About This Blog

This blog was created as my final project for my English 102 class. It shows the story Paul's Case by Willa Cather from Paul's point of view, as if he were writing a blog. I decided to create a blog because it seemed like the kind of thing Paul would do. He never shares his thoughts with ordinary people, yet with the closed circle of friends he has he creates plans and discusses all his dreams. Paul could use a blog to share information, about what he's up to, with his friends. Another reason for writing a blog was because I do a lot of writing and posting online and the semi-formal nature of blogging appealed to me.

The biggest challenge in the writing of this blog was doing it from Paul's point of view.The story was written from the third person omniscient so I could get a fairly good grasp of what Paul might have been thinking. However, the story doesn't reveal his inner thoughts or what he himself would have to say about the events. As well, Paul is considered to be mentally ill, or at least mentally different from the normal rational being in that story. This means he thinks in ways which are unusual, and I have to reflect that in my writing. I have to logically write illogically.

Posts like the suicide note were especially hard to write since not only did they show Paul's lack of logic but they were also full of emotions and I had to figure out what Paul would say. Most of my time with the project was spent on figuring out how Paul would say it.

Another challenge was getting the dates correctly. The book provides no year as a reference point and date information is spotty. Fortunately in one spot of the book, both the day of the week and the day of the month are mentioned so I can figure out what sort of year it is thereby helping me fill out missing date information. The week in new york is pretty sequential so I just had to keep track of what day of the week it was. One feature that proved handy was the ability to edit the date a post was posted on. This lets me create the blog as if they were written on the actual day. I selected the years 2007-2008 so it would be modern while matching the days perfectly.

After doing this project, I'm still not satisfied with the style of my writing, and I'll probably go back and edit the posts to improve them. As well, the story has a lot of background information which isn't in event form, so I'll eventually create events to fill the empty gaps in the storyline and essentially rewrite the entire book in blog form so a person can read the blog and understand everything that's going on, without having to read the book.