Sa-Shai Daniels' Portfolio

This project was all about our developing our writing skills. The class we did this project in was language arts. We were learning about storyboarding, the structure of a story, how to use dialogue properly, the different kinds of characters, and how to make a character that complimented our stories. First we learned all the background that we needed to know about writing a novelette. All of our stories were supposed to be centered on a worldwide apocalypse, so the next step was for our groups to pick the event that we thought should ruin the lives of our characters. After that we each made a major character and minor character. We made the characters so that they were clear individuals with a strong personality, defining characteristics. Then we practiced writing from the point of views of our different characters. It was hard to write from the point of view of a character instead of writing your own point of view. After we had practiced writing we decided on the way we wanted to write our group's novelette. For example we decided on things like the point of view, and whether we should write in past tense or present tense. When we were finished with all the prep work we decided on a weekly writing schedule for our group, then we started writing. Each member of the group wrote a chapter a week, and each chapter had to be at least 500 words. We wrote for about five weeks, and after that we worked on revising our novelettes until we could no longer find any errors. 

 

My biggest challenge during this project was creating a character that wasn't based on someone I was close to in real life, but I tried my best to make my character her own person. Looking back on my writing, I think I was able to do that rather well. The most vital thing I learned well doing this project was how to plan a story before writing it. In the past when I wrote stories I had always tried to think of interesting events as I was writing. The storyboarding process was very helpful in the development of both my group's novelette and my individual writing style because I already knew what I would be writing in advance. After finishing this project I feel that I can successfully write a well-rounded and well planned story.

 

My group’s apocalyptic novelette was about an alien race that invaded Earth and is attempting to kill off the human race by using biological warfare. The alien race called Cyruses released a disease that could not be cured by humans. My character Rose, her younger sister, and their friend Will travel together to find a way to save humanity. The wonderful part about the characters we made was that they refused to give up, even when the situation seemed hopeless. The characters deal with problems that everyone deals with as well as the apocalypse. They are relatable and I think it makes the book enjoyable for the reader. The back-page blurb and the prologue art two artifacts that I think show the most growth. They are both descriptions of the novelette, but the prologue was written at the beginning of the project and the back-page blurb was written closer to the end. Both of these artifacts are things we worked on with our group. The prologue was something we all wrote together, we agreed on what we wanted it to say about the book, and then we threw ideas back and forth until we’d made a prologue that we were proud of, and even though we all wrote our own back-page blurbs, we helped each other to revise them.

 

I would definitely relate this project to collaboration because we really had to rely on our other group members, and if someone didn't write there would be a huge gap in our storyline. By relying on my group members and having them rely on me, I was able to improve my trust and collaboration skills. By the end of this project I trusted the other people in my group completely and they trusted me. By using collaboration we were able to work together as a cohesive team, which isn’t something that was possible for us at the beginning of the project. I felt like I had to do my part and write my chapters as well as I possibly could; they motivated me to do my best. This project was also about long-term writing, but it was also about trust. This project was very teamwork centered. It would have been three times as hard to finish this project if I hadn't had the help of my other two group members. And even if I had been able to finish the novelette, if I hadn't had my group member's individual view points and interesting writing styles to accompany my own the finished project would have been nothing compared to what it was.