Writer’s Memo
The elements of a fairy tale that my story contains are that: it begins with “Once upon a time…” and ends with “…Happily ever after”, has a female main character that experiences conflict with others as well as herself throughout the story, has the rural setting of a castle hidden in a beautiful valley, and has royalty as the dominance over the town of Ravia, and Melina and David experience a change in social class. The story I wanted to tell in my fairy tale is the story of a girl who comes from nothing, has no parents, has a difficult life, and is able to bring herself from nothing and change the lifestyle she had with a new attitude and outlook on her future. She wasn’t expecting anything big to happen, but it fell into her lap anyway. I wanted to show that her life wasn’t the perfect fairy tale situation where it goes from terrible to wonderful, but that she hit a few bumps in the road on the way to a happily ever after and not everything worked out so perfectly, such as losing a best friend as a consequence. In my fairy tale, I set Melina up as growing up in an orphanage and having to work in the castle under the royal family when she was old enough. The Prince happens to fall in love with her and vice versa, but their relationship hits a setback when an unexpected event occurs. The rhetorical device I used in my paper is ethos, to give Melina credibility. Throughout the entire paper, beginning, middle, and end, I express Melina’s thoughts and how they change as the story goes on. I show her feelings about different characters and about herself as she goes through different stages of her life.
This fairy tale that I wrote was actually something that happened to me personally, in which the digital retelling is more like the real version, and the fairy tale is the fictional version. I work at Rave Motion Pictures, and I dated Dave and my best friend was Kelsie. Since that event in my life felt like a real fairy tale, that’s how I decided to write about it for this paper, and I chose to describe the more real and modern version of what actually happened (minus the death of the parents) in the digital retelling. I think it showed my ethos even more because I know how a situation like this actually felt, and could express that through Melina’s character. I think it was more difficult to retell my fairy tale digitally because I tend to write a lot, and with limited choice of pictures and text I couldn’t really describe the situation to the extent that I normally do. I tried to relate the digital retelling as best I could to the fairy tale, except with the modern take on it. I like the comic life software a lot, because it was just like a storybook, except easier and quicker to put together.
