Commentary Draft - The Importance of Chocolate Milk

NB. Third style model 'A Cheertastic Christmas Miracle' is not included within this draft.

Commentary One – The Importance of Chocolate Milk

The Importance of Chocolate Milk is a short story written with the purpose to entertain. The genre of the story is romance, with hints of intellectual comedy. My target audience is young adults, age ranging from 15-18 and I imagine the story being published in a short story anthology. I used two style models; Paper Towns by John Green and Severed Heads, Broken Hearts by Robyn Schneider. I chose these style models because they have the same target audience and are within the same genre.

Severed Heads, Broken Hearts is written in retrospect. The main character is reflecting on how something tragic happened to his friend and how his “own tragedy held out”. My character is also writing in retrospect about how an experience, meeting a girl, changed his life.  Both style models are also written from a male point of view – my story is told through Mark, a boy who has little experience interacting with girls, shown through his awkward body language – he bumps into Rosianna in the first place.

The main content of my story is dialogue between Rosianna and Mark, the main characters. Rosianna uses interrogatives such as “Shouldn’t you be helping me now?” and “Are you going to help me find my papers or not?” to spark Mark into action and assert her authority. She is a girl with a purpose, shown through her “hope and determination” to change the way people view the German language. Mark uses a lot of simple sentences, such as “I’ll gladly help you” and “you’re still not making sense” because he isn’t eloquent in expressing his opinion. I used different sentence structures for character expression.

Extended metaphors run throughout Paper Towns, for example “all the strings inside him broke” or “each one of us starts out as a water tight vessel.” The metaphors are talking about life and how different people think regarding the subject. My story starts with a metaphor, running out of chocolate milk is the “Big Bang that shaped my universe”, to show the significance of the event. In my first draft, I had ‘explosion’ instead of ‘Big Bang’. I decided to change it because there isn’t an explosion bigger than the Big Bang. It highlights that this sparks a chain reaction that changes his world, not just something that happens with no impact. It also shows Mark’s intelligence; he is able to express himself eloquently but only in his head.

I used similes to show differences between my characters. Rosianna is “like a gazelle”; graceful and swift with fluid motion and innocent beauty. Mark is “like a giraffe”; slightly awkward in the way he looks and stumbles on small things like speech. To achieve my purpose, I had to make the audience care about both characters, so much so that they’d want them to have a happy ending. By giving them characteristics that could invoke sympathy, such as the inability to express themself easily, makes the reader feel emotive towards the characters.