Weekly Blogging: Lessons from Freya
This week’s blogging is in honor of our completion of Michael Betcherman and David Diamond’s e-mail novel The Daughters of Freya. We’ve discussed the usual things English majors discuss: characters and characterization, plot, pacing, mood, recurring themes. But for this post, I want us to think about the following:
What can/did you learn from Freya as a writer?
October 11th, 2007 at 11:07 am
I guess the most valuable thing I have learned from Daughters of Freya as a writer is how important it is not to lose your reader. Not only in the obvious meaning of confusion, but also in the sense that I don’t want my reader hooked and then I lose them. When fishing, you wait and wait for a fish to bite, and then you struggle to keep the fish and bring it home. Daughters of Freya hooked the fish and then took a nap. As a writer, I do not want to make that same mistake.
October 13th, 2007 at 5:05 pm
What I learned from Daughters of Freya was how the actual structure of a piece can be incorporated to the piece. Many of the e-mails we read, were also read by those who wished to eradicate Sam as a threat. I hadn’t considered how the e-mails we recieved could be spun in a different light. I think it would have been even greater success if Sam realized her e-mail provider was hosted by Techtide, or something similar, and it was actually her own ignorance. (a fake website for her e-mail provider, and in the bottom in fine print saying “hosted by Techtide” or something similar would have been awesome for this)
October 13th, 2007 at 5:24 pm
After reading The Daughters of Freya, and thinking in terms of a writer, I learned the importance of choosing a genre that works with the medium/format (or vice versa). Although I enjoyed The Daughters of Freya, I think that this particular genre – mystery – was wrong for the e-mail format. Because the story was so detailed (i.e. lots of characters, detailed plot, etc…), I think that often times it was easy to get really confused. I found myself forgetting who certain characters were, and looking at the “character list” took something away from the story for me. Also, I would sometimes forget certain details because of the multiple sub-plots that were going on; this definitely added to my overall confusion. Maybe a different, less complex, genre would work better in the e-mail format.
October 14th, 2007 at 3:48 pm
The main thing I learned from Freya as a writer, is that certain techniques are appropriate for certain mediums. This was not written as beautiful prose, or any other style that often draws us into literature. However, the use of e-mail formatting was appropriate and successful here. I think it was really interesting how the author was able to incorporate bits and pieces from the character’s lives, aside form the main focus of the story, into the piece as a whole, which to me, gave it great depth. I learned how there are several different techniques that allow a work to become more than simple storytelling, and I think Freya is a really good example of how literature can become very real and is constantly changing as we move into a digital world. overall, I learned from The Daughters of Freya just how vast the range of literature can be.
October 14th, 2007 at 11:10 pm
What have I learned from Freya… Well, I found that, for the first 70 emails or so, one of the strongest aspects of the piece was the pacing. The frequency of the emails themselves was slow enough to keep me checking my email constantly for longer than I’d like to admit, but wasn’t too delayed that I got impatient or bored. It was enough time between installments to let me chew on things for a bit, but not too long that things lost their flavor. The emails themselves were often cliffhangers, which helped keep the tension up. Unfortunately, I felt that the last third or so of Freya was rushed… the build-up was great for the majority of it but it felt like things were happening too fast towards the end.. I guess starting from the time when Sam publishes her expose in the LA Post. As a writer, what I take away from this is that finding the right pace for a piece is important, but equally important is keeping that pacing consistent. Otherwise the piece feels unbalanced.
October 15th, 2007 at 9:51 am
In theory the email novel is an interesting idea and even though it is not something I personally enjoyed, I think that Freya is a good example of where the future of literature is headed. My issues with Freya had a lot to do with the fact that I couldn’t control how fast or slow I read the novel because I had to wait for the emails. I found myself holding out until I had a good amount of unread emails in my inbox just so I could get the sense that I was reading a normal novel…it didn’t quite work. On the level of narrative, I found myself sometimes getting bored with Freya. The characters are pretty one dimensional and I found the emails to be very impersonal, which left me not really attached to any character, not even Sam. As a writer I definitely learned the importance of the reader/character relationship; even if the story isn’t amazing, the novel can still be at least entertaining if this relationship is established and cultivated.
October 15th, 2007 at 1:40 pm
What I learned from the Daughters of Freya was valuable to Narrative One because I had a similar idea of a continuing story with numerous characters. Learning how to keep the reader engaged as well as keeping them on track with what was going on and who exactly the characters were was hard. Because I wrote the story it obviously made sense in my head but I had to think outside the box and ask myself questions like, All right, who is this person related to, how are they friends with the three main characters, what is their purpose to the story. So thinking about Daughters of Freya I realized that if was hard keeping track of all these characters being thrown in at once in the multiple emails in the one email in my inbox. Pictures are what helped and a constant little hint to remind the reader of who they exactly were. I often times got lost in the emails, especially when there were responses to Sam’s articles, as well as the emails she recieved from people she thought could help her figure out if Jane was involved. Knowing the characters of what you’re reading is a big part of understanding the story and seeing the difficulties in Freya I was able to try to work on that weak point in my project to avoid having the same problem.
October 15th, 2007 at 5:35 pm
Being that this was the first e-mail novel that I have ever read, I learned everything I know about this medium from this one. Unfortunately this gives me little perspective because i have nothing to compare Daughters of Freya to. I don’t know what a ‘good’ e-mail story will look like, but regardless I can take something away as a writer.
The story mainly taught me that with e-mail narratives not all genres will work. The subject matter must either be dull enough so that it doesn’t require the urgency of a phone call or be such that e-mail is the only form of communication. DoF hit some rough spots at the end where the conversations became too personal and important to be sent over e-mail. Annoying.
I also learned that the length of the buildup of a story should be proportional to the length of the resolution. In DoF there was a long buildup for a few weeks and then the ending came very abruptly. I feel that as a writer if you are creating a long story with a winding plot there should be a very intricate climax and resolution. DoF seemed to lack perfect structure in this sense.
::Clock Model::
October 16th, 2007 at 3:15 am
From this whole email novel experience, I suppose I have learned as a writer that I like books. I don’t enjoy checking my own email (let alone reading it), so why would I enjoy getting ten other peoples’ fictional emails? There is nooo way I could remotely keep up with the emails, so pacing was completely lost on me, causing me to have to slog through a ton of emails, making the story a huge chore to get through.
From Daughters of Freya specifically, I learned that it must be incredibly difficult to keep track of, and consistently portray the different voices of the characters in the story. Email just feels so impersonal to begin with, so I imagine filling all those different emailing shoes is a tough creative task. Even though there are some pictures provided, essentially the author must make all these different cyber voices come to life.
October 16th, 2007 at 10:07 am
i learned from daughters of freya just how important the medium that you use to convey your story is. If you don’t use the proper type you can definitely bore your readers and possibly even get them confused as the story progresses. I feel as though that this should not have been written in e-mails since e-mails are a great way to communicate with one person at a time. It becomes very tough and confusing for a reader when a character is trying to describe what is going on all the time.
It was also very tricky for me to keep characters seperated out in my head and in writing e-mails characters were able to jump in and jump out of the story very quickly without a build up or them being eased into the story.
October 16th, 2007 at 11:09 am
From reading daughters I have learned, as a writer, that it seems like you can take almost any medium on line ( email, flash,…) and turn it into some sort of story or narrative. It has opened my eyes to the different possibilities that are out there and that could possibly be done different from the traditional writing on paper in a book. I also think that this is very important to writers these days because it opens up so many different options to write things in. Also, these different forms may be better and express a narrative better than another form.