Kaze’s Fall 2009 short story class.
(After I return from Italy next week I’ll once again be teaching my adult-ed short-story class in Northern Virginia. Interested? It’s called “Writing a Short Story” and can be found on pg. 24 of this catalogue. Here’s a piece I did on the class back in November 2009. What I said then is all still true.)
One of my favorite bits of magic has occurred again.
I’ve just wrapped up this fall’s short-story class. Six 2-hour sessions, one every Thursday night, with a promise to each of my students—none of whom has ever written a short story before—that if you commit yourself to getting it done, you’ll have a short story drafted by session #5, and comments from me and your classmates by session #6.
Thirteen students signed up, three dropped out early, 10 finished the course, and right now I’m looking at a stack of 10 short stories.
Where did these come from?
I’ve got a story about a little girl in India whose mother sent her off—temporarily, her mother swore—to be a servant, and who comes to realize, as the years drag on, that she may simply never be free. I’ve got a story about an urban gang member beating up a preacher in the street, but who, in the midst of the violence, hears a voice from the sky. Here’s one about a woman haunted by the death of her grandmother, and who meets an old Andean woman in the Witches Market who rubs salve into her hands and serves her coca tea and seems, just possibly, to speak with her grandmother’s voice—or even, perhaps, to be her. Here’s another about a family, two sisters and two brothers, whose father told them as kids about “the greatest treasure ever.” He’s dead now; they’re searching for it. I have here a story about a girl who’s got a little alligator growing where her thumb should be. And here’s one about a boy calling every Allen Smith in the phone book, in hopes that one of them will be the father who abandoned him and his mother.
I’ve got four more: A Jewish family, with coins sown into their clothes, flees the Soviet Union. For her birthday, a little girl named Sam gets a live kangaroo. A harried mother herds her six small children through an airport to visit their father, stationed in Turkey. Another woman wonders if she should have children at all, and whether to marry.
Where did these come from?
Take 10 or 12 strangers whom you’ve just met and ask them to tell the story they’d most like to tell. I do this all the time. Some don’t think they can do it. One of them asks, “Can anybody write a short story?” My answer, based on experience, is: Sure.
We’re human, so we tell stories like mad. You can barely shut us up. The only way, it seems, to slow down our natural compulsion for storytelling is to call it creative writing. Then we seize up. But I ask the new student: Can you tell a story with the facility of a born writer? We’ll find out. Can you learn the rudiments—what goes into a story, how it gets put together—so that a person could read the damn thing all the way through and take pleasure in it? I am sure you can.
Craft is learnable. “Your protagonist starts here. She ends up there.” The parts that are unique to you—the ideas that come into your head and won’t go away, the characters and their circumstances and the things that get between them and what they want—the wellsprings of your imagination, the very fact that you’ve got a yen to write . . . those are the inexplicable parts. Hence the magic.
My heartiest thanks to the 10 new writers in the photo above. The Indian girl is by Dhanji on travel-india-pictures.net, the old Bolivian witch by iancowe on flickr.
Ted the Cat (1994-present) is a domestic shorthair blogger and vers libre poet. He also enjoys sleeping, eating, and lurking. Ted the Cat co-habits with Kaze,
also a blogger at 317am.net.
i want to meet her family & talk with them also
please,please,please,please,please,please,please call meon 9096569108,9209467235
This post was so encouraging. I imagine our fingers tapping out ideas in tandem from our different sides of the U.S.
I would love to read those stories; my interest was picqued. Maybe give them my info if they would like to let me read them. If not, give them my heartfelt appreciation for such good ideas. Kelly
I'll bet you'd fit right in, Kelly. I believe, just looking at that family photo of yours and reading Erudita, that you have plenty of stuff inside you out of which to make stories. Me, I get a whole new set of new writers every time I start a new class. It's as exciting for me…maybe even more so…than it is for them.
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Too much water between us, Kaze. If closer by, I would certainly join and -who knows- eventually become a good writer
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