National Poetry Month #30

Charlie Sterchi

To help orient or “ground” the reader, it’s important to establish the “ground situation” quickly, especially in flash. This is done by providing “grounding” or providing “context” details of where and when the story is occurring. Identify where and how “grounding” details are established in Sterchi’s piece. Now your turn: see how much “grounding” information you can embed in your first sentence. Consider the journalistic Ws: who, what, when, where, why.

National Poetry Month #29

Michelle Morouse

How short can a story be? Ernest Hemingway famously bragged he could write a story in six words: “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.” Microfiction, even shorter that flash, works by compress a story into its most distilled form. Check out “On Call,” a story that makes a full arc in the span of a sentence. Try it on your own! Can you make create compelling “turn” by the end of a single sentence?

National Poetry Month #28

Christmas in July? Why not Christmas in April! In “Powder,” Tobias Wolff uses the holiday to create tension between family members and displays how a story’s setting, both time and place, can put pressure on the plot. Notice how Wolff creates a number of internal and external “stakes” in the piece. 

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National Poetry Month #27

Opening lines are supremely important in all works of fiction, but especially in flash since there is no room to overcome a weak beginning. In flash, sometimes the opening line is nearly the entire story—the rest is just expansion of the opening line or theme and variation of it. What do you think makes a good opening line in general? Why is this specific opening line of “The Wig” an effective one?

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National Poetry Month #25

We all know what it’s like to face that tyrannical blinking cursor on an empty screen.When you’re stumped about what to write, remember the five “modes” of fiction writing you can use: dialogue, description, exposition, physical action/staging, and interiority/commentary. In “Umbrella,” pay attention to each sentence. What “mode” does each use? Look at the line, “Had her inadvertent action shown the boy that she felt that she, too, belonged to him?” Which of the five “modes” of fiction is employed here? What specific style of narration is used?

National Poetry Month #24

Short story master Anton Chekhov famously described his process for writing stories by grabbing the nearest object, which happened to be an ashtray: “If you wish…by tomorrow I will write a short story. Its title will be An Ashtray.” His friend Korolenko commented “It seemed that the ashtray had already created images, ideas, and a chain of adventures in his mind.”

What duller object can you get than a dish? But Michael Martone proves that a good writer can imbue any item with metaphorical significance. What do the dishes represent for the girl? What do the dishes represent for the narrator? Now try it yourself: See how an object in your story might on greater significance by meaning different things to different people.

Some Context on “Dish Night” from Mental Floss article “11 Things We No Longer See in Movie Theaters” by Kara Kovalchik

One gimmick that kept movie theaters operating during the very lean 1930s was Dish Night. Money was obviously very tight during the Great Depression, and families had to be extremely cautious when it came to any discretionary spending. A night out at the movies was an unnecessary luxury, and cinema audiences dwindled. Theater owners lowered their ticket prices as much as they could (sometimes as low as 10 cents for an evening feature), but what finally put bodies in seats was Dish Night.

Salem China and a few other manufacturers of finer dinnerware struck deals with theaters across the U.S., selling the theater owner their wares at wholesale and allowing their products to be given away as premiums with each ticket sold. Sure enough, soon housewives were demanding that their husbands take them out to the Bijou every week in order to get a coffee cup, saucer, gravy boat, or dinner plate to complete their place setting. One Seattle theater owner reported by distributing 1000 pieces of china costing him $110 on a Monday night, he took in $300—a whopping $250 more than he’d made the previous Monday.

National Poetry Month #23

A gun? A bank robbery? A baseball game? A masterful handling of narrative time? That’s right, folks, you can find all of these and more in Tobias Wolff’s “Bullet in the Brain.” Our protagonist, Anders, is a bit of a grump, but watch how Wolff develops his character. Check out the paragraph that starts “It is worth noting what Anders did not remember…” How does this section offer a “counterpoint” to Anders’s prior characterization in the story? How is his character “deepened” or made “complex”?

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National Poetry Month #22

Jamaica Kincaid’s “Girl” is a classic example of how repetition can achieve an effect. In this second-person instructional, a mother gives her daughter varying pieces of advice. Notice the effect of mixing advice with various degrees of severity in the list: “Wash the white clothes on Monday” vs. “this is how to make a good medicine to throw away a child before it even becomes a child.”

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