The New Lecture

Achy and Tess

Today I woke up very happy knowing that is Friday and the weekend is here. I got done with my first week of my course and it was a rough week, but I have learned a lot in my class. I have two more weeks to go, but these two weeks coming up is going to be more challenging because it would be more work for me, well that’s what Achy has told the class. As I got up from my bed and got ready for my class, I was thinking what Achy have prepare for today class. When I got done getting ready, I went down to the Dining Hall to go eat breakfast. 

Getting Self Serve

My Lunch

I finished eating breakfast and then I started walking to my class. When I got to class I took my laptop out of my backpack and started typing for my journal. When the hour was over at 10 PM, I emailed Achy my journal because every Friday we need to send it to her; is part of our grade. I thought we were going to work on our workshop of the essays about our opposite, but instead, she gave us a whole different lecture about the elements to build a good. In order for this to work, you need to ignore the first draft. It has to be used after the first draft because then you have to ask question about: who is the POV? Where does it take place? When does it take place? Then the character has to have a desire, but it must be deep and real, something he really wants. When the character has a desire it needs to have an obstacle because if it doesn't have an obstacle the reader won’t have the enthusiasm to keep reading the book. The obstacle has to be realistic and it can’t be any obstacle that you can solve in minutes. It has to be an obstacle that you need a plan to solve the obstacle. It can be a person, society, your health, and addiction or any kind of obstacle that takes time to solve the problem. If the obstacle is easy, than it would not be a real obstacle. It has to explain what the POV character wants and what is in his way. Then, we execute the plan, meaning, what actually happens when the plan is put into action. The tricky thing that blew me off is that the plan always has to fail because then we will know the true colors of the character. After each failure we need to evaluate and repeat the steps over and over again. Achy told us that each failure makes the problem worst. I think this was very helpful because I never knew that a story have to have this. She gave us this lecture because later on in the course we have to write a story about anything we want. Then she let us out of class for the whole day at 11:30, but we need to watch a Star Wars movie because the movie uses this method a lot. Make a plan, execute, fail, and do it all over again. I wish we only needed to watch the movie, but we have to take notes on every scene of the movie and write who are the characters, the plan, the execution, and how did it fail.

Who wants pizza?

Then, I went to the gym with Vicky for the second time. We stayed in the gym from 5 PM to 6:30 PM. I went to work out my legs and Vicky went to go play a scrimmage basketball game with five other guys that go to play basketball every day at 4:30 PM. When we left the gym, we came straight to the Dining Hall to see if it was still open because they supposedly close at 6:30 PM, but when we got there it was still open and letting students go in. Later, Dani and Oyin came in and join us at the table me and Vicky we eating at. Then we were talking about their classes and how late they got out from class. Oyin got out at 5 PM and Dani at 6 PM. Oyin told us that when she got to her room that she went straight to sleep and took a nap. Dani was barely coming out from her class when she came to join us. I was very surprised because I thought they were going to get out early today. Then, I thought to myself that I was really lucky that Achy let us out at 11:30 AM.

Then we were planning to go to see the popular bean in Chicago but it was too late already. The girls wanted to go watch a movie, but we didn't know what was the closes theater at and plus it was getting late, so we ended up staying in the campus. Dani brought her computer and put on a movie on Netflix. Then I started to get hungry, so I order pizza. That’s how we ended up our night a Netflix movie with pizza.

Our HD Plasma TV.