Great Rock n’ Roll Pauses centers around the speaker, Alison Blake, and her family. She gives us insight at first into who each family member is and what sorts of behaviors they encounter in their home from each. The main plot of this story focuses on one day in their life. As for the story’s conflict, the simple answer is that Dad had a rough day at work and essentially takes it out on the speaker’s brother. This conflict is resolved once the dad has a chance to go on a walk with Alison and calm himself down. However, I feel that there is a larger conflict in play within the story. Based on this story alone, Alison’s brother seems to me to have a form of autism. The family clearly has different views and opinions of the brother and his obsession with pauses in songs, and this creates an underlying conflict between each character. However, this specific conflict is not fully resolved by the end of the story.
I liked the diagrammatic form that was used to tell this story, especially since she establishes early on that this form of storytelling is how she keeps a journal. I liked when she used basic shapes to help readers visualize the story. For example, when she’s talking about the wall between the bedrooms she uses a basic rectangle shape to show what’s happening/being said in each room on either side of the wall.
For my diagrammatic story, I want to use fonts and simple shape graphics to get my voice heard, rather than using words alone. I’m a writer, and I tend to ramble in my stories so I think this will be challenging for me. I like the idea of using blank slides and blank spaces to represent pauses and bring a sort of anxiousness to my readers. On page 15 of Diagrammatic Writing, Johanna talks about enframed text and how it can be used as a “side thought” to the other elements on the page. I think this would be a great way to show what my character is actually thinking about the scene or events unfolding around them. I also like the idea of aligning the next slide’s text with where the text ended on the previous slide to help the story’s flow and pacing. If you want the pacing to be slower or allow for a pause or change of idea in the next slide, you could start the text elsewhere, showing that it’s not particularly connected to the previous slide’s ideas.