Storytelling Week 13: Runaway

Once upon a time, there lived a princess whose lifelong dream was to marry a true prince.  She had dated many princes but none of them were exactly what she was looking for. She wasn’t going to settle for she was a young and beautiful princess who was from the richest family and lived in the biggest castle in all the land. 

The princess had long brown hair and big blue eyes and wore the most beautiful cream dress with lace all over it.  Sometimes, she would braid her hair to one side and other times, she would leave it in perfect curls. 

On a Wednesday afternoon, her parents set up her with a prince they knew she would love.  He was beautiful.  He had luscious brown hair with brown eyes and just a little bit of scruff.  He wasn’t typical of a prince but he was everything the princess was looking for, at least in her parents eyes. 

The prince took the princess out to brunch and they talked for hours and hours.  The prince knew immediately that he loved her and wanted to be with her forever but the princess didn’t feel the same way.  Though she enjoyed his company and thought he was a very kind man, she didn’t feel the spark.  After the date, she told her parents she wasn’t sure about him and they were extremely disappointed. 

“Give him another chance,” her parents said.  “You will go out with him again and you will learn to love him.”

The princess didn’t want to but she had to follow her parents’ wishes so she went out with him once again. 

She wasn’t in the best mood on their date because she didn’t want to be there in the first place.  She played along and was the sweet princess everyone thought she was until she saw something out of the corner of her eye. 

Contrary to everything her parents would ever want for her, the princess saw a man and knew it was love at first sight.

He was a regular guy and was nothing fancy.  He wasn’t a prince and certainly wasn’t deserving of a princess but at this point, she didn’t care.  She wanted to be with him. 

She left the prince at the table and immediately approached the stranger.  They looked each other in the eyes and he knew it was love at first sight. 

The princess left with this new love of hers and took him straight to her parents.  She told them, “Mom, Dad, I couldn’t go through with the prince you set up for me but I have found someone else and we are in love.”

“Nonsense! You can’t be with this man for he isn’t even a prince!” they said.

The princess was angry at her parents but she didn’t care.  She knew what she wanted and she acted on it. 

The princess and her new love ran off together and never looked back.  That same day, they were wed.  

Castle

Author's Note: This story was based off of the original story, Princess and Pea.  In the original story, a prince was looking for a true princess and in order to test her, a pea was placed underneath twenty mattresses to see if she could feel it and indeed, she could.  He found himself a true princess.  I wanted to switch my story and have a princess try to find a worthy prince but it turns out that a prince wasn't what she wanted after all.  She wanted a regular man, not someone her parents set her up with. The story I wrote was short, sweet, and to the point because sometimes love is complicated but not for these two.  I mainly used the first paragraph of the original story to tell mine and left out all of the stuff about the testing of a true princess or, in my case, a prince.  Plus, it is possible for a princess to be with someone who isn't a prince and vice versa.  I wanted my last story to be fun and uplifting and thought adding this to my portfolio would do just that.  

Andersen Fairy Tales unit. Story source: Fairy Tales and Stories by Hans Christian Andersen, translated by H. P. Paull (1872).

Gen. Ed. Review

I am pretty sure I am taking this course as a general education western culture.  For the most part, I did not enjoy my gen ed courses here at OU.  It’s hard to remain interested in courses that don’t have any relation to your major so I didn’t think they were that great.  I did like that for my major, I had to declare a minor so that took up a good amount of my gen ed courses that I was required to take and I really enjoyed those courses. 

I waited until my last semester in school to take my gen ed math course because math is my least favorite subject but I am actually enjoying that course more than I thought I would.  I think that in general, we take a significant amount of gen ed courses and I would like to take more classes within my major or even my minor but with all the rules, too many credits from inside your major won’t count and that is kind of frustrating. 

I do think that it’s important to get a wide variety of courses in college because we should be well rounded and have a broad knowledge base.  Even though I didn’t enjoy all the classes I took, I’m still glad I took most of them so that I have a little bit better understanding of whatever subject it may be.  

knowledge

College Writing Review

Being a journalism major, writing is a huge part of what I do every day.  Even though the writing I do in this course isn’t quite the same as the writing I do in journalism, I think that any writing course I take is beneficial to me in the long run.  One of my first semesters here I took expository writing, what is work.  It was the most writing intense class that I’ve ever taken and it really helped me become a better and well-rounded writer. 

I think that this class taught me a lot about how to write more narrative based stories or novel based stories.  I’m so used to writing news stories that have to be very structured and this course allowed me to be a little bit more creative and explore some different aspects of writing that I don’t get to explore that often. 

