The Point of a Story
In our course, you write what you read and read what you write. We call the process emulation through analysis, or ETA writing. It means that you pick apart a text because you want to emulate it, not because of a “mean-spirited, picky insistence that every child get every last little scrap of ‘understanding’ that can be dug out of a book.”
That quotation comes from John Holt and his essay, “How Teachers Make Children Hate Reading,” which you studied as part of our introduction to literature and the reading process. Following that, you also received a three-part guide on how we read:
Our goal, again, is to emulate the works we study. To get there, we must analyze them, being careful not to let that analysis break the magic.
This time, we are studying narrative writing: a mode of discourse in which a sequence or series of events, real or fictional, is relayed or described. More simply, narrative writing tells a story.
For a piece of writing to be considered a complete narrative, it must fit the criteria outlined above, which it does through certain literary elements. Some of the basic elements of writing, like syntax and diction, are included in that protocol; everything else falls on a list you are given every year in your English classes. That’s why you’ll recognize everything in this article1:
Note: We are using that particular article for two reasons. First, if you read it, you’ll know everything you need to know to do this work. Second, it’s a site full of ads, which lets us use Snap and Read, one of the district’s most useful browser extensions, to eliminate distractions. When you click to “[r]emove distractions,” that site goes from this:
To this:
Analyzing Narratives
After you’ve read the background above, you can move on to analyzing and emulating.
Below are short stories of increasing length. After reading each story, run it through the protocol for works of literary merit. Write about each focus separately and completely, using the template provided below. Load it, make a copy in your Drive, and then complete it.
This template will be attached to any Google Classroom assignments, as well. The headings are repeated below for reference.
1⁰ Focus: How You Read
Focus on what this work reveals about how you learn and how you read. Does the length of the text help? How? Did you print a copy of the texts, or did you read online? Why? What was the effect?
2⁰ Focus: What Literature Is For
Use the post and the ideas we gleaned from its central video to ask yourself what each text teaches you. Is it giving you wisdom and insight? Into what aspects of yourself or your world? When in doubt, remember the video’s final quotation:
We should learn to treat [literature] as doctors treat their medicine, something we prescribe in response to a range of ailments and classify according to the problems it might be best suited to addressing. Literature deserves its prestige for one reason above all others: because it’s a tool to help us live and die with a little more wisdom, goodness, and sanity.
Often, this kind of analysis is pitched in terms of essential questions about human nature or society. For longer works of literary merit or nonfiction, those questions are usually provided in class.
3⁰ Focus: Emulation Through Analysis
The post on how to read covers diction, syntax, and other universal elements of writing. You can emulate those aspects in any writing response.
For this particular mode of discourse, and for each model text, you should also focus on literary devices. Characterization, conflict, foreshadowing, irony — all those and more can be analyzed and emulated. In fact, the best way to approach this sort of analysis is by adapting the directions from Part 3 of the Regents Examination in English Language Arts:
Closely read the text provided and write a well-developed, text-based response of two to three paragraphs. In your response, identify a central idea in the text and analyze how the author’s use of one literary element or literary technique or rhetorical device (characterization, conflict, denotation/connotation, metaphor, simile, irony, language use, point-of-view, setting, structure, symbolism, theme, tone, etc.) develops this central idea. Use strong and thorough evidence from the text to support your analysis. Do not simply summarize the text.
ETA Narrative #1: The Shortest Story
Author: Ernest Hemingway
For sale: baby shoes, never worn.
ETA Narrative #2: 50-Word Short Story
Author: Michael Lawrie
First Impressions
Beth: Socialist, vegan, Amnesty volunteer, and generally lovely girl. Her band wore the Swastika, SS badge, and the Totenkopf — so she did, too.
Walking home after a gig, she felt the blade slide in, cold then warm.
The police dismissed her as just another dead Nazi. Her killer was happy to have done his bit.
This is the original, unedited version.
ETA Narrative #3: Short Fiction
Author: Stuart Dybek
Sunday at the Zoo
We decided to stop drinking and spend Sunday at the zoo. It was going nicely until she worked herself up over the observation that it was a horrible thing to cage the animals.
“That’s not very profound,” I said, “everybody who goes to the zoo feels that sometime.”
“Oh, you cruel ********2,” she screamed, “I’m not everybody!”
She bellied over the guardrail and flung herself against the bars of the wolves’ cage.
Three wolves had been circling and as soon as she touched the bars they froze, fur
bristling along their spines.She had her arms stuck in between the bars up to her shoulders and as much of her face as she could wedge in yelling, “Eat me! Eat me!” to the wolves.
Just that week the newspapers had carried an account of how a small girl had an arm gnawed off – she’d reach in to pet them and one wolf held it while the other ate. It was, in fact, what had led us, along with the crowd, relentlessly to the wolves’ cage.
But the wolves held their ground, snarling, stiff-legged.
An attendant came running down the aisle between the fence and cages and grabbed her by the hair and throat, wrestling her back. She locked her arms around the bars and he kept
slapping her face with a thick, purplish slab of meat he must have been feeding to one of the animals.“I’ll give you, ‘Eat me, Eat me,’” he grinned, kicking her down.
At that instant all three wolves rushed against the bars so that they shook, and you could hear their teeth breaking on the metal. Their bloodied snouts jabbed through, snapping at air.
“Stop abusing that woman,” I shouted from the crowd.
Here is a PDF of the original story, with a second bit of flash-fiction attached: “Billy’s Girl,” by Gordon Jackson.
Emulation: Narrative Writing
The last step is to emulate one of the three short stories presented here. Your own narrative can be true or fictional or a combination of both. It can be on any subject you choose. It must only demonstrate the same kind of authorial choices.
Create this emulation however you wish — by hand, through Google, on a typewriter, etc. — and then submit a copy of it as requested for GAP purposes. Additionally, you should strongly consider the extent to which your story might be shared with others. Refer to this post:
As I work on emulating one of these narratives, I wonder what made these narratives popular. They are on rather odd topics and the writing seems a bit random. If the authors weren’t famous, would the narratives have gotten any attention?
That’s an interesting question. Hemingway’s apocryphal story is attached to his fame, sure, and there are thousands of other six-word stories that would help us talk about narratives in a classroom. We’re using that one because it’s Hemingway. The other two authors aren’t famous to that extent. I came across them ten or fifteen years ago, and I kept the stories because they let us look at symbolism, irony, conflict, etc., in atypical short narratives. Many other examples of nano/flash/micro-fiction exist.