Story discussion.

Perhaps it's easier to keep everything straight when it's in blog form, rather than emails back and forth. I'm more likely to check a blog than my emails, to tell the truth. n___n;

Rachel asked:
Guess what I have a question, this is a good story, but to be really honest, I'm not sure that I understand everything about the story, Can anybody point out what the set up, conflict, and resolution is? Maybe you said it already during class, but after reading it again, I don't get the story. I think this story has good potential, and is going to be really funny, but we should make sure that we have these things included in the story.

Brock replied:
Here's the way I see it, as simplified as possible.

The setup: Heavenly Emperor sees/hears mankind's complaint for food, decides to do resolve the problem

The conflict: Emperor sends the Star Ox to deliver the message of "Food every 3 days". The Star Ox miss-communicates the message and tells the people "Food 3 times a day"

The resolution: To amend the Ox's error, the furious Emperor punishes the ox by having him live on earth and plow the fields to provide the food for all of mankind.

I liked the story because of its simplicity. I figure any cool bit of character business to better communicate to story will only help us.

Andy says:

i think if we can add more surprises to our story, then it will be better. we already have a major surprise in our story--the cow mix up the message. i got 2 small surprises but don't know they r work or not.

#1, why and how the star ox miss-communicates the message? my idea is the ox saw a pretty cow and change it's mind from "3 times a week" to "3 times a day";

#2, the ox is punished at the ending. but audiences will know it will be punished because it makes mistake. my idea is, how about we tell the audiences that the ox is lazy and love drinking "milk"(some white color soft drink only exist in haven). then at the ending the ox have to do the labor job everyday and only can "produce" milk but eat grass everyday.

To which I reply...


I was also thinking about why the Ox mixed up the message. I thought that maybe, as he was struttin' down to Earth, it saw some of his friends and began showing off so badly that he forgets his message. Rather than go back and admit that he needs to hear it again, after he'd made such a big deal about being chosen to tell the world this important memo from the heavenly emporer, he decides to just wing it with what he does remember. Then his punishment makes sense, because he made a mistake and rather than taking the potentially embarassing steps to correct it, he just plows on.
I like the milk idea too, but oxen don't produce milk, being male cows. ^___^

I think it might be easier to keep replies straight in a blog, since then you can read a string of them rather than a bunch of loose emails that might just multiply exponentially.

If the group'd rather stick to emails than a blog posting system, that's fine too, and I'll delete this post.

(And by the way... FIRST POST!)