ENG 221
Greg Martin

SHORT STORY ASSIGNMENT: Write a short story using a small unit of time. (Adapted from What if? #67)

In order to complete this assignment, you will need to carefully read and understand the material in Chapter Eight of Imaginative Writing.

Many short stories employ a small unit of time or center on a single event that provides the story with a given natural shape. "The Wig", for instance, centers on an interaction only a few minutes long. "Snow" centers, with the exception of a few sentences, on events that take place over an hour or two. Your task is to write a story within the confines of a particular time unit. (Note how this assignment is NOT asking you to write a story like THE MEADOW or "Sticks".) You need not detail every minute of the unit of time you choose. Instead you want to focus on and dramatize, using scene and dialogue, the most important moments. This does not mean that you can't have sentences in your story that establish the ground situation (the unstable, static past before the story begins) and it doesn't mean, also, that you can't flash forward to the time of telling, like Baxter does in "Snow." It just means that most of your story needs to take place in a meaningful sequence of events. Kurt Vonnegut once said that it is the writer's task to "stage confrontations." Your story should do this; it should stage confrontations between two or characters, involving some kind of choice and recognition that leads to change.

For the subject of your story, you may choose from any one of the many prompts for freewriting from your journal up to this point. Use the published readings as craft models for imagery, voice, character, setting, and story. An in-class self-reflection on craft choices and influence will be considered along with the story, when it is graded.

I strongly encourage you to collaborate outside of class with one or more of your peers:  bounce ideas off one another, share drafts, make editing suggestions, offer encouragement.

Grading Criteria for the Short Story:

1. Story drafts must be complete.  Endings are difficult, but they are absolutely necessary.  Find a way to finish your draft before you turn it in. 
2. Story drafts should be proofread carefully.  Basic proofreading mistakes jolt the reader out of the dream you are creating.
3.The story focuses and dramatizes, using scene and summary, a central event in a small unit of time.
4. The story supplies the reader with the basic, orienting facts of the ground situation that they need to understand the story.
5. Tension and conflict are developed.  The story has a protagonist who wants something, and there are obstacles to what they want, and those obstacles are formidable. (In our story triangle, this is called "rising action.")
6. The protagonist has a "problem rooted in character" and not in the situation.
7. The story has a clear turning point, signaling change.
8. Details are concrete and significant (NOT ABSTRACT) and alive to the five senses. 
9. The writer pays heightened attention to the five craft features discussed in the first eight weeks of class.
10. The writer pays heightened attention to language:  to active verbs, to sentence economy (OMIT NEEDLESS WORDS!) to diction, to sentence variety.  

Length: No less than eight pages and no more than twelve pages.  Follow the formatting instructions on page 304 of your text.

Due Date: April 24th, at class time. GOOD LUCK!