English 284
Beginning Short Story Writing

Course Introduction

Course Objectives

By the end of this course you will be able to

• use a variety of methods to get ideas for stories
• structure a story so that it creates a dramatic experience for readers
• use writing strategies that enable readers to imagine your stories' settings, characters and events
• determine which point of view and which voice are most effective for a given story.

About the Online Environment

Your online course offers several advantages to the traditional classroom, including the comprehensive Online Student Handbook, the ability to communicate electronically with students and with your instructor, and links to a rich array of online resources.

Online Student Handbook

This handbook answers questions about your online learning course, such as how to purchase your text, schedule an exam, obtain a transcript, and get technical help if you need it. The handbook also provides additional resources, such as how to order books or journals from the library and how to study for an online course. See "Online Student Handbook" on your online course syllabus.

Communication with Your Instructor and Student Peers

• Online Discussion Forums, designed by the University of Washington award winning Catalyst team, allow you to communicate with other currently enrolled students and with your instructor. We encourage you to use the forum to exchange ideas, resources, and comments about your course work with other students in this course. This unstructured forum is monitored by your instructor.
• You can use e-mail to ask me a question or preferably post your question on the forum. I will reply on the same forum.

Online Resources

As an online student, you have access to a wealth of Web resources compiled to provide fast, easy access to information that supports your online learning experience. Organized by subjects, Online Resources link you to sites with help for writing and research, study skills, language learning, and library reference materials. All links have been assessed for credibility and reliability, and they are regularly monitored to ensure their usability.

Your Story Begins

Welcome to Beginning Short Story Writing. I'm pleased that you enrolled in this course. Since this is a class in creative writing, we may as well start by using our imaginations right away.

For starters, try imagining yourself in a classroom with the others who are reading this page. We're a small group, five or six at most. In nearby classrooms, students who are further along in the course work on later lessons.

If you're like the other students, you came to this first meeting feeling both enthusiasm and a touch of nervousness. To get acquainted with your classmates, listen in as a few of them introduce themselves:

"All I ever wrote before," says a former world traveler now living in Chicago, "were research papers and business letters. I always meant to write stories about the places I've seen, but didn't know how to begin."

Nearby, a 55-year-old mother of four agrees, "When my life slows down I plan to be a travel writer. I'm taking this, and a course in photography, to prepare. I may not accomplish all this, but I love a challenge and want to try writing."

A young woman sits watching from the other side of the room. (She's actually a sophomore in Biology at the University of Texas, but because this is a made-up story she gets to be in the room with us.) "But suppose this teacher is really hard?" she asks. "I mean I can write science papers fine, but I need these English credits to graduate. Suppose I can't think of any ideas?"

On her right, the 25-year-old fisherman from Alaska (or Maine, or possibly the coast of France), gives a gentle grin. "Hey, when things just get quiet and you look at your life, the ideas come. What I'm worried about is whether my ideas will fit into stories, on paper, you know? I like reading stories, but . . . heck, that's not writing them!"

The others laugh and nod. They recognize themselves in each other. Soon it will be your turn to introduce yourself, as you will in the Student Information Form on your course syllabus. No doubt, if you were actually sitting in a classroom, the others would identify with your reasons for studying fiction writing.

Why Do People Study Short Story Writing?

Students come to Beginning Short Story Writing from a wide range of backgrounds, and they succeed in this class because there are many good reasons for wanting to write stories. Some students always wanted to write but need college credit or a structured situation to get motivated. Others have done various kinds of writing, but never fiction. Some would like to publish stories, while others are simply avid readers who want to slip backstage—behind the page—to learn how fiction is made.

In all these situations, and your own too I hope, fiction writing has a way of meeting expectations and raising even bigger ones. Studying the craft of fiction helps you understand how a story is made, but it also expands your way of looking at yourself and at the world. Fiction takes life's most common materials—people, emotions, events—and modifies and rearranges them so that their meaning can shine through.

What Is a Story Anyway?

We all sort of know what a story is, or we think we know. It's about so big—1,200-6,000 words to be precise—built of squiggly black letters printed on paper, usually white paper. A story has a beginning, middle and end, characters, a plot, a setting and sometimes a spot or two of dialogue. Most stories have titles, although not all do, and truly good stories have themes—they're about something more than just a series of events.

This definition sounds simple enough. Yet when we read a story, when we get caught up in a story so deeply that the soup boils over and we leap out of our skins if the phone rings, we hardly think about things like "setting" or "words" or "themes." This paradox suggests a far less rational definition of a story: a story is an imaginary event that is real, and this event happens when a writer and a reader meet over a piece of paper.

