Write a short story which is one sentence long.

Write a short story with yourself as the main character.  Use the third person point of view.

Look up "parody" in a good dictionary, encyclopedia, and handbook of literary terms.  Then write a parody of a short story that you've recently read, or of last night's network news, or of one of your classes.

Write a short story set in 400BC.

Pick three public figures, past or current, and write a dialogue involving those people.  Have them waiting in line to see a movie, sitting together at dinner, or spending a night together in jail.

Write a sex scene.

Write a children's story.

Write a short prose passage or paragraph whose aim stylistically is to bore your reader to death.

Take one of your own completed stories, and cut out a paragraph from the first page, a middle page, and the last page.  (Is there anything there which you really don't need?  If you picked up the story and shook it, what paragraphs would fall out?)

Write a short story based on a letter or e-mail message you've recently received.

Write a story set in the place where you work.

Write a story with a plot that runs backward in time.

Write a story about writing a story.
 

Komputer Kicks

Here are some exercises to try with a computer word processing program:

a)  Try freewriting WITH YOUR MONITOR OFF.  Type as long as you can in one sitting, allowing your mind to wander freely.  If you become engaged with one subject, image, or pattern, go ahead and go with it.  After you've written as much as you can, turn your monitor back on and read the results.  You might then continue to develop and revise the whole thing, or part of it.  Or you may find, in the random flow of relatively unfruitful writing, the germ of an idea you can then develop separately.

b) Type what you think will be the final line for a poem at the top of your screen.  Then type the second-to-last line, but enter it above the first one you typed.  Continue to add lines this way until the line first entered has been pushed all the way to the bottom of your screen. (Don't invent your poem beforehand; you want to actually construct a new poem in this fashion.)

c) Take a "finished" poem or story and rearrange its parts.  You might highlight/select a paragraph in a story and move it to a different position, or delete several paragraphs randomly to see what's lost or possibly gained through the resulting compression.  Or, if you like, you could take a free verse poem and break its stanzas differently.  What happens when a poem written in a long block or single stanza is broken into two-line stanzas? Into three-line stanzas?  Does a different order enliven the piece, or bring into the foreground buried aspects of the work?  Does the new arrangement help you see possibilities for revision, or perhaps a whole new poem or story?  Continue to experiment with text manipulation; try out any reorderings or other ideas that you wish.
 

Prose and Cons

Go find stories by three modern or contemporary fiction writers and write a passage of prose imitating each one. (You might consider choosing three of the following writers:  Ernest Hemingway, F.Scott Fitzerald, William Faulkner, Angela Carter, J.P Donleavy, Don Delillo, Joyce Carol Oates, Susan Minot.)

Pay close attention to sentence length, sentence structure, diction, rhythm, and tone. How would you describe each writer's style?
 

Paws

Imagine that you're a particular animal--giraffe, cat, hummingbird, mole.  Taking the perspective of this creature, and assuming that it is capable of writing, compose a short story in which you describe the world around you.  Since animals cannot reflect or explain, you will be experiencing your environment in an entirely sensory way, and your writing should therefore be full of striking physical detail and metaphor. (For instance, from the point of view of a deer, a hunter's rifle would be something like, as one student put it, "a branch that barks.") One possibility is to locate yourself in a particular place, such as a classroom, rooftop, lakeside, or city street, and focus your description on that place.  Or you might imagine that you have just awakened in your bedroom on a typical Monday morning, only to find that you've turned into some animal. (This idea of course is from Kafka.) Use a good deal of specific, concrete, descriptive detail.
 

Skipping Stones and Digging Up Bones

Find an art piece which has significance for you, or simply piques your interest somehow, and write a poem or story based on it.  This might be a personal item, say a photograph of your family or a drawing you did as a child, or it might be an established art work.  You might even use some sort of "found" art, such as a sketch you came across on a wall, or a photograph discovered in some old book.  Describe the item as accurately as possible, but feel free also to digress and invent however you wish.  Avoid pat, obvious statements; discover or happen onto connections and associations as you write.
 

Tenure

Recall the ranking of songs we did in class recently, and the criteria you used to judge the pieces you heard.  What are your personal criteria for any kind of art, and especially for fiction?  What kind of reading experience, for you, is "good"?  What has gone wrong with pieces that you dislike?

Write up a prose paragraph in which you offer tips to a young writer for writing a good story. Be specific, clear, and thorough.  And be careful; this person is an intensely serious student who lives to write and who hangs on your every word.
 
 

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