Changing Stories

Jessica Morris
jmo97@terpmail.umd.edu

ABSTRACT

When someone is struggling through a period of transition, they might hear the clich the
only constant in life is change. But why is change such a challenge to humans? I am creating a
collection of fiction, poetry, art, and time-based media to explore how humans handle different
changes during adolescence. These pieces will be inspired by true stories I have learned from
interviewing my peers and informed by research. Interacting with my project will also be an
experience of change, as the reader will navigate through non-traditional written pieces and follow
the story through transmedia. I want readers to see connections in how humans handle seemingly
unrelated changes and to understand the challenges that come with change. My project draws
inspiration from nonlinear narratives such as Chris Wares Building Stories, Caitlin Scholls
Makebelieve, and the rise of transmedia storytelling as seen in The Lizzie Bennet Diaries. It is
targeted towards adolescents in the hope that it will make them feel less alone and understand change
better. My budget is low and I have most of the skills required for this project. As a future educator, I
hope my project will help me better understand adolescents.

INTRODUCTION
Ive always struggled with change, and when its happening, I often feel very isolated. I am
exploring how other people experience and respond to change, particularly focusing on changes that
occur in adolescence (between 13 and 19). I will be interviewing around twenty people of any age,
but we will be talking about a change that occurred during adolescence. This change can be what
people consider to be a turning point in their lives, something that caused them stress, or a really
wonderful change. I will also be researching theories of how the brain handles change and
anthropological theories of how our culture affects how we handle change. After I collect these
stories, I will fictionalize and combine them in order to write seven distinct stories about change.
However, this project is more than a collection of stories about change; interacting with my
project will be an experience of change. As people experience the book, they will be faced with
changes in the presentation of the stories. These changes may be small, such as turning the book
upside down mid-story, or large, such as needing to go online to experience the end of a story as a
video.
I hope to provide insight for both others and myself as to how adolescents as a community
experience change.

PROJECT DESCRIPTION (250-300 words)

I will create a multimedia collection of a stories related to the theme of change. In this
proposal, the term stories will refer to any artistic representation of an experience of change (video,
performance art, prose, art, etc.)
Before creating these, I will interview twenty people of any age about their experiences with
change during adolescence (13-19). I called for interviews via social media, so I am interviewing
friends and peers. I chose to find people this way because a personal connection will strengthen my
writing, and due to the nature of my topic, people I know are more likely to volunteer than strangers.

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I am not attempting to cover a comprehensive list of topics that people might experience; rather, I am
focusing on poignant stories from people from different areas of my life. I will conduct additional
research on psychological and anthropological theories about how people handle different changes. I
will use my creative writing skills to synthesize and fictionalize these experiences into stories.
Finally, I will decide what media I am going to use to create them. I am creating a meta-
critique by encouraging readers to experience change as they read stories that grapple with change.
The rise of transmedia and the nonlinear narrative has created a breakaway from traditional linear
storytelling. As a reader experiences my project, they will reach points where the mode of
storytelling changes. This could range from turning the book upside down, reading poetry instead of
prose, moving to a website to watch a video, viewing visual art, etc. Some stories may be wholly one
media, but other stories may switch media midway through. I will create three written stories, one
performance story, one video story, and two art stories.

HISTORY (500 words)