As you study story writing, you will be studying ways to make this event happen. It is, in essence, an act of magic.

Like the performance of a magician onstage, fiction's prestidigitation makes objects change, people appear (and sometimes disappear), heartbeats accelerate and audience members slide to the edge of their seats. Fiction's sleight-of-mind is accomplished with the simplest of props: words on paper. Yet as any good magician knows, what counts more than any prop, what counts first, most, and always is what the audience believes.

Our audiences do want to believe. With their help, we can create worlds for them to imagine. In order to do that we will first have to do what all magicians, athletes, dancers, all performers of any kind must do: Practice. Practice. Practice.

How Does One Learn to Write Fiction?

The lessons in this course guide focus on the elements that fiction writers use. They are:

I call these "elements" because, in their nature and their power, they're like chemical elements. When certain elements are combined in the right sequence and the right proportions, the unique chemical reaction that is "story" happens.

We'll learn how to cause that reaction by approaching it from three angles—as readers, thinkers and writers.

Reading

For each lesson you'll read a portion of our text, Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft by Janet Burroway and Elizabeth Stuckey-French. Their book is great for our purposes because it expands on this course guide's discussions and explains more about our elements. It also has sample stories, showing the elements—so to speak—in solution. Because we need different strategies for distance learning than we do for traditional classroom learning, you won't read all the chapters of Writing Fiction in the book's original order. Be sure to check the course guide and make sure which chapters apply to each lesson.

Two items of advice about the reading: First, do it. You might hit a rough spot where the text doesn't seem to help you. Or you may get rushed and be tempted to skip the readings. Fight that temptation and win—do the reading. For this class you have three teachers, Burroway, Stuckey-French and Orlock (that's me, by the way). If you prevent one of your teachers from showing up for class, by skipping the reading, you get only fifty percent of the learning. You also risk getting only fifty percent of the skills you need for the assignment, and that risks fifty percent of your grade—ouch. If you have questions about either Writing Fiction or this course guide, don't hesitate to ask.

Second, in the advice-for-reading department: Read with a pen or pencil in your hand. Mark in the text. Print out this course guide and mark it up too, or else always read with a piece of scratch paper at your side. Reading isn't a spectator sport, it's an audience participation event—your mind must get into the game. Underline, highlight, or bracket important passages, or copy key words out. Make notes of questions and paraphrases, putting what you read into your own words, etc. Talk back to these books.

(By the way, if you're thinking that you may want to sell the textbook after you finish this course, and therefore you should keep its pages squeaky clean, do the math now:

1. Take the resale price for the book.
2. Subtract the learning you'll lose by not letting your mind get into the game while marking up the pages.
3. Write the bottom line in red ink and inside parentheses.
   (It's a loss.)

Thinking

Fiction writers occasionally get inspired, but much of the time they simply get going. Sometimes they get stuck and must struggle to keep going. They rely on their craft.

This word, "craft," goes back to an Old English word meaning "strength" or "power." Knowing the tools of your craft, and knowing how to use them, gives you power. It helps you think of ideas. It helps you choose the best ideas and express them in the most effective way.

Story writing is a process of making choices, solving problems both in the mind and on the page. As you start out, you probably never thought about the wide range of choices available to you; choices not just of elements, but of what can be done with each.

You may know, for example, that working in the first person, "I," point of view, the way your character talks helps reveal what he's like. But can you achieve this effect in third person, "he" or "she," point of view, while showing a character's thoughts? Did you know that the lengths of the sentences describing your character also contribute to characterization? "Character" and "language" are two elements. The things you do with them are choices, and the range is wide. I want to expand your limited range of choices, those that come naturally to you, to over-choice, and give you some direction on how to use it.

To help you do this, every lesson contains a couple of "Thought Experiments." Your responses to these need not be written down, but I strongly recommend that you do them, at least in your mind. Such practice will make you better at the two most notable features of true creativity: Fluency—the ability to think up many ideas; and Flexibility—the ability to generate ideas of many different types.

These "Thought Experiments" can also be the basis for writing in your journal, a requirement for this course. This brings us to the topic of writing.

Writing

One writer I know says that no one learns to write until he's written a million words. I prefer to think that each writer starts out with 5,000 mistakes. Each has a different collection of mistakes, but we all start with 5,000.

That is a very large number, I admit, but at least it's countable. Each time we write and make one mistake, the number decreases. Only by writing can we make these mistakes, and only by making them can we get better. (Personally I suspect that I'm down to somewhere in the 3,000's, and still learning.)

