Start by reviewing our process for reading, analyzing, and sometimes emulating literature:
On Narrative Writing
Through this post, you are studying and emulating narrative writing, which is 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 these criteria, 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 distractions2. Whatever you use, make sure it covers the basics. You’ll need an internalized sense of them to analyze what you read.
Narrative ETA: Emulation Through Analysis
Below are short stories of varying 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
2⁰ Focus: What Literature Is For
3⁰ Focus: Emulation Through Analysis
Note: For that tertiary focus, we are adapting the directions from Part 3 of the Regents Examination in English Language Arts, since it serves several purposes3.
Here is a downloadable and printable copy of all three stories, including the example text:
Example Text: “Widow’s First Year,” by Joyce Carol Oates
Note: You do not need to run this short story through the three responsive steps. Instead, it’s included to show you what all stories have. Even these seven words — just one more than Hemingway’s apocryphal story — create a story with a beginning, middle, and end. There are characters who experience conflict. That conflict resolves itself.
All stories obey these rules, or they break them deliberately. Keep that in mind as you read the two stories that comprise your assignment, and then use what you’ve learned here to craft your own story.
Here is Oates’ story in full:
Widow’s First Year
I kept myself alive.
Required Narrative #1: “Sticks,” by George Saunders
Click here for the story and a bit of background:
Required Narrative #2: “Give It Up!” by Franz Kafka
The second required story is quite short and strange. It will test your critical thinking and collaborative abilities to make sense of it.
“Give It Up!”
It was very early in the morning, the streets clean and deserted, I was walking to the station. As I compared the tower clock with my watch I realized that it was already much later than I had thought, I had to hurry, the shock of this discovery made me unsure of the way, I did not yet know my way very well in this town; luckily, a policeman was nearby, I ran up to him and breathlessly asked him the way. He smiled and said: “From me you want to know the way?” “Yes,” I said, “since I cannot find it myself.” “Give it up! Give it up,” he said, and turned away with a sudden jerk, like people who want to be alone with their laughter.
Emulation: Narrative Writing
The last step is to emulate one of the 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:
Which is just one of many such documents available to you. The most cursory search on Google would give you hundreds more. ↩
When you click to “[r]emove distractions,” that site goes from this:
To this:
This is not the only way to get a readable, reviewable source for literary devices, but it works extremely well with our technology. ↩
The first is to give you another way to learn the necessary literary devices, since the full exam prompt offers a list of them. This is what it looks like:
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.
The second purpose is to practice succinct analysis. You are not required to write an essay of analysis on the ELA Regents Exam; instead, you must write only two or three paragraphs. Your focus is on identifying a main idea, identifying a literary device that develops that main idea, and analyzing examples of that literary device in the passage. ↩