James Fazzio
December 8, 2008
Final Project Reflection

The text that my group chose to study as our final project is Flight Patterns. There are four major characters in the short story and we have four members in our group, so we each decided to take one character to focus on. The four of us made twitter accounts and put ourselves in our characters shoes and posted multiple twitters throughout the past few weeks. What we did was analyze each character and continue their lives based on how we thought they would continue on living.
The character that I chose to focus on is William. After reading the story, I thought about what William was like and the types of things that he would do. I posted several twitters based on how I perceive William and off of the things that he does. Since Grace, William, and Marie are all family, we made posts that correspond to each other.
Mostly everything that I posted on my twitter account has been about either Williams family or his work. Since he is so addicted to work, I posted a few things about his accomplishes at work and I made some posts that showed William having a bad day at work, since nobody has a good day at work everyday. Other posts consist of him enjoying time with Grace and Marie because they are the most significant figures in his life. A couple of posts are very sexual since in the short story, him and his wife are strongly sexually attracted to one another. Since his life mostly evolves around Marie, Grace and work, I believe that these are the types of things that William does from a day-to-day bases.
There are a few other posts that involve other situations that relate to the book. I remembered that William tells us about his attraction to other women and made a post that talked about his thoughts about her while he was on his business trip. Other posts involve his knowledge of the Declaration of Independence, his training for the triathlons that he participates in and other things that William would probably be doing.
The short story does not talk much about the history of William’s family; this is where my creativity comes in. I made events such as Grace’s birthday and a family movie night, things that would probably happen to any family, and incorporated them into their lives. This is where I had to use my judgment and analysis of the characters to post something that is meaningful to the story, and, at the same time, is not something that is totally abstract and off topic. Posting these twitters really helped me understand each character more thoroughly and caused me to analyze the story and what could happen next at a deeper level.
All in all I would say that this project was relatively easy and a good way to analyze literature. Getting started was really simple because I had the story fresh on my mind and I had a bunch of ideas for what I should write down. When my posts started to build up, I began running into problems. The main problem was remembering to go onto my twitter account and actually making the posts. When I did remember, there were a few other challenges that I had to overcome. I also had trouble thinking of new ideas that were not similar to the previous posts. I didn’t realize that it had been a couple of weeks since I had last read Flight Patterns. I decided it would be a good idea to reread the story in search of new ideas. My idea worked perfectly! Mostly what I got out of the story when I reread it were little things that William did often or well that I could make a post about. Overall I would have to say that this was a good way for me to get into the story and actually think about the type of person William really was.

twitter url:

http://twitter.com/jvfazzio