Jesika's Blog

This week I decided to watch more TED talks and there was one in particular that I found interesting. The TED talk was called "What makes a hero?" by Matthew Winkler. This caught my attention because I didn't really realize how many popular stories like the Harry Potter, Hunger Games, and The Lord of Rings used a common layout. A common formula for a hero's journey includes the ordinary world and special world, along with certain key events. Those key events are status quo, call to adventure, assistance, departure, trials, approach, crisis, treasure, result, return, new life, and resolution. A hero's journey is basically written in a cycle where they go through those key events. I just thought that was interesting and didn't really notice until watching the video. Joseph Campbell even wrote a book on the dozen of stories on the mono myth of a hero's journey. A quote by Joseph Campbell. (Source: Pinterest ) Link: TED Talk " What Makes A Hero? ...

For this week, I decided to do a story lab and watched a Ted talk video about stories and storytelling. It was called "The Danger of a Single Story" by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. I really enjoyed this Ted talk because it opened up my perception on how a single story doesn't represent a place entirely. She mentioned her personal experience dealing with this when she came to America for college, and that her roommate was shocked to know how well she spoke English since she was from Africa. She talked about how her roommate only had these assumptions of Africa because of the negative and one side things she's read or seen on different media platforms here in the U.S. At the end of the talk, I really liked what she said, "When we reject a single story and realize there's never a single story about a single place, we regain a kind of paradise." In addition, she talked about you could change this by writing the story from the other side's perspective. For i...