One of the main goals of Teen Writer’s Lab is to encourage flexibility and cooperation in writing. Every week, we do “prompts” that may involve students working separately or together, but then they share their writing and discuss it.
One particularly fruitful prompt we did this semester had to do with point of view—how does a story change when you change who’s telling it? In this case, first we watched a video of a folktale that was unfamiliar to everyone:
The folktale was “Three Golden Flowers” and it was told in a typical folktale narrative style, third person omniscient (all-knowing). The students each chose to retell the story from another point of view, which forces us to think which details are important to the teller of a story. Here are some of the results!
Sarah:
My name is Bob, and I am the oldest brother of the three. My younger brothers are both generic—I mean, wonderful people. Robert is great, great worker, great storyteller, but Bill is shy, quiet, and absolutely perfect in every way. If that’s not foreshadowing, I don’t know what is.
So anyway. Back to the story. The king asked us three specifically to go look for golden flowers for some reason in exchange for his daughter (which sounds very wrong in retrospect), and I was chosen first. I don’t know why he asked three random people from the village to, but I am the Chosen One who was asked first, which means that I was going to be the one to get the three golden flowers and give them to the king! But, all did not go as planned. Some random fisherman with a rather shifty look around him asked me what I had in the basket I put the flowers into, and I told him that I had worms. I mean, that was true, I technically also had worms in the basket, but when I got back, the flowers actually turned into worms. That was something that was not supposed to happen.
So anyway then Robert was told to go get the flowers, and he also failed. Bill asked what happened, and we told him “yo, don’t reply to that old fisherman, he’s going to reality bend those flowers out of existence and replace them with worms.”
Bill did not do what we said.
Bill came home with both the flowers and a shiny new flute. We asked him what he had done, and he apparently spoke to a stranger for once in his life and told the fisherman the truth. Darn it Bill, you weren’t supposed to be this perfect!
Thankfully enough, after the king’s daughter was healed and we stopped moping, Bill was told to keep 100 birds in line. Robert and I scoffed at the idea, Bill has a deep phobia of birds that he must control every time he sees one, but then something horrible happened.
We heard Bill playing the flute. This does not sound like a bad thing at first, however Bill is tone-deaf and cannot play an instrument to save his life. The birds did not care, and they lined up for his autograph. Now Bill is an island-renowned rock star—oh, and he got married to the king’s daughter. I’m not jealous, whatever could you mean?
Xan
I stretched my leaves up to the sky gathering as much of the sunlight as I could. I felt the cool splatter of drops from the waterfall glistening on my petals. The breeze was warm, and my siblings and I danced together in the wind. Then a shadow passed over our small home in the rock. A dark shape loomed over us, pushing away the sunlight and blocking the drops of water. I cowered with my siblings as footsteps rocked the ground and the shadow loomed taller and taller. A human hand reached down and plucked three of my siblings from the earth, crushing their green leaves in a gigantic fist. I stretched out my petals as they were taken away but I could not reach them, I could not pull them back. The shadow passed, and life and sun and water returned to our small outcropping. But my siblings and I danced no longer, as we mourned our loss. A day passed, the sun light went from our small home, and we tucked out petals close waiting for the dawn.
The day came again, and with it the warm breeze, but as we danced once more, a great shadow came again. I felt the air quiver as a hand reached out. Suddenly I was pulled from the dirt. My roots snapping as I was pulled away. I felt my siblings reaching out, but they were too far, too far. Me and two of my siblings were dropped unceremoniously in a basket. The lid went on, and the rays of the sun vanished. We were rocked to and fro in the dark, the sound of the river, closer than ever before. I couldn’t imagine a worse fate at the moment, sealed in a basket, away from most of my family, hidden from the sun. I was wrong, so terribly wrong, worse came. In the middle of the voyage, sealed away from the sun, I felt my stock begin to twist. My petals curled up and withered to dust. My leaves sealed themselves to my sides. I flopped to the bottom of that basket, a worm.
