Hello, my name is Tie. For the next 14 weeks I’m going to be doing a course on learning how to read and write short Storie. My goal is to develop an understanding of short stories so that I can write my own, experiment with technique, and work on finishing many of the ideas I’ve captured over the years.

If you want to take this same course here’s the link below.

https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/21w-755-writing-and-reading-short-stories-spring-2012/pages/readings

Its completely free, besides the book, which thankfully my local library already had. The Course gives you a syllabus, readings, Lecture note, etc. Though you will have to have good management of your time if you want to finish it in the 14 weeks.

But think of my post as my personal entries for myself with notes and examples on my process during this journey.

Most if not all my quotes will be references from the book or from the lecture notes. But if it occurs that I haven’t given the correct reference then don’t be afraid to correct me, I’m still learning.

Anyways back to the post.

Week 01: Sessions 1 and 2

Course Introduction

I reflected on the question, “What do you like to read?”

Stumped at first, wondering to myself what I actually like to read. I wrote…

• Magical realism
• (Fairytale/dark/folklore) fantasy
• Surrealism
• Good humor
• etc (meaning I do not know)

I wanted to also add soft fantasy, maybe I have yet to find the right amount of hard fantasy that I can read and want to come back to reading. Its too heavy, serious, and intense. But how do I enjoy dark stuff but not those other three things. Has to do with childhood shows that influenced me as a kid like Courage the Cowardly Dog, Flapjack, and Adventure time. So things that can be serious but that isn’t the continuous mood. Like Ghibli films, they take on serious things like war, capitalism, etc but allow the characters to relax. It becomes exhausting to read stories that doesn’t take a break from it seriousness or giving breathers that are just spicy 18+ scenes. Maybe I’m just weird but I like stories that where you see the characters to a break (even wizards) like people rather than devices to making the plot move or more engaging.

Know thyself

I write best either after waking or before going to bed (once I wrote 1,000 words a night for over a month. I wasn’t consistent and I often wrote repeatedly ‘I need to write something’, but I am proud of my commitment).

I often experience stiffness in my wrist and fingers when writing, leaving not much of a choice but to be mainly dependent on my laptop or my phone. From time to time I write by hand until my hands start experiencing that discomfort.

My bed, the floor, or while sitting in the car tend to be my best choice now, at least until I find somewhere that not a lot of people will be at. I have a place in mind now but I’m still feeling out, then there’s also the fact of the fall semester coming up soon.

“Most people believe that one starts with the short story and works ‘up’ to a novel, but that’s a misconception.”

I’d raise my hand higher if I could because… ME! MEMEMEME! THIS IS ME 100%.

I spent many years hoping to be a novelist but eventually came to accept that I won’t be one, at least not until I’m ready to dedicate myself to practice the art of writing a novel. Short story writing feels right, I think I have been trying to make my ideas that were made to be short stories into novels. That’s not happening, at least not happening to me.

What is the Short Story ?

• What is this story suppose to do?

• What is your goal as a writer in this particular work?

At times I forget to ask questions instead of mindlessly going through an entire story, just to get to the end and say “I did/didn’t like it” and move one. No reflection what-so-ever, which makes no sense since I’m a finish and utter over thinker ( I know that doest have anything to do with reflection I just like being dramatic). It’s a bad habit that’s gotta go.

“The writer has to let it become what is will be, the writer cannot force the story into some outline if the characters are going in a different direction.”

I feel this relates back to what I was saying a couple paragraphs ago, when I said it feels like characters are used to help with plot. Best example are side characters (the best friend, the love interest who won’t get with the character, etc) tend to just be very generalized flat characters. They have or are used to fulfill the characters (who feel like self inserts) destiny, that’s it. The stories often feel forced and awkward, pushing me away from wanting to continue reading it.

Then on the other side of he coin is the characters that are let off the leash outside their gate, the story goes everywhere, there’s no focus or direction. The character is talking to anyone and everyone, doing anything and everything. A disorganized story isn’t good either.

