Schrödinger's Box - A Story

So if you witnessed my previous rant on school, you'll know I do the elective Creative Writing.
Here is a piece of flash fiction I wrote for an assessment. Feed back would be valued.

Emily Schrödinger peels off the star stickers casually, sticking them onto the enormous yellow box in front of her. Her father fastens a crimson ribbon around it while her brother scribbles a message on a sticky note. “Thank heavens we thought of it, Maurice,” chatters a slim woman, tapping her manicured nails. “Imagine the fuss your grandma would’ve put up if we forgot.”
“Well, Myra darling, I’m known for my genius.”

Freja Schrödinger dodders towards her door, slippers shuffling on the vinyl floors. Carer Pauline smiles, taking her hand and leading her to the function room. “Where am I?” Freja Schrödinger’s diction is muddied by age.
“You are in Montview Aged, Freja. It’s your birthday today!” The carer’s polished voice recites scripted lines, calming and re-educating the old woman about herself.
“Oh, I love birthdays! How old am I?”
“90, Freja, 90 today. All your family is coming to visit!”
Her lined hands shake, lovingly straightening cutlery, bedecking the function room with gold balloons, checking on the cooking. Her lips infinitely mouth, “I love birthdays,” as she works.

A stream of relatives begins to flow. They come, some awkward, some at home. They come bearing envelopes or hauling gifts. Maurice Schrödinger and his family stride in slightly late. Smiles are plastered onto their faces, but Emily’s is hidden by an enormous box. The siblings join the line of children to obediently kiss their great-grandma on her papery, sweet-smelling cheek while she dithers over their names. After feasting on the array of cakes and titbits, Freja announces, “I want to open my presents.”

She embarks on a voyage of discovery into the recesses of the boxes and envelopes, helped with any difficult knots by her carer. At last she reaches the Schrödinger’s box. Maurice steps forward. “Can I tell you what’s inside, grandma?”
She nods, fiddling with her hearing aid.
“Grandma, you’re so special to us, so, so special. So for your 90^th birthday, we decided we wanted to celebrate many more birthdays. What does this box contain? It contains life, grandma, pure life. So keep it safe. Who knows what would happen if you lost it…”
“What a good boy you are, Michael”
“Maurice”
“Maurice, yes, such a kind young man. I shall treasure it with all my heart.”

The old lady shuffles to the chair beside her bed. She pats the box protectively, cooing to it to stay safe. The ribbon still fastens the box shut sternly; its star stickers glint silver. She settles exhaustedly into the chair, closes her translucent eyelids and whispers, “It was a nice day.”
She falls asleep.


Hope you enjoyed it, hope you got it, tell me what you think.

Ellie

Creative Writing - to technique or not to technique?

At school, we have an elective called Creative Writing. Unfortunately, I have to do it, because they said that English Accelerants must. This elective is so, so damn boring. It's all "this is a simile," and "this is a metaphor."

But while I could spend all day ranting about the idiocies of this course, I actually want to go into detail about why I think the way schools teach a) writing, and b) English is, by and large, flawed.

Have you ever read a story and gone - "Wow, this is so ridiculously flowery that I just can't get through it." I'm pretty sure that if you've read amateur creative writing (what we do in schools) your answer will be yes. Schools are so obsessed with techniques. They force us to analyse with them - I'll get to that - and use them in our creative writing. Now, while I do not in fact think that techniques are bad, the teaching of them tends to get bogged down in similes, metaphors, [heaven forbid] alliteration, irony. Stuff like that. And an abundance of techniques do not make a good story. I mean really, who actually enjoys alliteration? What effect does it have on the reader? At a school level, these almost always result in a deadly boring piece of writing that sounds at best childish, and at worst, plain silly. If we look at actual books, how do they get their meaning across? Sure, good books contain techniques, but 1. containment does not equate to causation, and 2. they're probably not intended. In fact, good books do contain techniques to convey their meaning, but they are far more complicated than some ridiculous metaphor about how the sun is a match in a sea of melted crayons or something. These are story wide metaphors and analogies. These are allusions to past events. Good books hijack the reader's emotions to allow them to find meaning in characters and plot. No one ever gleaned a dystopian  portrait of mass hysteria through the language techniques of The Crucible. Arthur Miller did not spend hours deliberating on marks-grabbing thesaurus words to use. Instead he used incredible characterisation and parallels between various periods of time to create emotions and ideas in the reader's mind.
Therefore, it seems rather stupid to write essays surrounding techniques. In school, we are taught to analyse parts of the text we are studying using techniques. In my opinion, the individual techniques isolated are irrelevant for a larger analysis of the message of the text. In a classical education, where students were taught to quote noted experts or classical texts as evidence. This was, I believe, flawed, because it left no room for the student to use their own logical processes to justify their beliefs regarding a text. I can see how Post-Modernism would have frowned on what would have seemed like a failure to allow for individual takes and perspectives of a subject, based on students varying life experiences.
However, our new system of analysis retains the traditional lack of student agency. Students are forced to include in our analysis and identification of small techniques. For example, if a character says something which is ironic, the student would write, "When character x says "y", this is an example of irony. The effect on the reader is z." I don't see why we are required to say "this is an example of...", as we can use our own logic to explain the significance of the quote and its effect on the reader. We do this anyway, why include the techniques? We are also expected to find individual instances of techniques. We can't generally say, "the whole of text a involves an allusion to the b which is used to impart the relevant message of c." Because this would not be a technique in isolation. (I kind of do above anyway, because it makes more sense).

