Penn Foster Chapter 1 Summary

In Chapter One, Foster tells how every trip is a quest (except when it’s not). A quest is composed of a quester, who is often young and inexperienced, a place to go, a stated reason to go there, challenges and trials on the way, and a real reason to go there. The place to go and the stated reason to go usually go together; the quester must go somewhere to do something. The real reason for the quest is not the stated reason; it is self-knowledge found because of the trip. Chapter Two describes acts of communion and their significance in literature. A communion is whenever people eat or drink together but when eating is in a book it has more meaning than just food. Meal scenes reveal the status of the relationship between the members of the table. For example, if the meal goes badly and someone gets up and leaves saying that they “lost their appetite”, that signifies a poor relationship. Communions are also not always

Sex scenes are very difficult to write and make interesting or not cliche. That is why many authors try to avoid them by skipping from one scene to the next. A writer might jump from a man unzipping a girl's dress to the next morning which infers that they indeed had sex without going into details. Foster even speculates that the most sensual scenes do not have the actual act of sex in it. Foster moves on to water it’s connection to baptism in literature in Chapter Eighteen. In everyday life, if you go underwater, you either drown or survive but in literature, it is much more symbolic than that. When an author submerges a character underwater, it is baptism. The character often will come up to the surface as a new person like a rebirth. Throughout books, baptisms occur in countless different ways such as a boat accident, a trip to the pool gone wrong, falling off a bridge into a river or sometimes the water isn't even literal