Narrative Workshop Blog Post (2)

The top 3 insights I got from workshop today was on characterization, redundancy, and the conclusion. While analyzing Maddie's narrative, she chose to characterize her friend more than her, so in the end, we knew more about her friend than her. It was important to follow the mentor to an extent, but she also needed to add details about herself to help the reader understand who the narrator is. Redundancy is something that could add emphasis to a narrative, but too much slows the reader down and doesn't create an efficiently paced narrative. In Da In's narrative, she told us she had chicken pox quite a few times on the first page, however we already knew this from the title, so it was unnecessary to add these many details. Lastly, it's important to end your narrative well enough so the reader doesn't have many lingering questions. Back to Maddie's narrative, I had many questions when I read her narrative, mainly because it ended so abruptly and didn't provide a sense of closure for the reader. To follow the mentor text, she needed to add an overall theme to organize her narrative better so the reader wouldn't be lost at the end, which Maddie didn't yet do. This is why her ending was so confusing, because she didn't set it up throughout her piece. One thing I can do better is to work on coming up with questions before the workshop to ask the person. This is because the author has a better understanding for why the readers are confused and what they can improve.

I received a lot of feedback for my narrative. Mainly, everyone thought my ending and reflection needed work. They thought it was confusing and delt with too many ideas in just one or two paragraphs. This way, I wasn't able to end my narrative strongly, and ended up creating a lot of questions for the reader. In addition, since my mentor text was Living Like Weasels, I had to work on making an eel symbolize something. This way, I would be able to expand on how this animal encounter affected me as a person. One thing they liked was the encounter I chose, because they said it was very similar to the mentor text encounter, and allowed me to reflect extensively on what that moment meant to me. One last thing I need to work on is cutting out redundant pieces throughout my narrative, because I over describe things in places, and edit my tenses because my mistakes made it hard for the reader to follow my story. I should also focus more on the actual moment itself and expand on that, because that part is the crux of my narrative. 

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