?”Storytelling is the creative demonstration of truth. A story is the living proof of an idea, the conversion of idea into action. A story?s event structure is the means by which you first express and then prove your idea?”
——Robert McKee STORY (1999)
There are two parts to this week’s lecture—comments on our blog posts and story narration. Speaking of blogs and narrative, there’s actually a link between them—both about life stories. The former is updated regularly which documents the blogger’s everyday experience, which is a type of narrative; so it’s interesting that these two concept should’ve been put together as topics in the same lecture.
I’ve always thought that keeping a blog for the course is a great idea so that I can document my growth in media studies with a public medium, while also generate new ideas from blogging (because it takes a great amount of thinking if I were to write a deeply, thoroughly reflective blog). After Rachel’s presentation, I learnt two things. One is that I’ve been spending too much time every week just to write more than four hundred words for each blog. Before I actually started blogging, I did understand that the purpose of this is to keep a record of all sorts of media-related experiences or reflections; however, I got carried away by focusing on writing. One of my friend who is not in this course joked that I was not a media student, rather, a English literature student or someone who studies creative writing. It’s time to make a change. 🙂 The second thing that I learnt is the DIEP structure of writing reflections. Although I am able to come up with many thoughts on one matter, this method has a scientific advantage in providing me a great starting point. It is usually hard to find somewhere to begin with when you have too much ideas going on at the smae time in your brain. There’s the DIEP structure:
DIEP
D – Describe objectively ONE thing you learned; I – Interpret the insight; E – Evaluate the effectiveness and usefulness of the learning; P – Plan how this information will be useful to you
The passion I have for narrative is indescribable. I have always loved a story; I would like to read or listen to any types of stories because I suppose that’s the only way to know about our true selves. Even if we know the structure of a human body, we still don’t quite grasp the point of our existence and our identity. Decisions made and things that happen in a story, nevertheless, reveal our actions and the reasons behind it indicate who we are. Each of stories shares similarities yet still varies a lot from one to another which is the same with human beings—we share the same humanity but differ in personalities.
Due to my love for stories, I have brought the book, “Story” by Robert Mckee, to Melbourne from China the last time I flew here. What I didn’t expect is that Brian talked about some quotations from the book during the lecture; and my favourite part was the clip shown about conflicts with a “Robert Mckee” voiceover. He was so irritated and pissed off when an writer asked about whether a story without a conflict is plausible. Really amusing to watch him shouting at the author about how important it is for a story to have conflicts and progression. Such emotional reactions really have emphasized that a good story does not possess a flat plot line, rather, full of problems to be solved (just like real life).
Other things learnt were elements of narrative, the Hero’s Journey (which I have learnt during high school) and the three act narrative structure. These are basic knowledge that I should know about, but I won’t elaborate here in my blog. What I think I will do is to spend sometime finishing the book “Story” and post some entries about the ideas in it in the future.
(The book “Story” in Chinese)