Maintaining an equilibrium (like so many things) is important. Having a guideline to follow and not next those parts of the guideline with a purpose. You want your character to walk into a party so beautiful/handsome that everyone is gapping at them, but your character wants to skip the party and but ends up going to the party in pjs as a statement. Maybe they wore Pjs relating to a band which leads to them talking to someone else that also doest want to be there, maybe they meet someone who proves their point on why they didn’t want to come. I don’t know, just don’t make everything so perfect or unrelated to the characters character and development.

What is the Short Story?

• Unity
• Singularity of point of view
• (Unity of place)

What I’ve learned in week 1 of this course

Sherwood Anderson

• what gives to a story isn’t plot, instead it’s words that give to it

This is likely subjective but I agree. I find myself more interested in stories that aren’t heavily plot driven, I find them boring. They lack a sort of rawness of being human, it feel more like the writer is trying to tell me a story they created but are worried that I will lose interest. Though maybe they dont and they like stories like this because it more interesting. I dont know but while I was reading Sherwood Andersons short story “Hands” I was drawn into the world (though it took a couple rereading for me to feel that way) the characters and personalities and their backstory of how they got there, I developed this need to know.

Nadine Gordimer

• Short stories and Novels both have the goal of expressing/communicating the human experience, they go about it through different approaches
• Short stories are flexible, experimental, and aims for a discrete moment of truth

While I read Nadine Gordimer’s short story “A Company of Laughing Faces,” I felt myself drawn to the story because I related to the main character Kathy, a seventeen year old girl who finds herself at Ingaza Beach for Christmas. Her mother wanting her daughter to get out and hang out with other young adult. Kathy finds herself struggling to fall into the crowd of teens that she spends most of her time being among them instead of with them. Laying on beaches on by herself as other groups of her peers hang out with each other and play. Playing a game of tennis with some girls but once the game was over was by herself again, dancing with a boy who had little to no interest in her. Even when she did make her way in she eventually ended up wanted to go home by the end. There were other things too, of course, I related to how she felt, how even though you’re aware of what you should be doing you find yourself just belonging on the outskirts and the everything in the universe continuously reminds you.

Alice Munro

• “So when I write a story I want a certain kind of structure, and I know the feeling I want to get from inside that structure.”
• “But though I’ve tried to pay attention to the story I have not gotten it right.”
• Every final draft, every published story, is still only a try, an approach, to the story.”

I had a hard time trying to write this all in my own words because it already says enough. I feel like I’ve heard a quote that says that even when you think you are done you really aren’t. Writing a short story is a lot of rewriting but it is also like learning in a sense, you can know a lot about a given concept but you will never fully know a concept. Knowledge isn’t something that finishes, it is something that continues to change but often is left alone with what is known about it in the moment. Man, what am I trying to say? Something smart.

Edith Wharton

• “If the incident dealt with be one which a single rospective flash sufficiently lights up, it is qualified for use as a short story…”

If the subject you are telling in the story is simple that it can be told with limits, then it is a short story. Examples of this is limited word count, time (I guess pacing) , limited amount of characters, limited amount of places, etc. If the it’s too complex that these limitations hinder rather than helps it then it’s a novel (or possible a novella or series)

John Updike

• There are many reasons someone writes, lessons, reflection, connection and so on
• Not every story is purposefully give meaning, and if it does the meaning isn’t always told to you, the reader, and maybe that in itself could be the meaning

Don’t get strung up on your story having some deeper meaning, it doesn’t have to if you to feel it doe or if the story itself naturally lacks one. Maybe there is an unconscious or subconscious meaning, (I dont know which one is the correct word to use,) maybe not. That’s fine.

Random I’ ll take out later. I dont like my conversations with Macayla, they dont feel right, they dont feel like me honestly talking, it just me talking to get rid of the silence. I dont like my conversations with her, I dont like who I become

That’s all I have for this weeks session.

Bye!