This is a list of everything we accomplished within the session! I was both surprised and impressed at mine and my peers abilities to loosen up and learn so much.We had an exercise where we had to pick a film and strip its plot down to its “barest bones”. This enabled us to prioritise the things that matter most within a story, and allowed us to focus on labelling the variety of emotions those different plot points evoke. I chose the film “Scream” and had to force myself to let go of information I previously thought of as integral, such as a characters age or gender. It was a great exercise for me in particular as I am very used to writing in a passive form, but Lucy noticed that and encouraged me to write from a more active perspective – that of the protagonist and the subsequent actions they take. We then had to draw the plot through different iterations of water – whatever emotion the plot point evoked within us we had to express on the page! This freed me up creatively and encouraged idea generation.Together as a collective group we identified various archetypal tropes often assigned to characters – we then broke off into smaller groups to discuss the specific traits of the archetype we’d chosen. My partner and I chose “The Maiden” as I find the damsel in distress character an incredibly interesting case study, both in her most stereotypical form and the ones that subvert them. This exercise, along with the other group work exercises encouraged me to be sociable and relaxed around my peers as we were all actively participating and learning not to take ourselves too seriously in the process.At the end, my partner and I had to choose a few different tropes and create a story based around how the archetypes would interact with each other. I feel that my most important take away from this last segment was a growing awareness that characters can adapt and evolve into various archetypes, and go on developmental journeys that change their internal philosophies!
