Metaphor by Metaphor

If you desire, you can email to me no more than three examples of your reading the stories below as fiction writing textbooks. Each example of your reading this way can earn up to five points. Each should be no longer than 500 words. I will stop collecting them at midnight on April 22^nd.

When you write, be specific. Quote the story to support your assertions about it. Include an example effort of you using the knowledge you find in the textbook/story. Completing even one of these will help prepare you for our final exam.

You can read and write about these stories in any combination (i.e. you could write about one story three times, each story once, one story twice and another once, or one story once, and so on).

The stories are all found in Deepening Fiction:

• ZZ Packer “Drinking Coffee Elsewhere”
• Julie Orringer “Pilgrims”
• Margot Livesey’s “The Niece”

If you have questions, please email me.

Consider these questions:

• What kind of story does your beginning promise readers? How do you know? Which words make the promise?
• Which words or phrases establish the POV in your story?
• How are readers introduced to characters? What are readers’ first clues to their personalities?
• Is there an implied question in your first sentence? Anything at risk? If not, which strategies have you used to interest readers?

Address these prompts. You have lots of time. Do a good job.

• Describe the process of writing this draft. What worked well? What would you do differently if you could?
• While the specifics of an assignment are a factor, what generalizations can you make about your writing process? What sorts of things do you do each time you write? Why?
• In what ways might revising this process be useful? Or, if you are perfectly satisfied with your current practices, offer a defense of them.
• What changes do you plan to make to your rough draft?
  • What worries you about your opening? Your middle? Your conclusion?
  • How can you increase the reader’s engagement in the narrative?
  • Which scenes might your summarize? Which summaries need to become scenes?
  • Make a list of several “next drafts.”
    • Give each draft a specific purpose (In this draft I’ll see if altering the order of events increases the drama, or sort through and apply workshop suggestions, or add scenes that characterize, or rewrite summaries into scenes, or cut clichés, or rewrite boring scenes, etc).
    • Save sentence-level/grammar issues for the last draft.