marvelously verbose Gordon Dahlquist. It's taking me a while to get through, partly because it's almost 800 pages, but partly because the breaks are really, really weird.

I'm used to typical novels - a scene happens, the scene ends, and then there's an extra line break before the next paragraph. This is your cue, as a reader, that you've reached a good stopping point: The bit you were reading is all wrapped up, and you're free to fold the page down and continue at another time. Even in books that don't have chapters, that extra little space is usually enough to let you know where the comfortable breaks between things are.

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