"The only thing that infuriates me is that I have more unwritten stories in me than I can conceivably write in a life time."

-Howard Fast

Answer 2

Me, when people ask for my best answer. I'm not ready to choose!

1.  What is your EQ?

"How does an author communicate who they are through their stories?"
2.  What is your first answer? (In complete thesis statement format)

An author communicates who they are in their stories through setting.
3.  What is your second answer? (In complete thesis statement format)

An author communicates who they are in their stories through characters.
4.  List three reasons your answer is true with a real-world application for each.

Personal experience- Reflecting on my own story from Nanowrimo, I can see now how much I relate to my characters. They aren't just random choices, they are a creation of who I am and who I would like to be. Their worst qualities are my worst qualities, their interests are my interests. even the world they exist in is mirrored off of what I know.

Other author experience- Looking in the book Glimmer Train I see that I am not the only author who has experienced this. There are lots of accounts where authors admit that they pose characters and settings based off their personal life. Sometimes it's harder to find but it's usually there. Lots of the authors interviewed in Glimmer Train will support my answer. 

Obvious Patterns in analysis-Obvious Patterns is another way of saying common sense. Or maybe I mean undeniable evidence. How can you write about something you don't know? How can you escape your experiences and past?

5.  What printed source best supports your answer?

Glimmer Train-A book made completely of a wide spread of author's interviews.

NaNoWriMo-What better support than my own experience? I can share what I have felt, understood and written.

6.  What other source supports your answer?

Mentor, Alison Baker-My mentor is an author as well as a teacher. She has had nearly 16 years of higher education. I believe she qualifies as a source. By the way her answers are brilliant! I could pick her brain all day, but I will settle for our half hour meetings every Monday.

7.  Tie this together with a  concluding thought.
I am rather confident in my answers, and I know that there are more possible answers that I should explore. I might do so, just to test out if they are more promising. But for now these are my answers.

  

"It was good that I found another way to finance my writing,because it's never been just a job for me. It's been an intense all consuming that's defined,reflected,revealed,and saved me..."

-Susan Shapiro, Only as Good as Your Word

Interview 3 Reflection

This is the most relatable picture of how I conduct interviews.

1. What is the most important thing I learned from the interview?  

The most important thing I learned was my mentor’s point of view on my essential question. We had talked about authors’ influences at great length before my interview with her and that was mostly what had inspired my essential question. I think that it’s important that I have that recorded, so I can go back to it later for inspiration and direction. It’s reassuring that I have support for my answers from a fellow writer, especially when they are so much more accomplished. It’s also reassuring to know that I have not found all of the answers. Mrs. Baker brought up lots of ideas that I had never occurred to me and it has lead me down new paths of research and analysis.

2.  How has your approach to interviewing changed over the course of your senior project?

I don’t think I’m that great of an interviewer, that’s for sure! I’m pretty introverted most of the time and I think that is evident in my interviews. My questions come out awkward and lead to a lot of babbling. On top of that I usually have to stop myself from interrupting their answers and inserting my own. Then when they stop talking there are awkward pauses where I have to try and carry on the conversation, something not natural to me. Which is pretty silly considering I spend most of my free time reading other people’s conversations. You’d think I would have picked up on the skill.

Over the year I think that I have become more comfortable with the idea of interviewing. While I still don’t have ease with it, I’m definitely not limited to only emailing people anymore. I think that I have improved on my responses in conversation as well. There aren’t as many awkward cuts in conversation as there were in the first interview. I still need lots of work on my interviewing skills, but I am no longer an interview virgin, so theres that!

"The counselors I looked up to warned me straight off not to become a scribe to make a fortune or find fame. Better motivations: because there's no choice and there's nothing else you'll ever want to do nearly as much."

-Susan Shapiro, Only as Good as Your Word

Storytelling

It can be surprising to find that people don't take your topic seriously. It can be even more surprising when you find people that you admire who think that you chose an "easy way out" with your senior project.