Research on the psychology of change--particularly adolescent change--is not a new field.
Jean Piaget studied cognitive development and focused on adolescence as a time of cognitive
development, a shift from concrete to formal operations (Kastner). During adolescence, the
prefrontal cortex-- the CEO of the brain--must first remove neural branches during adolescence
before it grows new connections for more sophisticated functioning (Kastner). In part because of
this, during adolescence decisions are made more by the emotional centers of the brain than the
thinking centers (Kastner). Additionally, there are different theories about how humans react to
change. In Elizabeth Kubler Rosss book On Death and Dying, she details the emotional states that
humans enter when a loved one dies. Today, her cycle is applied to how humans react to many
different changes (The Psychology of Change). Margaret Mead, the first cultural anthropologist,
studied how culture impacts the way people in different societies experience change (Mead).
Chris Wares Building Stories sets a precedent for nonlinear storytelling. Wares work comes
in a box containing many text pieces that can be read in any order. A review of Ware describes that he
is remarkably deft at balancing the demands of fine art, where sentimentality is an error, and those
of storytelling, where emotion is everything (Wolk). Additionally, Caitlin Scholls 2011 book
Makebelieve pushed genre boundaries by combining memory, tall tales, and poetic collage
(Makebelieve). One reviewer hailed it as less categorically a book and more simply a rhythm
that speaks to the underlying and insatiable state of human desire (Scholl, back cover).
While multimedia literature is a recent development, it is on the rise. In 2007, Harry Jenkins
defined transmedia storytelling as a process where integral elements of fiction get dispersed
systematically across multiple delivery channels for the purpose of creating a unified and coordinated
entertainment experience (Jenkins 101). Transmedia storytelling can be about additive
comprehension, which is Neil Youngs idea that each new text adds to the understanding of the story
as a whole (Jenkins 202). This means that parts of the story can stand alone, but the more parts
that are consumed, the better the reader understands the story.
An example of a transmedia story is Bernie Su and Kate Roricks 2012 project The Lizzie
Bennet Diaries, a groundbreaking multiplatform adaptation of Pride and Prejudice (The Lizzie
Bennet Diaries). The Lizzie Bennet Diaries retold Austens Pride and Prejudice through weekly
video blogs accompanied by characters who tweeted, Instagrammed, and Facebooked in real time.
UC Berkeley published a tutorial for journalism majors about how to create a multimedia
report. They describe a multimedia story as a combination of text, still photographs, video clips,
audio, graphics, and interactivity presented on a Web Site in a nonlinear format in which the info in
each medium is complementary, not redundant (Stevens).

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 Evidently, multimedia storytelling has been well established as a valid form of storytelling. I
will continue to research different examples of multimedia and nonlinear stories in conjunction with
further psychological and anthropological research.

SIGNIFICANCE AND DISTINCTION

DCC is more than just Photoshop and Adobe Premiere skills; it provided me with a
community during one of the scariest changes of my life. In these hallways I have found friends
from different backgrounds and a supportive faculty that helped me feel like a person in a
university full of numbers. DCC turned the space of Maryland into a place for me, and I want to
see how other peoples experiences compare to mine. Additionally, I will be using those technical
skills to push myself beyond my comfort zone of writing into creating an interactive,
multidimensional project.
The main difference between these past techniques-- The Lizzie Bennet Diaries, Building
Stories, and Makebelieve, is that I am not creating a world for my reader to inhabit. The world is a
theme of change, and in order to stay in this world, they have to continue to adapt and change.
However, this research is still relevant because it explores the value of using different mediums to
communicate different feelings and parts of a story. The Berkeley article in particular discusses the
advantages to using each type of media, which is extremely relevant for my project.
In brainstorming for this project, I spoke to Muftiat Ogunsanya, who created the mental
health literary magazine You Are Not Alone for her project last year. This is different than hers
because my theme is change rather than mental health, and I am not crowdsourcing the material.
While part of my project is the importance of community experience of change, I want it to be
my interpretation and use of creative license when it comes to other peoples experiences. It will
be based on communal experience, but I want to hone my craft of writing and creating tension in
order to create a strong body of work for the piece.

EXPERTISE AND SKILLS

I spent the last semester interning for a professional storyteller, and I have learned a lot
about interpersonal communication and how to find a strong story in someone. I have two years
of creative writing, so I feel prepared to create meaningful stories. I was introduced to 3D
modeling and a variety of coding and woodworking art projects. I have adequate skills in Adobe
Premiere and performance art for the time-based media pieces of the project.
I need to improve my skills in WordPress in order to create a website piece to host my
digital pieces. I am familiar with CreateSpace for publishing but I need to allow time to learn
more.

