ENG 321 2/3

• Exercise # 2:  One Example

• Discuss "Cathedral" and your good Reading Responses

Assignment for 2/8

• Read:  Burroway Chapter 3. 

• Read:  O'Brien's "The Things They Carried"

• Write:  Reading Response for "The Things They Carried"

  A)  What’s your initial reaction to the story?  What are your impressions?   B)  Respond to Questions 1-4 on p. 102     C)  How does this story influence your thinking about your own writing?
   

• Write:  Exercise #3:  Character and Conflict analysis of your story draft.  (This will help for your draft due one week from today.  Trust me.)

1. What is your character's unstable, but static ground situation?

2. What does your character want? 

3. What's in the way?

4. Is the obstacle formidable?  Why?

5. Is there more than one obstacle?  (Is there complication or rising action?)

6. What comes along that upsets this static situation and makes it dynamic?  (A wig from the garbage?  A girl who won't open her mouth?  A blind man coming to spend the night?)

7. What is your character's problem rooted not in the situation, but in character?  (Another way to say this is:  what is your character's existential dilemma?  They can't grieve.  They can't surrender control or power.  They don't know how to connect meaningfully with other people.)

8. What are the moments of connection and disconnection?

9. Describe your protagonist's reversal? 

10. How is this reversal both related to (a) action (to something that happens) and how is it related to some kind of (b) recognition on their part?

11. Does your character get what they want?  (They shouldn't, at least not in one way.)

Are these questions hard to answer without first having a story draft done?  Yes.  (The questions above are important to think about at some point in your drafting process, but I'm also trying to rescue some of you from your own procrastination--from working really, really late on Wednesday night, feeling terribly desperate. (I know some of you, because I know myself.) You can thank me later.)   What do I mean by draft?  Do I mean every thing just so and perfectly in its place?  No.  I mean it has a beginning, middle and end.  How do you write something that has a beginning, middle, and end, without, first, knowing all its subtle, profound complexities?  Here's how.  Write:  This happened.  And then this happened.  And then this happened.  And then this happened.  Until you're done.  Then, go back and make it subtle and profound. 

By the way, what kind of rubric will be used to grade my story?  How can stories be graded anyway?  Good question.  The list of eleven things above is the rubric, or criteria, for your first story draft.  This will be my checklist as I look at your story and decide how far along it is, how much thought you've put into it.  Why?  Because the questions above are absolutely basic, and speak to essential elements of the form called the short story.