I suppose these ideas might originate in the topic name. I chose to use storytelling over words like "writing" or "reading". I did this on purpose of course, all word choice is important. I knew that writing and reading had more educational ties to it. They made you think of essays and required reading, they didn't give you the creative side. By choosing storytelling I was making a statement. My topic would be creative, it would not be restricted to educational and factual questions, and most of all it represented my passion.

That's what this project is all about right? Learning about what you love and teaching a class about it so that maybe they can learn too.

So that is my first assumption, but I'm sure not everyone looked that deep into my topic name. Maybe what set them the wrong way was the way I did my research. Literature is fluid, as I have said countless of times. I rely mostly on interviews and personal experience to find my answers. Writing styles and rules are constantly changing so all I can really do is try and discern what matters right now. But I assure you that I am working just as hard as everyone else to find and dissect my research. Maybe even a little harder, because nothing is ever laid out for me. Everything needs to be thought through and interpreted in order to be valuable research.

Or perhaps what really bothers them is the creative aspect of it all. It's really silly to even consider, but it's possible that they have a prejudice against creative writing and anything associated. People are often taught that there is no future in the arts, including creative writing. The assumption is that writers are wasting their time, poor, or still a child. I hate to think that anyone would be trapped by these assumptions. Storytelling is such an important and incredible thing! With out story tellers we wouldn't have plays, movies, books. We wouldn't even have television. (Well we might, but it would be totally lame.) So I really don't understand where these thoughts come from.

But I am not saying all this to try and make them understand. That's not my job. My job is to explore my passion for a year and share what I find. If they don't understand that, then they are welcome to my presentation, come May. I would be glad to teach them just a little about what I love.

"I suppose I am a born novelist, for the things that I imagine are more vital and vivid to me than the things I remember. "

-Ellen Glasgow

Independent Component 2 Approval

Plan A:
My first idea is to travel to different settings like LA or the beach, a college setting or a park and write. I will create a new story for each setting with new characters and new plots. They will be short stories, maybe a thousand or so words. At each place I can wander and write notes and generally build stories. Then I can analyze all of the stories I've written to find what continues to come out of my writing and what changes between the different settings. 

The reason behind this is to explore my answers. I can analyze the different characters and what kind of world they live in.My personal experience is one of the best resources for my topic so I think this would be pretty rad.

To keep track of hours I can do a similar blog post to those during Nanowrimo. I will also take pictures at each location for proof. I will even share the titles to the short stories I write.

Being A Writer

Being a writer can be rather difficult. You might be doing ordinary tasks like grocery shopping or filling out a scholarship when BAM you really want to write! It's ridiculous, is what it is. It becomes a pulling urge and you feel antsy until you have a blank sheet or a computer in front of you. Then when you get there, you have no idea what it is that you actually want to write. So you just babble about nothing for a good ten minutes and it's rather fun. You can put it aside, satisfied. Until a half hour later...

"For a certain personality type,it seems that writing is a natural extension of reading." 

-Allen Morris Jones

Independent Component 1

I, Andrea Yzaguirre, affirm that I completed my independent component which represents approximately 56 hours and 25 minutes of work. I got the most help from the book No Plot? No Problem! by Chris Baty which was a step by step guide to surviving Nanowrimo. I also received help from my fellow nano writers via email. They sent me lots of support and encouragement! 

