Commentary

Commentary

I began my prose fantasy piece with a short, declarative sentence to give some context to the story and also introduce the protagonist. I knew I had to use a simple sentence in order to make the story accessible to different audiences/readers, particularly children. I also used the past tense of the verb ‘have’ to indicate that Ellie not believing in fairies was something that had changed. This would make the reader intrigued into what had happened that had made Ellie start believing in fairies. I also tried to subtly reference another fantasy book, Alice In Wonderland by Lewis Carroll with the imagery of Ellie falling.

To keep with the conventions of the fantasy genre, I kept the story in the third person and past tense. The capitalisation of ‘Reality’ emphasized that the fairy world Ellie was in was very different to the one she came from. It also suggested that Reality was a place, rather than a concept, and this kept in line with the fantasy genre conventions as this was a world that could never exist. I described the trees being ‘like ballet dancers’ as I felt like this captured the beauty and grace of the fairy world as well as the elegant structure of the trees.

In contrast to this, I wanted the secondary character, Blossom, to be presented as more confident and grounded. Whilst the stereotypical fairy could be considered quite fragile (‘thin film of glitter’ ‘slender’ ‘fluttered gently’), Blossom’s personality is stronger, shown in the raising of her voice and her ‘cheeky’ smile.

In the final paragraph, I used a lexis that was part of a naturistic lexical field, like ‘tadpole’ and ‘lily’, that were essentially a play on the expression ‘a tad late’. I hoped that the manipulation of these words would emphasize how different Faeland was from Reality. The final sentence ‘welcome home’ was used to spark the reader’s imagination about what this could be interpreted as and the mentioning of Ellie’s grandmother could suggest that she is also supernatural in some way.

In my blog, I used the term of endearment ‘my lovelies’ to show a connection with the reader and make the post more personal and informal. By saying that I knew ‘many of the readers were of school age’ I showed awareness of my audience and who was reading my work which makes the reader feel closer to the writer. I also used the phrase ‘if you’re anything like to me’ to build up a trusting relationship with the audience.

I put my advice in a list to make the post more easy to read, mainly because as the post was intended for a younger audience, I wanted the post to be concise and get to the point quickly. As well as this, I used the pronoun ‘you’ to talk directly to the reader and make it feel as if I was talking specifically to each person individually. However, I was conscious of not overusing this pronoun and coming across as patronising or condescending so I tried to bring the focus back to me with phrases like ‘trust me’ and ‘there’s always one kid…’ In the final paragraph, I asked the readers for their feedback and suggestions so to not separate myself from the reader too much and keep the lines of communication open.