Assignments
Nov 14th, 2021 by JGB
Student Stories: A Guide to Developing Your Responses
As you prepare for our discussions of your classmates’ and your own stories, you should keep these questions in mind:
What happens in the story? Who are the characters? What are the plot elements such as the conflict and climax and resolution? Where does the story take place? How does the narrator’s perspective shape the telling of the story?
What is the story about? What human concerns are addressed in the story? What images, actions, or circumstances acquire a meaning that resonates thematically or symbolically? How do the voice, tone, syntax, and style of the presentation shape our experience reading the story?
Only after you’ve considered these questions should you move on to your assessment of which elements of the story — in regard to both what happens and what the story is about — would benefit from revision, from the writer altering, expanding, deepening, reducing, or eliminating that aspect of the story. You should also identify those areas in which the story is particularly strong — not simply to offer praise (which is always nice to both give and receive) but to convey how a story’s particular strengths guide our appreciation of that story.
On your classmates’s stories, you should make three types of annotations:
line edits: corrections to persistent or particularly striking errors
marginal comments: questions, comments, and praise on particular passages
terminal comment: a summary of your responses to the story: praise, observations, questions, advice
Exercise 5: Where’s the Fantastic?
Complete this Google form.
Select one (or more) of these images as the basis for a story. You are free to expand, alter, or abandon your original response to the image as you develop your story.
Your story should be no longer than five pages (1,250 words.) This assignment is due Sunday, February 27 at midnight. Please place your story in the Exercise 5 folder on Google Drive. Please format using Times or Times Roman, double-spaced, with page numbers, and name the file FirstLast.Ex5.docx.
Exercise 4: Tabloid News
Go to the website for The Weekly World News, and look around until you land on a headline or article that you’d like to use as a basis for a story. Your story must not be comic; you must treat the fantastic circumstance with seriousness. Your goal is not simply to make the reader believe your story; your goal is to make the reader care about what happens and to whom it happens. (You can also go here to see more of the magazine’s headlines.)
Your story should be no longer than five pages (1,250 words.) This assignment is due Sunday, February 13 at midnight. Please save your exercise as a Word document and place it in the Exercise 4 folder on Google Drive. Please format using Times or Times Roman, double-spaced, with page numbers, and name the file FirstLast.Ex4.docx.
Exercise 3: The Heart
We’ll be doing an exercise in class that will provide you with some specifics regarding character, conflict, and setting for this exercise. After that, you’ll move on to this second step:
For the purposes of this assignment, consider these 19th century maps of the heart literally and scientifically accurate, and write a story in which something happens to one or more characters to alter — for example, to destroy or diminish or enhance — one or more of the heart’s regions. (Click on each image to enlarge it.)
Your story should be no longer than four pages (1,000 words.) This assignment is due Sunday, January 30 at midnight. Place your story in the Exercise 3 folder on Google Drive. Please format using Times or Times Roman, double-spaced, with page numbers, and name the file FirstLast.Ex3.docx.
Exercise 2: The House
Write a three- to four-page story (750-1000 words) that begins with this sentence: The house is _____.
Fill in the blank with one of these words: sinking, shrinking, splitting, rising, expanding.
In your story, the house must be sinking, shrinking, splitting, rising, or expanding for a reason that is never explained by the narrator, perhaps not even understood by the narrator, but that reason should have something to do with the story’s protagonist. The house must have sunk, shrunk, split, risen, or expanded at least six feet by the story’s end.
This assignment is due Sunday, January 22 at midnight. Place your story in the Exercise 2 folder on Google Drive. Please format using Times or Times Roman, double-spaced, with page numbers, and name the file FirstLast.Ex2.docx.
Exercise 1: Fantastic Beasts
- Rank the beasts.
- Complete this form on Google Drive.
- Write a brief story (no more than 750 words) about a character who, a week earlier, transformed into one of the two beasts you chose. The beast should not have any of the five characteristics you identified on the Google form.
- Carefully proofread your story.
- Share your story in the Exercise 1 folder on Google Drive.
- Your story is due by midnight on Monday, January 17.