I find all this focus on techniques incredibly irritating, but you might not. Tell me below in the comments.
What do you think? Share your education woes.

See you later,

Ellie.

Hey guys, you should definitely check out my friend and author, Dimitrious Charles' new book. You should also like Stories of Earth WWIII on Facebook/ Follow it on Google Plus.

I'll write a full book review once I am finished, and that will be soon, because it is one of those books that almost morphs into an addiction. I physically can't put it down for more than a few minutes.

Back to reading,

Ellie.

Birthday Girl!!!

Sooo, now I am 14. Today was my birthday!!
For the first time in forever, there'll be music there'll be liiiiight   a few years, I had a birthday party.
So I thought that maybe you'd be interested in finding out a bit about it:

Location - Live Steamers. These are pretty much super fun mini trains (steam and diesel) that you can ride on. This made the party idea super childlike, i.e. great. Below is a picture of me on a train, and here's a pic of a train itself.

Me (left) and my cousin

A train being prepared for driving.

Invitations - Following the theme of childishness, we made the invitations a colouring competition! A picture of Thomas that Tank engine to be coloured in.

Food - 

The cake - Here is the link to the recipe we used. Is it possible to have anything cuter than a fairy bread      cake? Probs not.

• These biscuits - we did 100s and 1000s, choc chip and ginger.
• Chocolate brownies. That's pretty much the recipe I used, but I got it from the actual DK kids cookbook.
• Fairy bread!!!
• Strawberry and marshmallow skewers.
• Fairy cakes (grandma made these)
• Sandwiches (cucumber!!!)

Party bags -

What's a party without party bags?
So I had to craft some party bags pretty quickly. What I did was I grabbed some brown paper bags and in permanent marker wrote the name in a pretty font, a cake/present/train and a thank you message. Ended up looking really effective.

1 regret - I should have had a pizza piñata :(

OK, hope you have fun with these suggestions,

Bye,

Ellie.

Welcome

This is my blog. Hooray!
Now I have to write something, to tell you stuff about me and so forth.
But, I have to admit, it does seem a trifle narcissistic to ramble on about myself, and so, I shall simply have to keep it brief.

My name is Ellie. I don't really like reading all the boring details about age and favourite colour, because they really don't affect me or you. So instead here's a list of a few things I like:

• Food.
• More food.
• Cooking
  (Ok, I'll stop with the food, but you should know I really like food)
• Crafts and Art
• Drawing (see above)
• Dress ups, fairy bread and other things I really ought to have grown out of, but have absolutely no intention of actually abandoning despite my teenager-ness.
• Jumping and running and not staying still because I am so hyper!
• Crossword and puzzles.
• The internet and reading material.
• And (in case you haven't noticed) italics.

I am the kind of person who says "good grief" and "heavens above." I am also incredibly argumentative and political when I'm in the mood. I indulge in children's TV shows, especially Superted which is a rad TV show from the 80s that you should really, really, most definitely check out.

I feel organised when I make dot point lists. So here is another about what this blog will be about:

• Stuff I like or find interesting and think you should get to see.
• Responses and opinions (!!!) to current affairs.
• Recipes and art and DIYs.
• Photos.
• Anecdotes.

So that is me and my blog. Hope you'll enjoy. I'd love to hear from you about what you think!!!

Bye, Ellie.

P.S. I may take a while to get used to blogging, so bear with me.