Skip to main content

Reading Notes: The Man in the Moon and Pygmalion

Hello! 



I couldn’t quite decide how to start these notes, so I decided I would stick with that theme and take style notes over how the stories in the anthology were started. Many of them started with some form of “once upon a time,” or “one day” this included the stories in, The divine, Tricksters, and the Fairytales sections. This is a beginning I think a lot of us are familiar with from fairytales and has almost become a cliché in some ways. Unless I was going to write a fairytale, I don’t think that I would use this tool to start a story and even then, I might not.


The other stories in the anthology had what I called a “cold start,” to distinguish them from the stories that used the “once upon a time” start. There were a few similarities that I noticed.
The stories in the Origins section were a very cold start. For instance, “The Man in the Moon” only states that there was a blacksmith that didn’t like his job. We don’t learn anything about who he is as a person, his life, or his surroundings. There was no character development or back story to ease the reader in which seemed to make me focus less on the character and more on what message the story was trying to convey. This could be intentional, but in my own stories I think I would prefer to give more context.

In the Supernatural, Metamorphosis, and Fables sections, in the opening there was either character development or scene development that helped me as a reader better engage with the characters and the story. In “Pygmalion” we, as readers, get a description not only of the characters motivations but also of his past. This sets the stage for the reader to be invested in Pygmalion’s emotions which are a central part of the story.

For my story, I think that I would rather start with this later kind of opening, because I would prefer that my readers be more engaged with the characters and invest in them.
Bibliography:
The Man in the MoonFrom Laos Folk-Lore by Katherine Neville Fleeson (1899)
Pygmalion” from Ovid's Metamorphoses, translated by Tony Kline (2000)

Photo (Once Upon a Time on a Vintage TypewriterVia PublicDomainPictures 

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Assignments, and Tigers, and Bears! Oh, My!

Hello again! "Light Reading" After looking over the core assignments and the extra credit assignments, I am looking forward to the work for this semester with a mixture of excitement and apprehension.You know that feeling of reading something you wrote a long time ago? The one where you cringe a lot? I am having that feeling currently and we haven't really even started writing. While more enjoyable reading and creative writing will be a welcome change to the routine of my normal semester, it has been a while since I have had to really sit down and write anything worth reading. So I hope you can all bear with me through this experience and hopefully provide some feedback, so we can all cringe a little less in the future.  Wish me luck! Photo via flickr by  quattrostagioni

Famous Last Words: Migraines

Hey there! As you may have guessed already because this is an extra credit post, I fell behind last week. This time partially due to procrastination and partially due to a migraine. It was great. Let me tell you about it.  I had been feeling really great all week, getting my work done, not too stressed, and like usual I was planning to do the three weekend assignments on Sunday. Yes, I know I shouldn't wait until the last day to do them. Yes, I know this whole thing could have been avoided by doing them early, but hey, hind sight, spilled milk, you know the drill. Plus, I didn't have any other homework due on Monday, unlike usual, so I thought I would have plenty of time. (Here is where the ominous music should play.) However, that afternoon I started having a migraine attack. This quickly spiraled into me sitting and staring at the wall until it stopped later that night. Sadly, I didn't get much work done, as you can imagine.  Luckily I am back on my feet today, alth...

Introduction

Hello!  My name is Cat and although this will be a blog about mythology and folklore, today I want to tell you all a little bit about myself and my summer. So, to start off I am a civil engineering student here at the University of Oklahoma. I will be graduating in December, but I will be staying on for another year to complete my master’s degree, also in civil engineering but with a focus on structural engineering. Civil engineering includes the design of buildings, infrastructure, water supply systems, waste water treatment systems, and traffic control systems to name a few.  Over this summer I had the opportunity to work as an intern for a civil engineering company and learned a lot from the experience. I learned to design pump stations, outline drainage areas, how to do the runoff calculations for inlets, culverts and drainage ditches, and a bunch of stuff about low impact development, but most importantly I learned that I don’t like doing any of those things....