To help you take a bite out of your own 5,000 mistakes, for each lesson you'll do two types of writing, journal writing and a more formal writing assignment. In these two forms you can make your mistakes, recognize them, and overcome them.

Your Journal

A journal is a book in which you write every day. That includes weekdays, weekends, holidays, sick-days, and days when you are otherwise a-frolic on vacation. You get a day off only if you cross the International Date Line.

Writing teachers love journals not because they hate trees and want to see more paper used, but because journal-writing works. Students who keep journals become better writers. Here is how the author Dorianne Laux describes the effect:

I have no idea of the usefulness of these scribblings to others, I know journal writing works for me in the sense that on a daily basis I am taking what happens in my head, running it down through my heart, then up through my shoulder, down my arm, and into my fingers that hold the pen. I like the physicality of writing by hand, the act of translating what I'm feeling and thinking into words on paper. Writing daily, or almost daily, no matter what comes out, makes me feel whole, purposeful, balanced, scrubbed clean. There is so much about the process of writing that is mysterious to me, but this is one thing I've found to be true: Writing begets writing.

So much for theory about why journal-writing works. Here are the practical details:

1. Begin each day's entry with the date and a notation of the weather ("1/1/05, Sunny with screaming sleet," or whatever).
2. Write approximately one page (200-300 words) each day.
3. Write about whatever you like. Spelling, grammar, originality, or other qualities don't count in your journal. It can make no sense at all. As long as you're writing, you're getting better at writing, perhaps even counting down some of your allotted 5,000 mistakes.

Each lesson has a writing assignment, and before tackling the full assignment you may want to try out experiments, versions, or portions of it in your journal. In addition, our "Thought Experiments" often suggest writing possibilities. You don't have to use either of these journal-writing prompts, however, nor do you need to send your journal in with each lesson. At certain points in your enrollment I have methods of checking on your journal writing. My students fondly call these methods "diabolical" or "fiendish." Be afraid, be very afraid.

Writing Assignment

In addition to daily journal-writing, for each lesson you'll do a more formal writing assignment. In it, you practice the techniques discussed for that lesson in the course guide and in our text. Except for the last lesson, which is a performance, these are merely exercises.

If you were studying gymnastics, penmanship, or piano, you'd do exercises. These mini-performances break down a complex task into one of its individual actions. An exercise may strengthen only one muscle, but that one must work well with all the others in giving the perfect performance. So you'll exercise the muscles for story structure, character, setting, and so on, one at a time.

As you work on these exercises, you'll find that doing a piece of writing over several sessions, for a brief time each day, gives you the best results. That's because although everybody writes, writers rewrite. If your first draft looks perfect, let it cool off for a day, or even two days. First drafts seldom age to perfection; you'll probably want to go back and make changes, then let it age again.

How Long Are the Assignments? How Should I Format Them?

Most of the assignments for this course require three to five pages to be done well. These pages should be double-spaced, with margins of at least one-half inch on either side. Number your pages. Since eye strain is an occupational hazard in this business, pamper me with typefaces that are 10 characters-per-inch (cpi) or 12-point.

For specific information on how to format and submit assignments, see the About Your Instructor page linked from your online course syllabus.

How Will I Be Graded?

It is always difficult to grade creative work, but this is a credit course so grades must be given. I've learned to evaluate writing less on its subject than on how well it reveals that subject. Looking at your assignment, I ask myself, "How well does this piece use the element of craft covered in this lesson? Does it apply the techniques taught in the textbook? Those in the course guide?" I also ask, "Has the author made these techniques his or her own so that there's room for a bit of creativity? Can I feel, because the author put forth the effort, how much the author cares about or enjoys this subject?"

After answering these questions, and mentally comparing the answers to those I've arrived at thousands of times for other students, I give my comments. I sum them up in a numerical grade. This number combines two aspects of my thinking.

First, I evaluate your performance. For example, you may be born to display brilliant imagination, write stunning sentences, and provide insights that trickle shivers down the spine. Or you may be, by nature, a basically able writer but not yet capable of such dizzying achievements. Everyone starts out at a different level, and by the time we get to college these starting levels can be widely separated. The level at which you start unquestionably affects performance.

Yet we all know great natural performers or athletes who went nowhere because they never worked hard enough to get better. As one writer-friend of mine puts it, "Talent's cheap. Stop in any bus station. In the waiting room, you can find genius-type talent sitting and staring at the schedule, going nowhere." So the second factor that I evaluate is learning.

