Get Going!

I read over all of your Five Story projects this morning, and now I'm so excited for the real, full-length stories! So get writing!

To those of you who couldn't see my comments--I think I've figured out why. You have to open the document in your word processor, like Word or Pages or whatever. Don't open it in the Dropbox program. It has its own commenting system, and that was not the one I was using when I commented. I made my comments in Word, and they should be there. Also make sure your document is set to Final Showing Markup in the review pane--otherwise, the comments will be hidden.

One final note: some of you did use bits here that I would consider genre or experimental in some fashion, and that's fine, but I am going to push you to make those stories literary, so if that's not what you want to do, DON'T USE THOSE. It does us little good for me to force you to write a story looking through a completely different lens from what you want the story to me.

Also, like I said in class, I'd like the stories you write for this course to be original to this semester.

See you Tuesday!

A Story A Day

This exercise is to get you generating a lot of possibilities for your short stories this semester and to get you familiar with the process of writing every day.  If I could have my way, I would require you to write 250-500 words a day, 7 days a week, for the entire semester.  Think of the writer you’d be after that!  You’d have the beginnings of a collection!  But, since I can’t do that, I will start the semester out by having you write every day for a week.

So, here’s the assignment:  Thursday, 9-8, you must bring in between 5-7 stories (hence, a story a day) that could be the seeds of your stories this semester.  The typical published short story is 15 pages long.  If you can manage to write a 15 page story every day for a week, more power to you.  But for the sake of your sanity, I will require only that you produce 1-2 pages per each story (250-500 words).  That “story” could be an opening scene or two, or it could be looser piece of writing where you try to pin down the story as a whole.  I only ask that it be intelligible enough for me to understand, as I will be reading these and advising you on which would make the best stories for you to pursue, and that it be an earnest attempt at creating a short story for a real audience.

Of course you are allowed to make use of the Generating Exercises, the ones in Making Shapely Fiction, and I will load even more exercises to your Dropbox file, if you need something to go on.  Use them or don’t—it doesn’t matter to me.  All that matters is that you write, write, write!

I am eager to see what you come up with!