Ellen Hopkins� Burn is a unique take on a pretty well known story, using techniques that I’m hopeful I can learn from. I enjoyed Hopkins� way of making the typical misunderstood girl from a conservative family/star crossed lovers plot, and putting a twist on it. From this I learned that even small details in the plot or tone can make a large impact on the story and how the reader perceives it. Hopkins begins the story talking about the misunderstood girl, using cliche quotes like “Real love finds you once, if you're lucky.� She then turns the story even darker, as she does with most of her books, turning it from a stereotypical misunderstood, love crazy teenage girl story, to something much deeper. The subtle tone shift gradually gets more extreme, until it is eventually shown through quotes like, “Do you ever dangle your toes over the precipice, dare the cliff to crumble, defy the frozen deity to suffer the sun, thaw feather and bone, take wing to fly you home?� Given that structure of the writing is what made me choose this book, I’ll go into the obvious for anyone who knows about Ellen Hopkins and her style of writing. Ellen Hopkins uses a similar structure in a lot of her novels, one of prose and poetry combined, with stanzas on the page. While I can’t really pull a quote to show this and I can’t upload a photo, I’ll simply say that she uses a mix of prose and poetry, as well as word shaping on the page, to convey her story in a unique way. I’ve always been intrigued by how she does this, but by analyzing the text as a mentor text, I was able to understand more of the meaning of why she writes the way she does. From this, I learned another way to structure a novel in a different way that will change the story and leave something for the reader to remember. I also learned that the incorporation of poetry and rhyming into a novel is not only acceptable, but highly effective. Hopkins uses poetic devices and rhyme schemes to signify important lines or leave them marked in your memory. Since the reader often reads her books as prose, giving a cadence to certain lines makes them more memorable, and therefore more impactful. An example of this cadence is during an inner monologue of Pattyn, the main character, when she says “I felt angry, frustrated. I felt I didn't belong, not in my, church, not in my home, not in my skin.� I had never thought of using something like a rhyme scheme or specific cadence to a sentence or phrase to make it stand out to the reader. Hopkins� writing taught me lessons moreso about the structure and small details of novel writing, which has inspired me in both my poetry, prose, and novel writing.
I enjoyed Hopkins� way of making the typical misunderstood girl from a conservative family/star crossed lovers plot, and putting a twist on it. From this I learned that even small details in the plot or tone can make a large impact on the story and how the reader perceives it. Hopkins begins the story talking about the misunderstood girl, using cliche quotes like “Real love finds you once, if you're lucky.� She then turns the story even darker, as she does with most of her books, turning it from a stereotypical misunderstood, love crazy teenage girl story, to something much deeper. The subtle tone shift gradually gets more extreme, until it is eventually shown through quotes like, “Do you ever dangle your toes over the precipice, dare the cliff to crumble, defy the frozen deity to suffer the sun, thaw feather and bone, take wing to fly you home?�
Given that structure of the writing is what made me choose this book, I’ll go into the obvious for anyone who knows about Ellen Hopkins and her style of writing. Ellen Hopkins uses a similar structure in a lot of her novels, one of prose and poetry combined, with stanzas on the page. While I can’t really pull a quote to show this and I can’t upload a photo, I’ll simply say that she uses a mix of prose and poetry, as well as word shaping on the page, to convey her story in a unique way. I’ve always been intrigued by how she does this, but by analyzing the text as a mentor text, I was able to understand more of the meaning of why she writes the way she does. From this, I learned another way to structure a novel in a different way that will change the story and leave something for the reader to remember.
I also learned that the incorporation of poetry and rhyming into a novel is not only acceptable, but highly effective. Hopkins uses poetic devices and rhyme schemes to signify important lines or leave them marked in your memory. Since the reader often reads her books as prose, giving a cadence to certain lines makes them more memorable, and therefore more impactful. An example of this cadence is during an inner monologue of Pattyn, the main character, when she says “I felt angry,
frustrated.
I felt I didn't belong, not in my,
church, not in my home, not
in my skin.� I had never thought of using something like a rhyme scheme or specific cadence to a sentence or phrase to make it stand out to the reader.
Hopkins� writing taught me lessons moreso about the structure and small details of novel writing, which has inspired me in both my poetry, prose, and novel writing.