Kat Lewin
1) Suspenseful Lead – induce anxious excitement and uncertainty!(!!)
2) Dramatization (of POV) – don’t just expositize!
3) Scenes – scenes! Woo! Gives logical progression (use Meredith story as good example; Jurassic technology too: scenes are exhibits)
4) Change – change of characters, change of a trend. Some change.
5) Conflict. (hmm, there’s no conflict in my essay yet… Oh, change in narrator’s POV is conflict. Cool, cool.)
6) Intimate Detail. “Intimate detail: think bunghole.” Sonically and visually – telecast a lot, dramatize.
7) Dialogue. Duh.
8) Research with feeling! Need human sound to keep from getting lost; emotional reactions.
What engages us in the beginning? What draws us in and keeps us moving into the essay?
“Get this” – uses colloquial diction to add intensity and immediacy to his early description. We’re drawn into the piece by the display of immediately fascinating marvels: things that don’t necessarily exist. (Good use of the accordion to tie the museum curator and the quirkiness of the piece into the seemingly random intro music. Also, the eerie museum-entry music is very captivating and funny.)
Intimate details of the museum and its curator; ties this strange museum into our conventional ideas of a museum, but belies the assumed normalacy by strange audio effects underneath.
What’s the argument? What is the POV that ends up being developed? How does he develop this POV?
This piece develops the idea of human uncertainty. It begins with a fairly conventional point of view, amusedly providing a view of an interesting world, but, through elements of diction especially, establishing the narrator’s clear rejection of the world. However, the story reaches its climax, I feel, after he introduces the children of the micro-miniature sculptor, and reaffirms their credibility with the line, “…who did exist?” Here, the narrator shows that his initial point of view was flawed, and both he and his material grow. The narrator develops this new point of view by taking brief looks at other marvels and expressing the human uncertainty about them. Ultimately, this is his point: human uncertainty is natural, and important – we can’t just give in to skepticism; our confusion and uncertainty about our world must be treasured. He’s looking for a renaissance of wonder.
He prepares us for this by showing the people he interviews saying this, but making it look like a tangent. Like Hitt tying Amerigo to contemporary human qualities – he’s building a relationship in the end. So it ultimately feels right.