Further Learning: The Great Courses

In the interest of furthering my education I've decided to get a couple of the courses from The Great Courses.  I've seen these advertised before and while many subjects looked interesting, I never wanted to spend the money for them before. I think they have a big marketing push at the start of every year (New Years resolutions and such).  The courses are fairly expensive, but heavily discounted this time of year.  But as I said, I'm trying to work harder to learn, and I think these will be helpful.

The first course I got is Building Great Sentences: Exploring the Writer's Craft.  I never much enjoyed English class in school, but I think it would be useful to brush up on the basics.  I feel like I am weak in sentence writing.  I often am much more verbose than I need to be.  Hopefully a greater understanding of sentence structure and how to form them will help with that. 

The other course I got is Analysis and Critique:  How to Engage and Write about Anything.  My interesting still leans more toward writing fiction, but now that I'm doing this blog it'll be useful to learn how to write on non-fiction topics better.  

I plan to start listening to these soon and work my way through them.  I expect I'll provide updates and reviews on them as I go. 

The Plan

I have a simple plan for this year.  I'm going to watch through all fifty-three of the animated movies released by the Walt Disney Animation Studios.  I'll watch one movie each week,  in order of their release.  So I will be starting with Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs proceeding from there. 

After I watch each one I'm going to take a close look at the plot, and try to pick apart how the story was put together.  I'll look at things like the protagonists and antagonists, the act breaks and how the action rises and falls.   I'll try to figure out why each scene is there, and how it fits into the overall plot.  And once I've done that I'll post my breakdown here on the blog.

I'm no expert at this.  In fact, the main point of this exercise is to learn.  So I don't expect that I'll catch everything in the films right away.  I invite anyone that does choose to follow this blog to speak up with their own thoughts about the plots, pointing out things I might have missed or interpreted incorrectly. 

So that's my plan.  Feel free to follow along.

Twitter Account

I have a twitter account, @MutantLemon  So you can follow me there and hear my various witty remarks. 

Taking a Class About Fairy Tales

I signed up today for an online class on the Canvas Network.  "Fairy Tales: Origins and Evolution of Princess Stories."   I've never done a class online like this before, so curious to see what it's like.  Hoping to get some new insights that will be useful in my own stories and analyzing others stories.  I'm sure I'll post more about it once it gets started.

To Do List

Statement of Intent

Welcome to Mutant Lemon Media.  This is a personal blog, but I also intend to use it as a place to explore the craft of storytelling.  I have many story ideas, some of which I'm currently working on writing.  One of my main plans is to examine movies and break them into their component parts to understand how the story is put together.  Lessons I hope will translate to my own stories.

I made this blog largely for my own personal use, but I welcome anyone who wants to follow along, perhaps providing me with further insights and information that I miss.  Or maybe I’ll provide a bit for information you can use.  Either way, I look forward to the exploration.