Writing a novel

When I was thinking about the topic for my personal project, I remembered my hobby of reading novels that started at the beginning of junior high school. My mother told me to read novels for supporting my English classes, enjoying spare time, and adding entertainment choices. At first, I didn’t like novel because a lack of pictures and the first novel that I read being boring. At that time, my mother continued buying me novels even though I didn’t read them at all. Finally, I decided to read a novel when it is the only entertainment option left. The first novel that I read was Serial Lima Sekawan, a British novel that was translated to Indonesian. Until now, I have been reading a lot of novels. As I continued to read, my passion for reading grew to the point were I not only want to read novels but also write them. This led to me having a personal interest in writing novels. I am now interested on doing that interest for my personal project. Related to that project, I have set these three following learning goals:

a) Learning to express my ideas. Learning to express my ideas will be important in fulfilling my personal interest in writing novels, generate solutions to problems, and improve self esteem. My personal interest, writing, will require me to brainstorm ideas that can be made a story. Then, I will need to select the ideas that will be made into a story while adding new ideas that match the previous ideas. As for solving problems, almost every solution to a problem came from an idea. Examples Include: Thomas Edison’s idea of the light bulb helped solve the problem of dark nights, The Wright brother’s idea of the airplane helped solve the problem of travel being too long, and Edward Jenner’s idea of vaccination helped solve the problem of viruses being incurable with antibiotics. Finally, expressing ideas can help improve self esteem. Self esteem will be important in tasks such as presentations and group work. Due to all that, I will need to learn to express my ideas. b) Learning English writing skills. Learning English writing skills, like vocabulary, grammar, and sentence structure will be needed to help fulfill my personal interest in writing and complete academic tasks properly. In writing, a good use of language will be needed to convey the information in an engaging way. Examples include the use of wide vocabulary to avoid being monotonous, using proper grammar to make the information clear, and using different sentence types to make the writing more compact and efficient. These writing skills also apply in academics, were good grammar, sentence structure, and vocabulary are graded considerably; especially in essay. Due to all that, I will need to learn English writing skills.

Product Goal

Reflection

After completing my personal project of writing a novel, I reflected on it further. During the reflection, I realized that the project has a huge impact on me and my learning, especially on my future goal to be a writer. These impacts are an learning to arrange a project and an increase of English writing skills. A. Learning to arrange a project Before this personal project, I was already involved in a few projects, both in and out of school. The difference between those projects and my current one are the scale of the projects. In the previous projects, the scale is smaller and the duration is shorter. On this personal project, with a longer duration, I decided to create a novel until printing it into a book. To make it real, I have to arrange it; think about the story, manage the time to finish the writing, design the cover, find a place to print it, spreading a questioner to know the reader’s opinion, until making a report of it. On the process of arranging it, I managed to increase my skills and attitude, such as planning, committing, and evaluating/reporting. First is planning. I had to plan many things, especially the time. While the planning process felt time wasting at first, it finally helped a lot on making the writing process and the deadlines clear. Next, to finish a project commitment is needed. This personal project taught me to commit into my work in the middle of doing school tasks. If I was late in writing a chapter due to schoolwork, I had to commit to catch up quickly so the time line that I arranged can be fulfilled. In the end, I was able to finish the story and print the novel in the form of a book. This taught me that if we commit, we can do something meaningful. Finally, I also learned to evaluate my works, which is something I didn’t do before the personal project. In the previous projects, my work was immediately evaluated by the facilitators. In this project, I did it myself by making a questioner and spreading it to several people to know their review of my novel. From their replies, I evaluate my work and did some changes. From this, I learned that you need to consider the readers when you write other than your own ideas. During the personal project classes, our teacher told us that the we must write a report for our project since it is actually the one that is graded, not only the product itself. During the reporting, I have to arrange it in different forms, depending on the criterion. From the process of making the report, I learned to report and take lessons from my project. B. Increase of English writing skills Before this personal project, my only experiences in English writing were writing short texts for English class. On the other hand, I like reading novels on my spare time. I have already read a lot of novels, with the average reading time of three days. Due to being motivated by the novels, I then decided to create one as my project. During the process of creating the novel, my writing quality at the start and at the end was noticeable, which indicated that my writing skills had increased from the start to the end. This can be seen in the effectiveness of the sentences, the bridging, and the pacing. In terms of the effectiveness of the sentences, my early sentences were highly ineffective due to separating a lot sentences and phrases that could be combined and not using proper connectives when combining them. Due to this, I decided to learn more on combining sentences and applying the knowledge on my writing, which resulted in a big contrast. My latter works flowed much better and was more effective do to having more compound and complex sentences. Next, the bridging, also ties to the first point of helping the story to flow better. Furthermore, I also learned to write more description between each events in the story to give a more clear description to readers on what is happening. Finally, the pacing. In the earlier chapters of my novel, most of the story was too fast and some parts were too slow, which made the story occasionally weird to read. Over time, by learning more about combining sentences and adding description, I managed to shorten some parts of the story while lengthening most parts. This gives it a more comfortable tone to read.

Product Evaluation

When planning for my personal project, I created four success criteria to ensure the quality of my product. These criteria are good use of English, clear and easy to understand story, entertaining to read, and overall positive review from readers. To evaluate them, I made a questioner asking these questions, which is then spread to my contacts. After waiting for some time, I managed to get most of the responses, which can now be used to evaluate my product based on the success criteria. A. Good use of English Based on the answers on how good is the grammar and spelling of my story, it mostly reaches the success criteria. This can be seen in the fact that most of the respondents claim there are few misspellings and grammar and even some claiming no such mistakes. Despite this, there are respondents that said there are a lot of grammar mistakes. This is partially confirmed as I reread my story and found several grammar mistakes along with typos. I have fixed some of them. Even though I have mostly reached this success criteria, I will need to fix the mistakes to increase the quality further. B. Clear and easy to understand story Based on the answer of the respondents, I have mostly reached this success criterion. The results showed that most of the readers think that the word choices are effective and even more think it is easy to understand. Furthermore, some of them answer that the word choices are really effective and the story is really easy to understand. Despite this overall success, one of the readers answered that the story is confusing due to the huge amount of events happening in the same time. Based on this, I plan to add more description during the events to make them clearer. C. Entertaining to read Based on the answers of the questioner. I have successfully reached this success criterion. The results on the question regarding the characters, plot, and action show this; with everyone answering the plot is fun and most people claiming the action are characters are good. The only negative response is a person that said the characters were mostly two dimensional and the actions scenes are boring. With this in mind, I plan to add more depth to the protagonists in my next story. D. Overall positive impact to readers Based on the personal responses of the questioner, I have successfully reached this success criterion. The results show that most people gives a mostly positive review, which means that most people gets a positive impact from my story. To improve further, I will need to do the improvements that I mentioned in the previous three criteria. The following are the response of the respondents on the overall story.