Alexa
The old fisherman tried his best to stay away from other people. They generally proved to be greedy liars and they always bothered him for magical gifts, but even he couldn’t avoid hearing about the chief’s daughter. What kind of idiot would eat a bad mango when she could eat literally anything else? Still, the chief wanted her alive and the only other person with magical talent on the island told him about the flowers. The fisherman would have gotten them himself if the chief had asked politely, he knew where they were and no matter how stupid she is a woman shouldn’t die from a mango. Nobody should. The chief didn’t ask the old fisherman though, he was an odd recluse. Most people didn’t even know he could do magic. Most people didn’t even know he existed. Instead the chief asked men to look for the flowers and told them if they found them they would get to marry his daughter. The old fisherman didn’t want to marry anyone so he ignored it.
The very next day he saw a young man, the oldest of three brothers he often saw exploring the island moving his skiff through the water with a container inside. He came, the old fisherman knew, from where the golden flowers grew. Maybe he had gotten them. “What do you have in there?” he asked.
“Worms!” shouted the young man. He didn’t need to shout, the water wasn’t that loud, then he left as fast as he could. Even if he hadn’t shouted, even if he hadn’t left, even if the old fisherman didn’t know bait far too well to think anything that wasn’t worms was worms he wouldn’t have believed him. Most people are easy to trick, but those with magic can see through any lie with practice, and he had plenty. It saddened him, he had liked those boys. They had always seemed content with their lives exploring paradise and while he had never spoken to them he smiled whenever he saw them come by. Why did everyone always lie? In a fit of spite his magic, almost without his permission but not quite, moved. It moved into the flowers squirmed through them and whispered to them in their language just how much they would like to be worms. For a moment he regretted it, the young man would surely get in trouble for bringing the chief’s daughter worms. Besides, she would not live long and she needed those flowers.
Still, the next day, when the young man’s younger brother came by in the skiff with the container, and he asked him what was in his container, and after a moment of hesitation he too said worms the old fisherman did it again. Deliberately this time. The flowers were happy to be worms, having been cut from their roots they would have otherwise died the magic told him when it came back. Flowers don’t know much, but they know they want to live and they never lie about it, the old fisherman whispered back. The chief’s daughter wouldn’t lose much if she died though, Life shared with a liar was hardly life at all. He was an idiot too, if his brother had told him what happened he should have known not to lie. He clearly wasn’t wise enough to marry anyone. The old fisherman couldn’t really blame him, he himself didn’t think he was wise enough for that.
When the third son came by he felt a bit of hope. He was the quietest of the brothers, maybe he just wouldn’t answer instead of giving a stupid lie. He hesitated too, but then he opened his container and showed me the flowers. At that moment he thought maybe not everyone is a liar. He gave the young man a whistle, he deserves an extra reward. After all, not everyone is a liar but the chief might be. He might not get to marry the chief’s daughter, he didn’t think he would mind, he never spoke about girls and according to his brother’s teasing never spoke to them either. Still, he deserved something for giving the old fisherman hope for humanity.
Kien
When he heard footsteps he knew who it was, it was a skill of his, passed down from his parents, he guessed it came with the trade.
“Why do you trouble me, young Paxraan?” he growled.
The young farmer stopped, started to ask how his uncle knew it was him, then thought better of it, who knew how his uncle did anything? The uncle knew he was doing this without turning around, maybe it was the air flow being disturbed, maybe it was a change in the relative magnetic field, maybe it was just a bit of magic, not even he knew all of his own secrets.
“I need help, you see I’m poor and when father dies, it will all go to my oldest brother,” stammered the farmer, deeply unsettled on account of the fact that he was staring at his uncle’s back while standing in his dark hut.
“Do you mean to tell me that you let him fill out the will?” the uncle spoke quietly, so quietly that it could have sounded like the breeze whispering if one stuffed their ears, a very angry breeze, but a quiet one nonetheless.