Hey Portlanders! The Portland Book Festival is tomorrow! I’ll be moderating a panel with Dan Gemeinhart and Chanel Miller, and there are dozens upon dozens of amazing readings and events. Tickets here; kids under 18 free. Hope to see you there!
Greetings, writers—
Welcome to the first week of Writing a Short Story in Eight Weeks. After “Writing,” in invisible ink, are the words “and Reworking and Revising,” because, as Bernard Malamud noted, “Revision is one of the exquisite pleasure of writing,” and as I (and many others) say, revision basically is writing, and vice versa.
“I’m a passionate believer in revision,” says brilliant essayist John Jeremiah Sullivan. “A lot of my writing gets done during the revision process.”
So we’re going to write, and we’re going to revise. And it’ll be fun. And rewarding. Or at the very least interesting.
Between now and next Friday1, your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to write a draft of a short story. Emphasis on “short” here: 500 or 600 words is fine. This is just the initial step, after all; your final product will bear little resemblance to your first draft.
Assignment 1
Write a Story About Something That Happened to You2
Don’t worry, this is going to end up being fiction. Personal experience is just the raw material.
The experience you choose for this draft should have the essence of a story—in other words, you can imagine telling it to someone else, because something of note happened. Maybe it’s that time you got bitten by your neighbor’s dog, or ran away from home, or got snowed in for days, or discovered a secret room in your house, or whatever. The important thing is that this event/experience has some meaning to you. You can stick to the straight truth in this version, or you can embellish things; it’s your call.
Two constraints: Make sure there is at least one other person involved in this experience/event. And write your story in the first person.
I know what my event is going to be, and next week I’ll write a little bit about it.
Happy writing!
And, though it goes without saying, vote, and vote well.3
Emily
P.S. A prompt for those who don’t want to participate in the experiment:
In honor of Halloween, a holiday I have mixed feelings about, write something—a poem, a scene, a memory, a freewrite—that uses the following words: spirit, dark, trick, and treat. But don’t make your piece have anything to do with Halloween. Counterintuitive! 🎃
If you can tear yourself away from the election coverage, and if sanity prevails.
Most of this “class’s” assignments come from a great craft essay, the title and author of which shall be revealed.
I’m honored to be one of 700+ writers who endorsed Kamala Harris.
I just found this and I love it!