Week of 11/13 - 11/20

Lately I have been working on my personal statements for colleges and over the thanksgiving break I have around ten essays or so to write. While working on these essays I have been wondering what makes a good personal statement? Obviously, it has to be personal and show something about you, but what is the best way to show you personality in an essay and make the reader connect with you and want to know more about you? I don't know the answer to this question, otherwise I'd have all my essays done by now. But I think that one way to help the reader connect with you is to include little traits about yourself that are common to all people, thus making yourself more relate-able, such as like a little nervous tick you have or something along those lines. I feel that details like this, though small and seemingly insignificant, are in some ways more real and common amongst people.

Week of 11/8 - 11/12

I have yet to talk about the book I have been reading for Stephanie's class, so I figured I would take a break from writing about tragedies and talk about Atlas Shrugged. Currently, I am about half way through the book and it's really staring to get interesting. Regardless of her political ideologies, Rand is a phenomenal writer. I've realized that throughout the novel she typically will briefly reference a character at one point, then start talking about them more later in the book, and ultimately have at least one of the main characters meet them. It's like she's constantly setting up interactions and events that are unlikely to happen yet happen anyway, and when they due the reader is blown away. This lead me to realize that this plot device is used in many novels and helps to make them extraordinary because so many unlikely events are taking place. It seems common for authors to allude to characters or events so that they can make them cross paths to the amazement of the reader later in the story.
Also, when considering the fact that Atlas Shrugged is almost 1,100 pages I keep wondering how much of the story Rand planned out before she started writing the novel and how much she included in the spur of the moment. The plot is seems so intricate and covers so many interactions between a very large amount of characters I find it hard to imagine her meticulously planning out a novel of this proportions before even starting to write it.

Tragedy Creation

This week in class we have been working on our tragedy essays and I am now starting  write my story. Moving forward I am concerned about how I will make a story so short be tragic. I'm afraid that I am not going to have enough to adequately develop the protagonist so that the readers will actually care about his fate. I also feel that as I'm writing I am going to be tempted to keep writing so that the story will be more emotional. I like the idea of each of us creating our own tragedy, but I would like them to be longer and more substantial. It think it would be awesome to work on them in small increments over the next month so that by the end we have a more dynamic story.
My story is set in post apocalyptic Corinth and is about the leader of the town's past coming back to haunt and ultimately destroy. I'm trying to make a throw-back to Oedipus the King to kind of give tribute to Sophocles. However, even after reading the fifty page I didn't really have a strong with Oedipus or care about what happened to him. Granted, I feel that this can be attributed to the fact that he was a horrible person throughout the play. But even then I feel that if Sophocles couldn't generate enough character development for our class I am dubious that I will be able to any better.