Fish, Fisher, Fished
Weekends are meant to be fun, but not so much if you have to carry out an ethinographic survey, asking random people what they felt about a story about a girl whose hair changed her world... Yup, the Saturday and Sunday flew past me like flies...
And now, it was time for those who didnt tell their stories, to tell them to the class.
And I was late to class.
Here comes the part about the traffic.... Okay, let's skip that for now...
And as I was late, I missed a story triad. Damn. Next was another classmate telling his story, and then there was another. After that, sensei encouraged us by telling us that none of the stories had that wow factor in them. Wow, now that's what I call encouragement.
Anyhow, I hungered for more. I thought that though I'd be working on my finalized story, I had room for creative improvement. So I thought of more and more inspiring concepts and ideas.
But little did I realise that I was about to be fished.
Literally.
Breaking my thought flow was sensei's three words on the whiteboard, melodramatically aligned to the center:
Weekends are meant to be fun, but not so much if you have to carry out an ethinographic survey, asking random people what they felt about a story about a girl whose hair changed her world... Yup, the Saturday and Sunday flew past me like flies...
And now, it was time for those who didnt tell their stories, to tell them to the class.
And I was late to class.
Here comes the part about the traffic.... Okay, let's skip that for now...
And as I was late, I missed a story triad. Damn. Next was another classmate telling his story, and then there was another. After that, sensei encouraged us by telling us that none of the stories had that wow factor in them. Wow, now that's what I call encouragement.
Anyhow, I hungered for more. I thought that though I'd be working on my finalized story, I had room for creative improvement. So I thought of more and more inspiring concepts and ideas.
But little did I realise that I was about to be fished.
Literally.
Breaking my thought flow was sensei's three words on the whiteboard, melodramatically aligned to the center:
Fish Fisher Fished
The task before us was simple: we had fifteen minutes, and we needed to think about an amazing, out-of-the-box story involving those three words, either directly or metaphorically.
As a boy who wrote lengthy, 400-page novels, I found this task extremely Himalayan, and not only that, I had that thirty-second story to worry about, too! Oh, the pain...
And so I bent my head over my book and extracted a pen, thinking about a fish, fisherman and his fishing rod.
Five minutes had passed, and I still hadn't gotten any 'wow' idea... Just random stories about fishes...
My hand automatically drew a piranha into the page, and, out of my frustration I think, I made it bite the fisherman's rod, eating the hook and the bait.
...
Hey, that's it!
As fifteen minutes had passed, sir asked us who had the best story in the class. I wasnt overconfident, but I raised my hand, as he said that if you don't believe in your story, who would?! The man had a point, and so I went up to the stage and drew my characters and storyboard onto the board (well, not such an extravagant storyboard or anything, just a rough sketch of three scenes...) and began telling them my story.
OUTFISHED: A story about a fish who ate metal, and a fisherman whose hooks were no match for its notorious bite. The story involves a cat-and-mouse chase kind of thing, in which the man tries to capture the fish, but can't, because the fish eats his hook and bait!
The story was fun, and the audience liked it. I understood the point about the excercise was to get my creative juices flowing, and they sure as hell did!
By the time everyone had finished, sensei told us that our homework was to develop three stories each conveying their meaning through only three frames. We were free to choose from a variety of software like Powerpoint etc to edit the slides, but the point was that if the story's meaning wasnt conveyed in three frames, it could not be conveyed in thirty seconds.
So with confidence in my heart and ideas in my brain, I went home.
No mention about the awesome fun I had at college on account of Holi, a festival of colors..... That's not the point of these posts anyway!
Hello, traffic, wait, house!
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