Monday, March 14, 2016

Playful Prewriting: The Neverending Story


Ever since the first read, The Neverending Story was magic to me. It was weird and unlike anything I've ever read and I loved it. It touched on elaborate themes like hope/despair, truth/lies, reality/story, desires/changeableness, remembering/forgetting, and eternity. How all those inter-played was fascinating to me. The most meaningful quotes that I personally connect with are along those themes.
 They are forgotten dreams from the human world... Once someone dreams a dream, it can't just drop out of existence. But if the dreamer can't remember it, what becomes of it? It lives on in Fantastica, deep under our earth." (The Neverending Story pg. 373)
On top of that, it was ridiculous and I loved that too.
Now that he was in danger of getting his wish, he would have liked best to run away. But since you can't run "away" unless you have some idea where you're at, Bastian did something perfectly absurd. He turned over on his back like a beetle and played dead. He made himself as small as possible and pretended he wasn't there. (The Neverending Story pg. 176.)

I've talked about it with a lot of people so far. A common opening question I'm asked is "How is school going?" and I take that opportunity to tell whichever poor unsuspecting soul all about The Neverending Story and the paper I am working on. What I've discovered so far is that most people aren't really familiar with the book but they are very familiar with the movie (1984). Some people ADORE the movie as a childhood favorite and one person can quote most of it. That stands opposite of me, as I can't stand the movie and have refused to watch it for probably 15 years. For research purposes, I might have to break that longstanding rule, to try to understand what moves people about the movie and if it's anything like what I love about the book.

My pre-writing consisted of mostly sticky notes.

I annotated the book as I reread it and pulled out quotes.

I organized a second set of sticky notes into three camps. Format, Characters, and Themes
Characters
Themes





 In a lot of ways, there is too much that happens in the book, to have included plot points in my sticky note clusters.

Originally I was hoping to be able to take the fact that it is an A to Z book and examine that in my paper. Since this work was translated from German, however, I won't be able to take that to it's full breadth, though I definitely want to include the visual aspects of the book in my paper.

4 comments:

  1. Love how you described how the book made you feel and I like how you are willing to look at the movie again to understand the views of others! Maybe a comparison paper could come out of this?! Looking forward to seeing what you're gonna do!

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  2. I haven't read or seen The Neverending Story! But I am fascinated by your excitement about it and I might be intrigued enough to read! (though I probably won't watch the movie... that big dog scares the socks off me.)
    I loved seeing your sticky note annotations! That was something I missed this time because I used a kindle!

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  3. I haven't read or seen The Neverending Story! But I am fascinated by your excitement about it and I might be intrigued enough to read! (though I probably won't watch the movie... that big dog scares the socks off me.)
    I loved seeing your sticky note annotations! That was something I missed this time because I used a kindle!

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  4. Haha that big dog was one of my childhood favorites:) And I agree with Nicole, comparing the book vs movie could be really interesting!

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