This is another independent workshop, following along the lines of the last. It will start with questions to ask yourself and respond to in a 10 min word war, which you then must link in your first response, followed by information for you to read and respond to if you choose, and then we'll get on to reviewing.
This time the Basics are a bit longer and include an extra explanation.
Intro Questions
1. What do you think makes a good chapter review?
2. And what do you like to look at when you review chapters?
3. As Knights of the Green Room, we often come across chapters that are all by themselves. How do you tackle reviewing only a single chapter and not the entire book?
The Basics
Plot - The progression of the story, and what happens in the story, the action.
Tone - The way the story expresses tension, reliability, truthfulness, and the voice of the author.
Theme - The main point of the story as derrived from exploring the reasons the plot proceeded as it did.
Setting - Where the story takes place along with weather, and decor
Conflict - The main problem in the story usually described as person vs [self/society/nature/person/etc.]
Characters - The actors who influence or respond to the plot. Sometimes the appearance of setting, such as cloudy days, can act as a character to express tension.
First Response
1) Assignment: Use Word Wars to write for 10 minutes on the questions we started with. Copy them onto your Word War, and then begin to write either with the questions, or beneath them. Either copy the results over, or copy the url and post it.
2) Food for thought: After reading about the basic elements of poetry, tell us what you think! Did you already know it? Did you learn something new? Do you think we need to redefine one of them? Tell us in your first response.
3) Post your first response with "First Response" at the top.
Tackling a Review
The Green Room is a medley of works across genres and style, the most abundant being novel chapters. There's always more of them because they stick around longer and no one wants to tackle them for one main reason: they're disjointed from the rest of the novel. At first, they all seem difficult to review but as Knights we know with enough work, we can slay any Green Room beast.
When targeting a chapter, often people bounce to nitpicking over grammar and spelling because they can't find anything else. Or they aren't willing to work towards finding anything else. Think back to the Critique Sandwich and how it's put together.
Nitpicks on grammar are great as a side to the sandwich but shouldn't be the main course. If you're focusing on these minimal parts, you're just acting as a spellchecker rather than a reviewer who looks at the overall story and message.
Now you know that you're looking at the plot but how are we looking at only one isolated piece of the plot? Break it down. Most chapters can be looked at as a short story but be careful because they still are attached to the main book. Spend time looking at character, tone, and setting in depth too since you don't have the whole plot in front of you.
When a chapter opens up, most likely there will be some setting to give you a sense of where the event will be taking place and later assists with what the characters are doing. From here you can ask yourself questions about the work and the writing.
You may find that the setting and character interactions conflict, or that something just feels off. At first, you may see nothing visibly wrong with a work, but often if you look closer there will be little things that don't add up. They may not seem like much separately but together they create the larger problem of, drumroll please, plot holes. Plot hole are such infectious little things that will spread quickly across a novel if given the chance. If you catch them early on and talk about them in your review, the writer may be able to fix them.
With an idea of what to look for while you're reading a chapter, try the following activity.
Activity #2
Once you've posted your first response, read the following chapter and respond to the questions below.
1. What are your first thoughts after reading this chapter?
2. What did you like and dislike about it? Why?
3. Do the character interactions seem realistic or does something seem off? Is the sentence structure varied and appropriate for what is going on? Do any sentences make you stop or re-read them?
If so, why do they seem off?
4. Did the chapter begin smoothly? Are the characters and setting easy to understand? Is the setting description enough for you to be able to picture the story events?
5. Treating it as a short story, is it interesting to read?
6. Does the plot develop during the chapter? Does the chapter feel like filled space?
Spoiler
“I’ve traveled every road in this here land.”
My summer started with my family not understanding why I wanted to take a break in-between graduating high school and starting college. To them, it was the ultimate mistake because it may or may not possibly skew my results of getting in. To me, it was an escape from their insanity, control and a chance to finally get to know the rest of the family. To me, it was just another lie that I had told them about what had happened a few years earlier, a lie saying that I was still in school. By technicality, I was really still attending a school but I left out the part where all of the teachers were ghosts and departed souls who had been dead for over 500 years. This would eventually lead to my downfall but at the time it was just another white lie.
