Greetings, writers—
After today we’re well over halfway done with our short story experiment, and if you’ve been doing it along with me, I hope you’re feeling good about what you’ve got.
Want to catch up? Here are Weeks 1, 2, 3, and 4.
Yesterday I was thumbing around in Naming the World: And Other Exercises for the Creative Writer by Bret Antony Johnson, and I was gratified to see how many of the writers Johnson included in the book offered exercises similar to ones we’ve been doing in this experiment. In other words, a lot of them are some version of Take something you know, that feels powerful, and then twist it, which is what these assignments have been in one way or another. Great minds, right?
And so today, working with the draft you have and adding a few hundred more words to it via this assignment, your job is to:
Create a moment of transition.
A moment of transition marks a turning point in your character’s life: they’re shifting from one state of being to another. Maybe it’s a kid taking his first job; maybe it’s child coming to understand her parents’ dysfunction. In Leonora Carrington’s The Hearing Trumpet (a novel, not a short story, but still) the extremely old narrator gets sent to a retirement home, whereupon all kinds of wonderful and batshit things start to happen. (Her son thought he was shipping her off to die, and wow was he wrong.)
When you give your main character a transitional age (say, a teenager), or when something happens to push them into a new phase of life (a marriage, an illness, a move, etc.,), you add a rich narrative layer to your story. Your story need not involve grand, sweeping change (though it could): short fiction often thrives on subtler transitions, those seemingly minor moments of epiphany that nevertheless carry emotional or psychological weight.
Is this all a long way of saying: make this a coming of age story? Maybe, but only in a way that almost all stories are coming of age stories, in which a character learns something she or she may or may not have wanted to know. And after that, nothing is ever the same again.
And now a prompt for the non-experimenters:
Okay, I wrote that ‘nothing is ever the same again’ business, and then I remembered that I needed a prompt, so I opened another book nearby (Secret Voices: A Year of Women’s Diaries, edited by Sarah Gristwood) and saw that 98 years ago tomorrow, Virginia Woolf wrote in her diary: “Things—empires, hierarchies, moralities—will never be the same again.” Well!
She wrote this because King Edward VIII was planning to abdicate his throne in order to marry American divorcee Wallis Simpson, a decision he formally announced on the 10th of December, 1936, in two official letters in which he capitalized My and Myself, which was maybe how it was done back then but which seems a bit self-aggrandizing now.
Anyhoo, obviously you ought to work with this particular sentence, but the prompt is to begin with it in one way another, and to work backwards from there. I think doing this in the form of a poem sounds particularly fun.
Happy writing—
Emily
MUSES is for sure some radical blessings.