Audris' Adventure

Reflection

Note: I wrote this story for a creative writing class, this is a reflection describing the skills I used. 

Point of view

The point of view I used is third person omniscient. For example, Audris' point of view is addressed in the first sentence after the prologue, "Audris had become desperate enough to attempt to see the Council, even though she knew it wouldn't work." Later on in the story, after Cal is introduced, his thoughts and feelings are revealed as well. For example, "He couldn't find any reassuring words, but he knew how hard this was for Audris and wanted to comfort her." The reason I used this point of view is because some scenes were easier to write from one character's perspective than the other, also hearing the thoughts of both characters lets the reader get to know both of them more intimately.

Craft and Style

Word choice:

One word that was particularly hard for me to chose was "condescending" in the paragraph, ""Something upstream must be tainting it... unless of course, the books you read are wrong." Audris said in a rather condescending tone. Typically, she was patient, but with the stakes so high and every minute being of vital importance to finding her brother, she was annoyed by every slight distraction." I even had to say Audris' line out loud to my parents so that they could help me find the word.

Denotation

The definition of condescending is "showing that you believe you are more intelligent or better than other people" (Merriam-Webster Dictionary). This is the correct word to use because Audris is older than Cal, and she feels that she is leading the journey. She brought Cal along to help because he promised he'd be useful, but it seems that he's made a mistake. So, she is asserting that she is more intelligent than him believing stories that won't help her reach her goal of finding her brother.

Connotation

The adjective "condescending" is describing Audris' tone when speaking. This tone has negative feelings attached to it, no one likes to be spoken to with a condescending tone. As explained by the next sentence, Audris was annoyed because this kid she brought along with her to help was wrong about the quality of the water. The word "condescending" helps show Audris' attitude and tone because in her annoyance and frustration, she lashes out at Cal by speaking like she is better. This proved to be very unnecessary because it did help them find the dragon, but in the heat of her stress, she felt like it was a distraction.

Sentence structure:

Active

One example of an active sentence in my story is, "Halfway down, one of the blanket strips holding Cal snapped." I originally wrote this sentence as, "When Cal was halfway down..." However, I changed it to be an active sentence because it is more exciting. Even though I am using the past tense, using an active sentence makes the action more live and interesting to the reader.

Parallelism

An example of parallelism is, "And the tears would not stop. Not when Cal gingerly led her back to the fire, not when they sat down and Cal covered them both in blankets, not when he offered her food (she would not even look at it). Not when the dragon returned to the cavern, put out it's magical fire, and curled up in it's empty store." Even though the second and third sentences are not grammatically correct, each phrase starts with the words "not when..." This parallelism is used to explain a sequence of events, all related because Audris is crying through each of them.

Dichotomy

"For a second that was an eternity" is a dichotomy because a second and an eternity are two opposite measures of time. Here, I am using a metaphor to show that in reality only a very short period of time passed, yet it felt like it took forever. This greatly adds to the description of of Audris' grief because, as many people experience, when a person learns sudden devastating news, it feels like time has stopped in the time it takes to process the information.