In the month of November I took part in National Novel Writing Month. Along side thousands of other ordinary people around the world, I decided to write a 50,000 word novel in 30 days. This seems sort of crazy, and it sort of was. 30 days to write a novel? With my schedule? With no previous experience? How was that going to work? Well the first thing I did was prepare myself. I read Chris Baty's accompanying novel and it guided me step by step. I planned my daily writing sessions, started an 'inspiration notebook' and created a playlist for writing specifically. Every day of November I was supposed to write about 1,666 words so that by the end of the month I could reach 50,000. Of course that was just a hope and in the end I often fell short of my goal. luckily a few days out of the month I would find a strange sort of inspiration and I would manage to cover large chunks of my story. It was a very stressful month as I tried to juggle senior project as well as classwork and the writing.  I went to a few meets with other writers at coffee shops or libraries where we worked side by side without discussion. Other times I would write in the back of Mr. Rivas's room on a recliner as students passed by. More often than not I would use my car rides as mandatory writing sessions. That's where I wrote most of the novel. And indeed I succeeded. On the last day of the month I managed to keep my eyes open long enough to cover the last 7,000 or so words.  I ended at 10:50 pm with 50,103 words and I had officially won. It was absolutely amazing! I had received my certificate from the official Nanowrimo website and then proceeded to have a dance party by myself as everyone else in the house slept.  If you would like the day-to-day breakdown then just look at my posts tagged Nanowrimo. At the end of every day I posted an update on the writing  as well as my new word count.

This was a perfect assignment for me. It not only introduced me to other authors and new resources, it also gave me first hand experience as an author. When I reflect on my research I can now examine it in a whole new way. I don't have to speculate on how an author might react to something because I can use my own reaction. Not to mention it was really eye opening on a whole new spectrum. I know a lot more about the formatting and procedures involved in writing. Authors don't usually like to talk about those sorts of things very much so this was perfect. 

The following photos are in chronological order. 

Here we have the first meeting with my fellow Nano writers, prior to November. 

Snap chat is a great way to log anything so of course I used it to count the days. 

This was from Day 1. 

I think this speaks for itself. Things were difficult in the beginning.

The seniors went on a hike and I took advantage of that by taking 

photos and stealing rocks for reference.

This was taken the day of my first write in! Local Nano writers and I met at a cafe in Rancho to write in silent companionship.  

Ah yes, I built a writing fort along the way to help me concentrate.  

An important thing about writing was to keep snacking. Other wise you would get sleepy, so I ate lots of oranges and chocolate covered blueberries.  

This was taken towards the end of the month near Thanksgiving. I was excused from helping in the kitchen as long as I was writing! 

I recieved this the last day of the month. I had to copy and paste my story into a word counter on the NaNoWrMo website. It didn't post the story or anything, just counted it up and announced I had won! It was a great moment and I plan to print this out and put it on my wall.

Lesson 2 Reflection

I'm so relieved it's all over!

1.What are you most proud of in your Lesson 2 Presentation and why?
I am most proud of my hook and activity because they were giving me the most trouble when I was planning my lesson. I couldn't figure out how to involve them without boring them or not making sense. I din't want to ask too much of them but at the same time I didn't want it to be lame.
2. a.     What assessment would you give yourself on your Lesson 2 Presentation (self-assessment)?
       AE       P          AP       CR       NC
     b.     Explain why you deserve that grade using evidence from the Lesson 2 component contract.
I think I deserve an AE because I think I did really well. My activity was fun and interesting and it reflected my whole presentation. I spent a lot of time putting together my answer and it took even more work to make the presentation flow more like a story than an infomercial. I did my best for it to seem more like a show than a presentation. Not to mention I spent a lot of time making that powerpoint pretty.
3. What worked for you in your Lesson 2?
The power point, but i'm not keen to depend on a power point. The pictures definitely worked well, and so did having my EQ on all the important slides. I am thinking of just using pictures for my final presentation, like a slide show.
4. What didn't work? If you had a time machine, what would you have done differently to improve your Lesson 2?
If I had a time machine I would go back and remind myself that the screen is a touch screen. I would have had less awkward pauses if I had just remembered that. The pauses made my presentation sound choppy and lame. I also might give myself a thumbs up and a hug so I could be less nervous while presenting.
5. What do you think your answer #2 is going to be
Character, I am already planning it out.
other options might be:













-character personalities
-morals
-themes
-dedications
-word choice