I had also forgotten to mention to them that in the process of my great-great-however many greats-grandmother dying, I had become the champion of the McGrath and Shrew covens. My life had changed in that instant where the collective consciences of the over 300 Shrews and 15 McGraths before me, transferred over to my mind. It gave me new insights and new ways to fight but the burden to my mind turned me into something darker. That is what I was keeping from my family. That side of me where it would scare them into what I had become, someone who was more like a serial killer than anything else. When you can easily describe yourself as a serial killer and what you do every day as your 9 to 5 job doesn’t scare you anymore, you find yourself in a place where the world doesn’t particularly care for you.
And so for two years after the accident, I searched and hunted down people within range of the small island floating in the middle of the Atlantic, which the McGrath school of magic had once called home. I had been left with a prophecy to fulfill before I got my next mission (whatever that was) and a place on the council. It worked for a short amount of time but I soon found that many of the people I wanted information from, were not within broom flight distance of the house.
Three ago, I had crafted a solution of how to stay in the United States, closer to all my contacts, without really alerting my parents to my return. There was a property that my parents owned on the Maryland and West Virginia border, a lot built when the canals rolled through, and had stayed for all the time after they failed. It was where I had spent every single one of my summers working, carrying on the dream of a man I had barely known and his wife that I had never gotten to meet. Well at least I had never gotten to meet her the first time around at living, ghostly meetings don’t count the same way that normal ones do.
These were the thoughts that ran through my mind as I shifted the truck out of park while waiting for the line at the dump to thin down. My plan had been working well for the past few years but recently I hadn’t had much luck finding my targets, the list of which was never ending. The hiding corpses business wasn’t going particularly well either. I heard on the radio on the way up the mountain that the WV state troopers had found two mangled bodies outside of Harper’s Ferry. This time wasn’t my work but I knew that if these bodies were so easily found, it was either done by a green champion or by a coven trying to make a point. If the politics of covens were described as complicated 5 years ago, one could now describe them as a pain in the behind.
A horn honked behind me and I was awoken from this dream like state. It was hard to find a parking spot so instead I just left the engine running when I ran up to see what price tickets were this time. The sign this week read “$1.00 per sticker, do not combine previous values.”
Mr. Gregson stepped out of the old farm truck behind and simply said, “well that’s bull. Doesn’t 50 cents plus 50 cents, add up to 1 dollar?” He asked this turning to me for response.
“It may be bull but it’s our only way to dispose of trash. If we think it’s bad here, what would you think if we had to go into Cumberland or somewhere?”
He huffed and pulled a single obviously crafted counterfeit bill out of his pocket, agreeing to go along with the sign. I on the other hand had simply replicated the stickers I bought last time, being a little bit more conniving than the rest of the magical townspeople.
My great-great-grandparents on my father’s mother’s father’s side, were people that you would use odd to describe while trying to be nice about their quirks. He (Mac) had worked for the railway, as that was the main employment in the town of Cumberland, as an engineer and many other things. When he retired from that, he worked for the school in Oldtown as a handyman of sorts, retired from that eventually and went on to take the record for oldest citizen of the town. He was 103 when he died in 2001 but it was not these collections of accomplishments that intrigued me, it was his other hobbies. When I refer to hobbies, I am of course referring to his sideline ways to make money which included being a mechanic and selling moonshine before and after Prohibition. This is the real gem of his life, in my opinion.
His wife (Kate) had died somewhere around 20 years before I was born and no one ever really told me exactly when she died. All I knew is that she was never there and hadn’t been for some time, leaving me the house and her craft projects as the only way to get to know her. She was in fact a witch, another thing I view as a highlight that other people shy away from.
“She was just a simple medicine woman with a knowledge of old remedies.”
“That’s not what the neighbors say.”
Who knows, she may actually be alive somewhere.
But the real beginning of my story starts at the point when I got to this house, unpacked everything, and found myself in the need of a job. I had worked many jobs in my short lifetime and could apply myself almost anywhere in any field. The people up here knew me and who my family was and most likely knew that I was not going to cheat them out of their money or their souls. I never did get around to applying anywhere that summer because my main source of income, came directly to me.
Her name was Maria G. Jones.
Homework
Now that you've tackled a chapter, for homework go out and tackle 5 more. Use the questions to help create your review and come back with the results. Post them with any comments or feedback you received in return for your reviews, and anything you'd like to talk about.