be AUDacious: Lesson 4: Closer

Key events in our lives -- big or small -- can ripple down through so many different aspects over a period of time. The more significant the event, the bigger the impact. While these changes may occur gradually over time, it's interesting to trace them back to the turning point.

Today's lesson is to use a song to "frame" an event that has impacted your life. (When I say "frame," I'm thinking in terms of providing a soundtrack or narration for the event).

CHOOSING A POINT-OF-VIEW
All fiction stories have a narrator -- someone who is telling the story. So it makes sense that nonfiction, which is exactly what you're writing when you journal on your layouts, has a narrator too. Just as fiction writers must choose a narrative point-of-view, so must you decide from which perspective to tell your story. There are three main types:

First person. The journaling is written from the "I" point of view. This is a good choice when you want to focus on your feelings and your memories. This type of writing is less for an audience and may read more like a confessional or a venting session. The "I" pronoun makes this type of writing very intimate and personal.
Second person. The journaling is written to "you," the intended audience. Scrappers are often advised to write from a second person point of view because having a particular audience in mind helps to focus the story you tell. In this instance, most of the memories and feelings are intended to evoke a particular reaction from the reader. This point of view also helps your reader to feel more involved in what's going on in the story.
Third person. The journaling tells what "he, she or it" does. The narrator is less involved in the story, and most of the details focus on action. There are two different types of third person narration. A limited point of view means just that -- the narrator's viewpoint is limited to just information about one character's thoughts or feelings. An omniscient point of view means that the narrator knows what everyone is thinking and feeling.

Determining how you tell your story helps you to determine what details are important and how to structure the entire narrative. But there's another benefit to playing with point-of-view: considering a story from someone else's perspective (your parents, your husband, your dog, Abraham Lincoln) can lead you to some interesting truths. It also widens the circle of your story, so that your family members feel more involved.

PLANNING:
There are many ways to go about the next steps -- I'll leave that up to you. But here are the basics: you need to choose a song that makes you think of an important event and then use the song's title and/or lyrics to help you narrate this event. Additionally, I'll like to think about writing your journaling from a different point of view, or combining point-of-views in your narration.

Once you've chosen a song that reminds you of your specific event, use the graphic organizer to help organize your ideas.

Download POV graphic organizer

WRITING:
As you begin your journaling, you'll also want to think about how you are going to organize this information. Since you are incorporating multiple perspectives, you want to choose an organizational style that will help your reader navigate this information in a way that makes sense and even enhances the telling of the story. Although there are multiple ways of organizing your writing, a comparison-contrast method is most suitable in this situation. There are two ways to organize in this manner:

Block format. This presents all of the information or details from your first perspective, and then covers the same information from an alternate perspective. In this instance, you would tell your entire story from one point of view, and then tell it from a second (and third and fourth...) point of view.
Point by point format. This takes a series of details or points and shows them first from one point and view and then from another. In this instance, you would take the first detail of your event and tell it from each point of view, before moving on to the second detail, the third detail, and so on.

DESIGN:
This is a perfect opportunity to use the album art as a jumping-off point for your page design. For each lesson, I'll give you the option to focus on one component of the album art. Today, we'll be focusing on the shapes or elements on the album cover.

MY LAYOUT:
My layout for today's lesson is incomplete at the moment. I spent the day flying back to Nashville from Houston (I've been gone since Saturday for a conference) and then driving home from Nashville. Needless to say, it's been a busy day. However, I'll have my layout ready tomorrow or the next day and will edit this post to include it.