APPROACH

I will be conducting research on anecdotal experiences of change via personal interviews. I will
create a questionnaire that I will provide to my interviewee before interviewing them so that they
have a chance to think through the questions. Additionally, I will be reading psychological and
anthropological articles about change theory in order to better understand the scientific reasons
that humans react the way we do. I will also contact English professors such as Kari Krause and
Brian Richardson to interview them about nontraditional and nonlinear storytelling.

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 WORK PLAN AND TIMELINE
Notes on the work plan: it is broken down by weekly goals. At the beginning of each week, I will
create detailed schedules of exactly how I will break down the tasks for the week based on my
schedule that week. I have built in time to go through four drafts of each story. Draft 0 is for myself
only, Draft 1 is for peer viewers or readers, Draft 2 is for professor viewers or an additional peer
viewer, and Draft 3 is the final draft.

Thanksgiving Break: Nov 22-27

Begin to collect interest from people (non UMD students) who want to be interviewed
Write questionnaire that will function as a precursor to the interview itself
Write interview questions
Write about what I am doing for my project and who I am looking to interview (that I can post)
Penultimate Week of Classes: Nov 28-Dec 4

Reach out to professors I know in the English department to find a professor willing to meet with me
next semester about creative writing
Identify a group of peers who would be willing to read my writing
Ask Jennifer Rudick Zunikoff, professional storyteller, if she would be willing to look over my
performance story next semester
Reach out to people at UMD who would be interviewed and schedule times to meet with them
Post in UMD groups about wanting to meet with students to interview them
Final Week of Classes: Dec 5-12
Interview 8 people who responded to my call for interviews
Finals Week: Dec 13-Dec 20
I will not be working on Capstone this week
Winter Break: December 21-January 24
Interview 1 friend from home
Week 1 and 2: January 25-Feb 5
Email Kari Kraus in the English department and I School about her work with nontraditional
storytelling
Improve WordPress site to become more familiar with how to use it and improve my website as both
a blog and how I want it to connect to my Capstone
Watch WordPress tutorials
If I am having trouble, reach out to Avi Goldman
Meet with anthropology professor Dr. Barnet Pavao-Zuckerman
Meet with Lyra Hilliard in the English department
Finish conducting interviews: interview 9 more people
As interviews are finished, type up information from the interviews and begin to identify key themes
and points of interest for further research
DCC Class Feb 2: 2 minute project pitch
February 5: Final Proposal Due, Research Journal due
Week 3: Feb 6-12
Synthesize the information garnered from interviews and pick the experiences I want to write on (by
Feb 8)
Create a rough outline for how the experiences will translate into different media (by Feb 10)

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 Have a plan for what stories will tackle each experience, identify what further research needs to be
done, have a clear plan for how the entire piece will fit together
3 written stories
Written Story #1, Written Story #2, and Written Story #3
Will be largely prose based, will possibly include poetry, graphic novels, or alterations on how the
text appears on the page
1 performance that I will present at the capstone fair that will be documented Performance Story
1 video Video Story
2 art pieces
Art Story #1, Art Story #2
Processing/Photoshop/Sculpture (TBD)
Touch base with the English professor
DCC Class Feb 9: Self Evaluation Rubric (ELMS), 5 questions for Interview with Stakeholder,
Bring to class whatever you have done for your project, read text on Iterative Design
Feb 12: Research Journal due
Week 4: Feb 13-19
Create template for how the WordPress site will look
Read psychology research specific to Written Story #1
Write Written Story #1 (complete draft 0 by Feb 19)
No one besides me needs to read this
DCC Class Feb 16: Meet with Stakeholder, bring to class first iteration
Feb 19: Research Journal due
Week 5: Feb 20-26
Read psychology research specific to Art Story #1
Plan and gather materials for Art Story 1 (complete draft 0 by Feb 26)
Spend at least two hours revising Written Story #1 (complete draft 1 by Feb 26)
Send to a peer reader
DCC Class Feb 23: Meet with Stakeholder
Feb 26: Research Journal due
Week 6: Feb 27-March 5
Read psychology research specific to Written Story #2
Write Written Story #2 (complete draft 0 by Mar 5)
Spend at least two hours creating Art Story #1 (draft 1 by Mar 5)
Touch base with Brandon Morse if I will need his materials
Revise Written Story #1 based on peer feedback (complete draft 2 by Mar 5)
Send to English professor mentor
DCC Class March 2: Stakeholder Interview due, bring to class second iteration
March 5: Research Journal due
Week 7: March 6-12
Read psychology research specific to Art Story #2
Create a plan/create Art Story #2 (Complete draft/plan 0 by Mar 12)
Spend at least two hours revising Written Story #2 (Complete draft 1 by Mar 12)
Send to a peer reader
Continue to create Art Story 1 (draft 2 by Mar 12)
Meet with English professor about Written Story 1 and revise and tentatively finalize Written
Story #1 based on English professor mentor feedback (Complete final draft 3 by Mar 12)
DCC Class March 9: Individual Meetings
March 12: Research Journal due

