In college, I’ve found that I tend towards highly structured subjects. Classes such as economics and calculus tend to be easier to study than, say, a class on Chekhov or British literature. This is largely because economics and calculus require that I learn the fundamental concepts and build on those. In other words, I can’t learn about basic supply and demand concepts and move immediately to econometrics.
What makes classes such as this (Epics of India) different is that I often have to come up with something completely new, rather than following very specific instructions to reach one number or one precisely worded answer. The weekly storytelling posts are a great example of this. While I do get some source material to work with, I can’t apply a formula and get the answer. It takes a lot of imaginative/literary thinking in order to complete the assignment and produce a full story.
Entering this class, I thought that I’d be terrible at pulling ideas out of thin air. There have been a few weeks when it took a lot of time to come up with an idea for an assignment, but I’ve found that I can come up with decent ideas much faster than before. I remember agonizing over the very first storytelling assignment of this class. Now, it seems that I can find an interesting perspective in the source material and expand on it within my own story.
This isn’t the only improvement I’ve made. In addition to coming up with stories faster, I’ve found that I can better analyze the stories we read. In other literature classes, I was able to come up with only a few interesting points. Having spent so much time writing notes over the Ramayana, the Mahabharata, and other stories, I’ve found that I can provide notes on, not only my opinion of characters, but of potential threads and trends throughout the story.
I used to think that I was almost hopeless when it came to literary analysis. The fact that I felt so hopeless probably stopped me from taking more literature classes. All it took to improve this skill and give me more confidence in these sort of open-ended assignments was trying. I’m more than glad I took this class. It’s made me try harder at something I thought I hadn’t much aptitude for. In order to improve this skill further, I plan to read those stories that don’t seem (at first) to offer easy adaptations. For example, a story with limited characters is more likely to prove difficult to adapt than one with dozens. This isn’t such a large change now that I’ve written several adaptations of the epics, but it’ll still make a large difference.
