Reading Notes: Week 4 Extra Credit Reading

Title: Sindbad: Second Voyage (Valley of Diamonds)
Author: Andrew Lang
Link: Story link.

Plot:

• Sindbad, fresh off of his first adventure, swears to stay at home and live a quiet life...which lasts for all of a single paragraph before he decides to set off again in search of excitement. 
• Yet again, he finds himself left behind by his vessel.
• Sindbad searches for his ship, but instead finds the egg of a large bird called a roc. He waits for it to land, and then ties himself onto the roc's leg to escape the island.
• This is foolish, considering that a roc has a challenge rating of 11 in the fifth edition monster manual. Sindbad stands no chance versus this behemoth.
• The roc deposits Sindbad in a land that is both covered with diamonds and infested with snakes.

The roc, bearing Sindbad. Illustration by Edmund Dulac.

Setting:

• Sindbad's home, over dinner.*
• This is the real setting where the stories are told, but the stories themselves take place elsewhere.
• An unnamed island outside of Baghdad, Sindbad's home base.
• The Valley of Diamonds, famed amongst sailors and merchants.

Characters:

• Sindbad: The real Sindbad -- the guy who actually participated in all the swashbuckling tales of legend. 
• Rugged, lucky, scrappy...this guy has everything your standard adventurer needs. He can't sit still for a moment and is always in pursuit of the next adventure, which he often blindly stumbles into.
• Sindbad: The "other" Sindbad -- he's not an action hero, but he shares the name of our protagonist and he's willing to sit and listen to his stories, so he's as good of an audience as you can ask for.
• Sindbad comes across pieces of fresh meat, which are lobbed into the valley by merchants in a convoluted method of mining diamonds.
• Using the meat, Sindbad baits a roc into carrying him into its nest, where he meets up with said merchants.
• On the way home, Sindbad sees a rhinoceros, which he attempts to describe to the reader.

Writing Style:

• I'm not a huge fan of the first person writing style. I don't know why, but I distinctly prefer feeling like I'm a neutral viewer to the story (i.e. third person omniscient) to being trapped in one character's head. I also think it's harder to write sympathetic characters in the first person, because I think they automatically sound boastful.
• That being said, there are interesting things you can do with first person. For example, it's possible to withhold key information from your audience and leave them in the same shoes as your protagonist. In the third person, we know almost everything that's going on in everyone's head. In first person, if the protagonist can't get a read on another character, neither can the audience. I'd probably employ this writing style if I did a mystery, with important missing plot details.