Greetings, writers—
Today’s story assignment is kind of an easy one, which means that if you’re behind on your drafts (or if you haven’t started at all), you can still catch up and join in the fun. And there’s a prompt at the bottom of this newsletter for those who aren’t doing the story project.
Earlier Story Experiment installments are here (we wrote about something that really happened to us), here (we told the story from a different point of view), and here (we added urgency in the form of a ticking clock).
This week, your assignment is to read through what you’ve written so far and identify the objects and props that might be useful to you in the storytelling.
Read with gentle eyes, holding the scope of the story in your mind lightly. You shouldn’t be digging too hard for these objects: they should float to the surface because they’re already important to the action. (But maybe some will be red herrings!)
So as far as my story goes, I’ve got the garden and the gun—those are easy. But I’ve also got the big old American cars if I want them, plus, for instance, Troy’s motorcycle, which was a very cool vintage something (a Triumph maybe?) that his friends used to tease him was a girl’s bike because it was about half the size of a Harley, the gold standard of motorcycles. I’m not sure what I’ll use yet, but I do know that the objects I pick to pay special attention to may change the plot or a character’s backstory or something else as I revise.
You can look for important images, too. For my story, maybe one of them is the empty hog barn, and another one is all the people from the co-op standing around the grill, watching someone try to barbecue a rabbit. The point is to look for things—whether physical or visual—that have weight, symbolic relevance, and/or emotional power. This is the draft where you look for your details.
Once you’ve figured them out, go through your draft and play them up a little. See how they change and enrich your story.
And now, a prompt for the non-Experimenters:
I’m afraid of my children. I’m afraid of my wives. I’m afraid of my friends, of my father, of you.
So said famed (infamous?) editor Gordon Lish to a Paris Review interviewer.
Write about what you’re afraid of.
Great post! Made me think of Patrick Raddon Keefe’s recent NYT Book Review podcast for Say Nothing (incredible book; nonfiction) where he said once he figured out who the killer was, he went back through the ms to place some clues and realized they were already there, he just hadn’t noticed.