Learning shows itself in the quality of the writing, as well as in the type of questions you ask; in your journal-writing; in how well you solve problems that defeat other students; and in many subtle ways that, as a teacher, I'm greedy to discover. If you learn how to learn about fiction writing, once this course ends you won't need my help to continue becoming a better writer. If that happens, my grade can confidently announce that ability to you, to your transcript, and eventually to the larger world that your transcript addresses.

So your six grades for the individual assignments reflect how well you

• did the reading and learned from it,
• thought through issues involved in the lesson,
• kept up with your journal,
• wrote naturally when you first started this course, and
• expanded your native ability because you worked hard and learned.

In assigning a final grade for the course, I weight all of the lessons equally except the last one—your full short story. If your story shows that you've learned and consolidated the skills from the earlier lessons remarkably well, it may count for more. If you were solid for five lessons but then took a nosedive because too difficult a story overwhelmed a not-yet-mature writer, your final assignment may count for less in your overall grade.

What Problems Do Students Have Most Often in This Course?

I've taught Beginning Short Story Writing since 1985 (and I still love it). In that time, I've seen most of the mistakes students can make in this kind of course, and I've felt my teacherly heart break over them. So here's a Top Four Tour of wrong-turns, good intentions gone awry, and just plain boo-boos—the sorts of things I don't want happening to you.

• Getting way behind schedule. In Lesson One, you'll find a calendar. As part of the assignment you'll print it out, fill it in, and send me a copy (place the original in a prominent location in your world). To help motivate you to stay on schedule, I'll keep the copy with your grade sheet and give you extra credit if you meet your deadlines—all of them.
• Becoming a midnight oil addict. So you want to meet those deadlines, but it's the night before the assignment is due, so you figure you'll toss together whatever you can before daybreak, since after all the extra credit for staying on schedule should make up the difference and it's not your fault you over-committed so the teacher can't mark you down, can she? She can. Assignments done hastily look like paint-by-number art works: The beginning brushstrokes are crisp and clear; the quality plummets; the finished product is a muddy mess. (And some of the blank spots still show.)
• Not reviewing the assignment. Creative ideas like to rebel against assigned rules. Character sketches explode into ten-page monologues; settings end up telling the history of a locale all the way back to before dirt. Most often these off-topic brainstorms hit because the writer encountered a new, difficult demand, got stuck and accidentally fell back on a previously mastered skill. The character sketch morphed into a monologue because the writer was a whiz at dialogue; the history-of-dirt sprung spontaneously to a mind that was brilliant at explaining, but never mastered description. I would never want to restrain your creativity, but I do want to train it. So go ahead and write out your off-topic brainstorm. Then read back over the assignment. Send me your appropriate response to the assignment.
• And last, and most painful, self-indulgent insensitivity. This one is best displayed by examples. When I receive materials that are as tasteless as the following, revulsion keeps me from being of much help. (As Dave Barry says, "I am not making these up"):
  • the attempt at a musical comedy (a la Neil Simon) set in a concentration camp. That's just plain gross.
  • the male student who sent me—as a first assignment—a first-person story from the rapist's viewpoint, vividly realistic and with a victim-character named (you guessed it) "Carol." Subsequent discussion revealed that he had expected me to grasp his intention, "It wasn't about you. I just wanted my realism to reach out beyond the page." Yech.
  • the all-men-are-trash story. The same goes for all women, all rednecks, all cops, or all-supply-your-favorite-stereotype story. We intend our stories to be read by intelligent adults. They know better.

The Last Word

We learn the rules in order to break them well.
—Author unknown.

In this quote, emphasis falls on the last word: well.

In any creative art, beyond the rules, beyond the elements and traditions, what truly matters is the artist's distinctive handling of his or her material. That's the bottom line—how the individual puts an original mind-print on the clay or paint or plot. As well, artistic rules are never entirely true. They're obviously made to be broken. Why bother studying them?

For many reasons. First, rules are the methods earlier writers invented to solve the problems we face. It can save us years to know the method Dostoyevsky discovered to quickly characterize all the members of a family, or the way Jane Austen used dialogue to foreshadow a plot. T. S. Eliot wrote, "Bad poets borrow, good poets steal." It is plagiarism to steal another writer's plot or characters or words, but it's just good sense to re-use technique. When something is stolen, it becomes the personal property of the new owner.

Second, the rules are what readers already know. Chekov explained, for writing plays, that if you put a gun on the mantle in Act I it had better go off by the end of Act III. The audience expects that. It does not mean that we could not make an unused gun the symbol for a character's cowardice or courageous pacifism. Rather, if we choose to leave the gun untouched—break the rule—we must do it well, incorporating audience expectations into our outcome.

Third, we learn the rules because they're good practice. But enough talk about practice. Let's get started.

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