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 Week 8: Mar 13-19
Read psychology research specific to Written Story #3
Write Written Story #3 (complete draft 0 by Mar 19)
Spend at least two hours revising and creating Art Story #2 (Complete draft 1 by Mar 19)
Talk it through with a peer, figure out if I need materials
Revise Written Story #2 (Complete draft 2 by Mar 19)
Send to English professor mentor
Finalize Art Story 1 (Draft 3 by Mar 19)
Evaluate where I stand with Written Story #1 and make a plan for what still needs to be done.
DCC Class March 16: Mid-Point Presentation
Week 9/Spring Break!: Mar 20-26
I am traveling to Boston Mar 24-26 and will not be working on Capstone
Evaluate what goals have been met
Email Porter to meet with him upon return about my mid-semester progress on non-traditional
storytelling
This week will be used as a catch-up week for anything I have fallen behind on.
Week 10: March 27-April 2
Read psychology research specific to Performance Story
Create a plan and begin to film, if necessary, for Performance Story (draft 0 by April 2)
Spend at least two hours revising Written Story #3 (Complete draft 1 by April 2)
Send to peer reader
Revise Art Story #2 (draft 2 by April 2)
Meet with Brandon Morse or talk it through with another peer
Revise and finalize Written Story #2 based on professor feedback (complete final draft 3 by April
2)
DCC Class: Working Lab

Week 11: April 3-9

Read psychology research specific to Video Story
Create a plan/create Video Story (Complete draft 0 by April 9)
Complete all filming and begin to edit Performance Story (draft 1 by April 9)
Send to a Jennifer Rudick Zunikoff
Revise Written Story #3 based on peer feedback (Complete draft 2 by April 9)
Send to English professor
Revise and finalize Art Story #2 (final draft 3 complete on April 9) Will be displayed at Capstone
Exhibition
Evaluate where I stand with Written Story #2 and make a plan for what still needs to be done
Revisit and make sure Art Story #1 is ready to be displayed at the Capstone Exhibition
DCC Class: Alpha Prototype/Small Group Working Lab
Week 12: April 10-16
Spend at least two hours revising Video Story (complete draft 1 by April 16)
Talk it through with a peer
Continue to edit Performance Story based on peer feedback (draft 2 by April 16)
Send to JRZ again
Revise and finalize Written Story #3 based on professor feedback (Complete final draft 3 by April
16)
Evaluate where I stand with Art Story #1 and make a plan for what still needs to be done

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 ALL STORIES BESIDES VIDEO STORY AND PERFORMANCE STORY MUST BE
FINALIZED BY APRIL 16TH.
DCC Class April 13: Working Lab
DCC Capstone Art Exhibition April 10-14
Week 13: April 17-23
Finalize Video Story by April 23rd
Finalize Performance Story by April 23rd
LAYOUT WEEK
Finalize everything in terms of the order of the stories, how the transitions will happen between
stories, and how everything looks on the page
By APRIL 23TH the physical copies of the book should be ordered from CreateSpace
Finalize how all the projects appear on the WordPress site
Practice Performance Story

