Click here for the story behind the six-word short story in this post.
Telling a Story
In our course, you will 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’ve now annotated a bit. Keep his ideas in mind as we move forward. Your first writing assignments were descriptive — simple enough not to need an ETA focus. We could focus on simply writing. Now we turn to another mode of discourse:
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 has to have certain elements. You are given these elements every year in English classrooms, because you primarily study fictional narratives. That’s why you’ll recognize everything in this document:
Now that you’re going to write a narrative, you’ll need those terms. Let’s begin using them by exploring some of the shortest fiction out there.
How to Respond
Below are stories of increasing length. For each story, there are three stages:
Stage 1:
Read the story quietly to yourself, and then read it aloud with a peer. Discuss your reactions for a bit. Then write a short response to the story by referencing specific elements. This is not literary analysis, but you can’t respond to a story’s ideas without a sense of its plot, characterization, etc. You might need to make reference to symbolism to talk about how something moved you, and you’ll certainly have to discuss conflict to talk about how a story is resolved.
Stage 2:
Ask questions about the stories in the comment section here or over at Google+. Talk to each other about them in that Community, too. Offer your observations, share your thoughts, analyze the story — and then check back regularly for the next week to see what your peers have to say. You will generate the evidence you need for grade abatement this way.
Stage 3:
Find other examples of short stories this length. If the story is six words long, track down more six-word stories; if it is about 50 words long, look for more 50-word flash fiction narratives; if it is a half-page in length, search for stories about that long; and so on. Share these with your peers online and in class.
The transparent goal here is to expose ourselves to as many short narrative as possible, responding to as many of them as possible in thoughtful, specific ways. It’s about sharing good stories with each other and explaining why we respond to them the way we do. Eventually, it will be about about emulating one of them.
ETA: Six-Word Short Story
Author: Ernest Hemingway
For sale: baby shoes, never worn.
ETA: 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. Click on the image to load Michael Lawrie’s website.
ETA: 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 ********1,” 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. Your assignment only corresponds to “Sunday at the Zoo.”
This bit of profanity has been edited out, with sincerest apologies to Mr. Dybek’s original text. We have to tread lightly; this is a high school, which means we inhabit the murky area between childhood and adulthood. C’est la guerre, as they say. ↩