Author: lskalisky22

In Great Rock n’Roll Pauses, a diagrammatic story is told through the author’s point of view as the daughter in a family consisting of herself, her brother, her mother, and her father. She tries to explore the different behaviors of her family members, trying to make sense of their actions through a PowerPoint presentation. The main source of conflict comes from her father’s inability to understand or try to connect with her brother, his son, about his interests. Albeit unusual, her brother is interested in the pauses between songs. Her father does not understand and blows up at him one day and her brother cries. There are also little conflicts between the author and her relatives, things like her father’s negative behavior or her mother’s obvious favoritism towards her brother.  

The conflict is eventually resolved when the father asks her to take a walk and he calms down. He comes back home and tries to connect with his son once more. Or at least not get mad at him. The characters change inwardly because their actions and thoughts change not their appearances. The diagrammatic format lends itself to this story by being able to express whatever emotion it wants to convey through the images the author puts together. She can replicate a physical or mental wall between her brother and herself just by placing a rectangle in the middle of the screen with dialogue on either side, things like that. Or the seriousness of a situation with harsher colors and less imagery. 

The ideas that I want to try out for my own diagrammatic story waver more on the writing side. Specifically, the part in Drucker’s Diagrammatic Writing on page 10 when she mentions the blank page produces anxiety from the audience simply for being empty. In my own writing, I tend to keep important sentences in their own line, even if it does not create a paragraph. It adds an important tenseness to whatever I am writing. I would love to try and create small images or words going in wonky directions or fonts to convey my story as well, not just the words. Things like keeping a steady rhythm by keeping words in the same spot and suddenly changing where they are to break the flow. Making words huge or small depending on the context of the story, anything at all to enhance the meaning. 

For this blog post I watched She and Her Cat by Makoto Shinkai and 160 Characters by Victoria Mapplebeck. I will only be discussing 160 Characters, however, because it was one of the longer videos. None of these videos, as stated in the instructions, follow the Aristotelian plot structure, the three part structure that can be simply generalized as the beginning, middle, and end. Or the inciting action, climax, and moment of last suspense. The videos we watched followed a more abstract or episodic element. In 160 Characters there were dates following the chronological events that happened in the story, fragmenting them into episodic sections.

The conflict and strife are not a giant tragic circumstance that follows the main character, but smaller tragedies that do not overwhelm, but encumber whoever the story is following. For 160 Characters, an absent paternal figure continually failing to be present are the small tragedies throughout. As tragedy cannot make up an entire story, there are happy moments in between those events. The baby being born and healthy, bonding with the baby, taking new pictures and loving each other, etc.

Their words were a large part of the story, coupled with the visual effects. I cared more for the words than them because they carried the story, the heart of it at least to me. Meaning, every detail was kept in the words. The words themselves as well as the voice acting for each line made them feel real and genuine. That a woman was disappointed in a man, but happy she now has a child she cares for.

The narrative patterns, from what I can see, are more episodic, like I said before. They feel like a mix of episodic and kishōtenketsu 4-part structure because of absence of intense conflict. But 160 Characters is also a personal anecdote as a fictional story. Though it may have happened to her in reality, she molded it enough to fit a narrative that evoked more emotion or the emotion she felt she was going through. Either way, phenomenal stories!

I am almost positive I wrote my Fargo blog prompt last semester and titled it the same thing. I am original until I am not.

Fargo is a story, but in that story the two main characters, Jerry and Marge, struggle against the plot towards their own individual goals. The plot is like a cause and effect sequence of events that begins due to Jerry’s unlikable, undeserving attitude and idea. He hires some shady characters to kidnap his wife so that he may get some money from her father out of a return deal. Things go south because the people in the story are not perfect beings, but humans who make mistakes. His father-in-law demands to take charge of the situation, something Jerry had not planned and thus must overcome. While those conflicts are set up and running, our second main character, Marge, must sift through Jerry’s long line of mishaps to uncover her own truth and recognize her own flaws. Marge has to react to the killings that happened because Jerry wanted his wife kidnapped and Jerry has to try and fix his mess, or, run away like he ended up doing.

The entire film, the audience can sense that Jerry is not a good person. He is not inherently evil, but his own misgivings and inferior status in life develop into a complex that ultimately brings his mental demise. Also physical, if you count going to jail as one. He cannot keep up with the horrible cause of accidents that started with his poorly thought out plan at the beginning and fumbles any chance he has, through work with his deal or at home with his wife and child. Marge, on the other hand, starts out as a likable and charismatic police chief. What we start to learn though, is that she may be unhappy with her unexciting marriage to a man named “Norm.” He is the norm, a regular man that Marge married. She meets up with an old friend and takes everything he says at face value, which is the same thing she did to Jerry when she first meets and questions him. It is not until one of her friends rattles her simplistic understanding of the world and it’s people does she begin to look under the surface level. Her old friend had lied to her face and she believed it, as did Jerry. After realizing her mistake, she goes back to our first main character and calls him out on the string of lies he keeps weaving.

On page 25 of Aristotle’s Poetics, he states that “we must not demand of Tragedy any and every kind of pleasure, but only that which is proper to it.” What he means is that for a tragedy to work out, a story must not continually make every single plot or action end up in one. There is a fine line between tragedy and straight up devastation. That is why, in Fargo, we did not see Jerry get away with his crimes or why Marge did not end up dying. That is why Gaear was caught in the end, and while multiple died, there was a lesson to be taught from Jerry’s mistakes. Not everything must be tragic to the nth degree for a tragedy to move and teach an audience.

Hello! My name is Libby Skalisky and I am a senior Humanities major. I specialize in English, Human Development, and DTC. I have already tried to take this class, but because of personal extenuating circumstances I had to withdraw. The most I remember about it is liking it a whole lot! Stories and storytelling in general is an art. It is hard to master, but I guess that’s why we’re all taking this class.

I am personally more partial to fictional stories because of the absolute out of this world stuff that can happen, but I am down for a little realistic story every now and then. I enjoy fantasy, comedy, romance, and animation. I grew up reading a lot of manga and books, as well as watching a lot of film and TV shows. My entire life has been based on what I could consume next, honestly. Even now, I am writing this and wanting to get back to binging a TV show I started a couple days ago, but alas.

I like stories, I like trying to write them. I do write fanfiction, but it’s never in a professional sense. I personally think I am a better poet than any type of storyteller, but that is why I want to see this class through until the end, to harness whatever stories I end up creating and liking them in the end. So, you know, don’t laugh at whatever silly stuff I come up with!

Here are some of my favorite stories in different media:

Movies: Baby Driver, Everything Everywhere All at Once

TV Shows: Bobs Burgers, Rise of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

Books: The Child Thief  by Brom, The Hunger Games Series by Suzanne Collins