Week 14: April 24-30, Week 15: May 1-7

These weeks are a built-in buffer and will be planned accordingly.
The priority for what needs to be done BEFORE the buffer is the Written Stories, because the
physical book MUST be ordered by April 23rd in order to not stress out that it wont get here.
Therefore, if need be, the Video Story, Art Stories, and Performance Stories will be pushed and
worked on here.
I can also use this time to finish working on my WordPress site and make improvement that way.
DCC Class April 20 and 27: Final Presentations
DCC Class May 4: DCC 106 Meetings/Dress Rehearsal
Capstone Fair: Thursday, May 11th

AUDIENCE

My project is for adolescents, whether they be as young as thirteen or as old as nineteen.

Adolescence is a time of forced change, and a time when many people feel alone. While as an
adolescent I found and find comfort in reading, there are a lot of people for whom reading is
really difficult, and having this project span across media allows different people to access it at
different points. This will specifically help people with dyslexia and other reading disabilities
because they will be able to consume stories through mediums besides text. People all have
mediums they prefer to consume, and so I am challenging them to experience stories in mediums
in which they may not be comfortable. I am also challenging people to confront experiences that
are uncomfortable and unpleasant in order to learn about the world around them.

BUDGET
The only cost for my project will be printing the actual physical book itself and potentially art
materials. Based on rough estimates from the self-publishing website createspace.com, a book that is
5.5x8.5 inches with full color with 50 pages would cost $4.35 each. I envision printing around ten
copies, so the total cost would be $43.50. Additionally, I am adding $100 to the budget for various art
supplies I may need. The total budget is $143.50.

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OUTCOMES
My career goal is to teach English literature and writing at the high school or middle school
level. I spend my summers working with adolescents in a camp setting. Learning about both the
psychology and cultural aspects of change and other peoples experience will help me to better
understand my campers and my future students. Additionally, I am pursuing the creative writing
minor and I hope to keep creative writing in my life, and this project allows me to combine my
passion for writing with my interest in adolescent development, while creating a project that I hope to
benefit adolescents when they experience it. DCC has pushed me to explore my creativity through
various software programs such as Processing and Adobe Premiere, and I am using these skills to
enhance my project beyond a collection of stories. I would love to find a way to introduce my project
to a group of adolescents in the future, but at the moment I am unsure how to do that.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Brushwood Rose, Chlo, and Bronwen Low. "Exploring The Craftedness Of Multimedia
Narratives: From Creation To Interpretation." Visual Studies 29.1 (2014): 30-39.
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Crowder, James A and Shelli A. Friess. The Psychology of Change. Systems Engineering Agile
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Goldberg, Stan. The 10 Rules of Change. Psychology Today, 1 Sept 2002,

https://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/200209/the-10-rules-change. Accessed 20 Nov
2016.

Jenkins, Harry. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York University
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Jenkins, Harry. Transmedia Storytelling 101. Confessions of an Aca-Fan, 22 Mar 2017,

http://henryjenkins.org/2007/03/transmedia_storytelling_101.html. Accessed 5 February
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Jenkins, Harry. Transmedia Storytelling 202. Confessions of an Aca-Fan, 1 Aug 2011,

http://henryjenkins.org/2011/08/defining_transmedia_further_re.html. Accessed 5 February
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Kastner, Laura. Adolescent Psychological Development. 2011. PowerPoint Presentation.

Legere, Lyn, Patricia B. Nemec, and Margaret Swarbrick. "Personal Narrative As A Teaching
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Liu, C-C., et al. "The Effect Of Story Grammars On Creative Self-Efficacy And Digital
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Makebelieve: A book by Caitlin Scholl. UnoPress, n.d., http://www.makebelievethebook.com/
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Mead, Margaret. Coming of Age in Samoa. American Museum of Natural History, 1973. Print.

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