After several days of scrutinizing price data, it’s time to scrutinize the stories themselves. While Josh added “tags” in real time describing each object, lately we’ve decided it might be useful and interesting to add tags that describe narrative elements and tactics.
Here are some we’ve come up with — but what we really want is your suggestions. What other story/theme/style tags should we add? (Anything here you think we should delete?)
Adolescence, Anthropomorphism, Bad Parents, Bad Spouse/Partner, Celebrity, Christianity, Christmas, Contemptuous of Object, Dead Relative, Death, Exposition – Classification, Exposition – Descriptive, Exposition – Sequence, Family Secret, Father, First-Person Narrator – Crazy/Unreliable, First-Person Narrator – Pathetic/Loser, First-Person Narrator – Well-Adjusted, Funny, Grandmother, Historical, Judaism, Magical Power, Murder, Object is Alive, Object is Cursed, Politics, Purple Prose, Religion, Romance, Sex, Thievery/Theft/Stealing, Third-Person Limited Narrator, Third-Person Omniscient Narrator, Uncle, Unhappy Romance, Workplace.
Hmm, some of those first-person narrator descriptions may be in the eye of the beholder!
Possible additional categories: Childhood, Multiple Owners, Object Was A Gift, Object Gets Destroyed … ??
Good suggestions, Jenny (from the excellent Yard Sale Bloodbath blog). And once we do add those first-person descriptions, I hope you’ll pipe up if you think we’re unfairly calling the narrator “normal” or “crazy” or “pathetic” or whatever. Those do sound very judgmental, it’s true.
I’m thinking on the first-person narrator thing, maybe the problem is with “well-adjusted.” The ones hat are crazy/unreliable or pathetic/loser, I think those are identifiable. But the ones that don’t clearly fall into that category may or may not be “well-adjusted.” I think maybe they should just be called “First Person Narrative,” sans further judgment.