Journal Seven, Dana

My best writing so far this term was the one with the photograph prompt. The entire piece was kinetic, and I managed to mix the dialogue tags, the action, and the dialogue perfectly. It somehow managed to be both fun and tense. Plus, I really enjoyed writing that character. She's a fun, feisty woman I haven't touched in a very long time, and I rediscovered everything I loved about her in the first place. I think that what I've most improved in my writing is my ability to be self-contained. I'm working on a long project, so a good deal of my work isn't self contained. It's supposed to be read within larger works that intertwine with each other. But I think I'm getting the hang of giving just enough context to serve the story without starving my readers or overindulging them. My goals for the last five weeks of class is to continue to work on diversifying my sentence structure in narratives. I took this class because I felt like I was growing stale.

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I think the fictional character in popular culture is Mulan. I know that as a reader, I should pick a literary character, but the fact of the matter is that books don't reach the most important audience for the future of American culture. There are three and four year old girls out there who aren't encouraged to pursue their unfeminine interests. Three years old is an impressionable age. Three years old is when you decide what you like and don't like. I remember when I was that young. I remember all of the Disney Princesses. I remember which princess wore what dress. It wasn't that I wasn't interested in science and engineering, but those things weren't presented to me as things I should be interested in. Then, there was Mulan. A woman who was pretty, but not comfortable just being pretty, so she went out and became a man for a while. And she kicked butt as a man and won the admiration of the men around her. She was turned aside for being a woman, but then she accepted her dual nature as a mix of masculinity and femininity, and she saved all of China doing that. That final fight scene, where she physically fought with fans and the like, that left an impression on me. The symbolism of her strength as accepting both parts of herself, with those fans... She was the strongest when she did that. I didn't get the complexities of it, but it opened a whole new way of thinking for little three year old me. Other girls need that, too, and more of it.

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If I had to recommend a have-to-watch movie, I think I would recommend Angela. When I think of magical realism, I call back to that movie. It has such an exciting, thrilling atmosphere... Something about it elevates it above a simple romance to something genuinely lovely. It's dirty. It's gritty. It's unapologetic. And it's heart breaking. I always cry when I watch it, and I didn't cry when I watched the opening scene of UP, just to let you know how serious that is. I have a soft spot for tall, in control women, and Angela takes the cake.
The IMDB doesn't do it justice.