Not knowing the level at which Jeremy is able to write, I would say that for this (hopefully) first draft of the Gothic Short Story, he will be able to develop it into a well-thought out narrative. As I began reading his short story, I was immediately hooked by his attention to detail. His use of descriptive words is sometimes out of context but it gets the job done. Some of his other strengths included how he illustrated his own imagination. Jeremy really seemed to let the story become him and I could see, even though we actually do not know Jeremy at all, that he was putting his own personality and voice into this story.
If Jeremy and I were to have a writing conference, I would start off small with my revising suggestions. I would encourage Jeremy to take a look at the narrative he had written and actually read it out loud. I think if he were to do this, he would catch a lot of his small dialog mistakes and would see how some of his grammar and word choices were incorrect. For example, by reading the story out loud, I am hopeful that Jeremy would realize the sentence "As they ran through the front door then door slammed violently behind them" needs to be reworded in order to make sense. While I know that all of his grammar, verb tense, and word choice problems could not be fixed in this way, I think it would be a good jumping-off point for discussing these problems.
Another thing I would ask Jeremy to take a look at would be the end of his story. I might ask him how he would feel if he were to watch a really great scary movie or read a horror novel only to find out that it was only a dream. I think that we all secretly (and insanely) want to be frightened by those things and/or find out if there is some truth behind the fiction. In Jeremy's case, his story would be much more exciting if his ending didn't fizzle into a dream, but left the readers wanting more; wanting to find out the fate of the characters.
Overall, I think Jeremy is off to a pretty good start in his Gothic Short Story. I think that he will need many drafts in order to be able to pull off this story. His flow needs to be developed so that while he is getting his own personality across, other people are able to understand him.
1 comment:
I completely agree with you. I think Jeremy has really great ideas, and he has a solid voice throughout the piece. The story is really creative, and kind of creepy. I also agree that the ending needs to be fixed. I HATE when books or movies just end with everything being a dream. The importance of the story is lost because of that. I also agree that he needs to read his story aloud in order to find his own grammatical errors. I read a lot of other people's posts and they are just too harsh on poor Jeremy. It was a very creative story. I know I could never be that creative when asked to write a Gothic short story. I know sometimes the writing style and grammar are bad, but I think some of the readers were letting that affect their view of the actual story too much. I think it was great. Good job Jeremy!
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