I think that it’s important for people to take writing courses in college even if writing isn’t their strong point because it’s not something that you’ll be able to avoid in life.  You’ll always have to write and it’s important to know how to do it and what makes a good story. 

I’m fortunate that we were able to read so many other students’ blogs because it helped me develop my own writing a little bit better.  I really enjoyed this course and the writing aspects that went along with it!

Writing

Reading Diary A: Grimm Unit

This week I decided to read stories from the Brothers Grimm LibriVox unit.  One of the stories from the first half of the unit that I really enjoyed was Rapunzel.  Though I have never actually read the story until now, I knew of its general plot and storyline so it was nice to get a chance to finally read it.  My favorite part of the story was when Rapunzel let her hair down. 

“Rapunzel, Rapunzel,
Let down your hair to me.

Rapunzel had magnificent long hair, fine as spun gold, and when she heard the voice of the enchantress, she unfastened her braided tresses, wound them round one of the hooks of the window above, and then the hair fell twenty ells down, and the enchantress climbed up by it.”

I thought the use of adjectives to describe Rapunzel’s hair was excellent and really allowed me to imagine what that looked like. 

Another story that I enjoyed from the unit was The Straw, the Coal, and the Bean.  I thought the story was different from some of the others in this unit which I appreciated.  It made me laugh that the inanimate objects like the bean and the coal and the straw could all talk and were appreciate that they escaped their death of burning in the fire of losing their skin and being made into broth. 

Overall, I thought this unit was full of fun and quirky stories and I really enjoyed them.  It seemed like some of the stories were a bit random and didn’t fit together like some of the other stories in the European units but I kind of like it that way.  

Disney's Rapunzel

Portfolio

Here you can find a few of my favorite stories so far.  Feel free to comment and leave suggestions! 

Storytelling Week 13: Runaway

Storytelling Week 11: The Mystery of the Poptart

Storytelling Week 6: The Game 

Storytelling Week 5: The Tree

Reading Diary B: Andersen Unit

 I really loved part one of the Little Mermaid story.  The word choice and language in these stories is so fun and vibrant and really descriptive.  I also like how positive and bright the story is at the beginning.  The descriptions of the scenery made it really easy to imagine what the sea must have looked like and the types of creatures and nature you would see under the sea like the flowers being as red as the sunset and the marble statue that was carved out of white stone and the blue sands. 

One of my favorite parts of the second story was the paragraph about the large ship.  It was easy to imagine what was going on and even easier to imagine the young prince.  He was described as the most beautiful of all, with large black eyes and sixteen years old. 

Even though this story was turned into a Disney movie, the writing is very mature.  I think that sometimes people underestimate the writing of a children’s story because of the content, not because of the actual writing itself. 

I think if I were to retell this story I would focus on the first one and include even more detail about what under the sea looked like.  It would be interesting to use the kind of descriptions the author used in these stories and make it a little darker instead.  Though I usually don’t like to turn my stories darker than the original, I think it would make for an interesting story and the way the scenery would be described would be really different. 

Overall, I really liked the Little Mermaid and the entire unit as a whole.  The story was just how I imagined and remembered from the movie as a little kid.  I had never read the stories until now; I had only seen the movie.  I’m glad I was able to know the story from the writing, not just the movie.  

The Little Mermaid 

Reading Diary A: Andersen Fairy Tales Unit

I thought the plot of the first story, Princess and Pea, was pretty interesting.  I liked how the Prince was trying to decipher whether the princesses he came across were real princesses or not.  He finally realized she was a real princess after she slept on top of twenty mattresses with a single pea on the very bottom and said that she slept poorly because she could feel something hard.  They concluded that only a real princess would be that sensitive and would be able to feel a pea under all those mattresses.  I thought the ending was a little strange though how they put the pea in a museum.  It didn’t seem to fit with the rest of the story but I still liked it overall. 

Another story I liked was The Emperor’s New Suit.  I think that I might try and retell this story for the storytelling post this week.  I particularly like the beginning of the story which is about an emperor who spent all of his money on clothes because his only ambition in life was to be well dressed.  I think it might be fun to retell this story from a woman’s point of view and also maybe from a college girl’s point of view because I personally know a lot of people who spend all of their money on clothes even when they have other things they need to be taking care of instead. 

I am looking forward to reading the story of the Little Mermaid tomorrow and depending on how well I like the story, I might consider retelling some parts of the original for my storytelling post this week instead of retelling the Emperor’s New Suit.  

Princess and Pea