Hello students! This morning, Brevity (one of my favorite nonfiction publications) published a piece on their blog about how writers make their work better. Spoiler alert: it's basically just Shameless Magpies without the catchy name. You have finished writing your short stories. That means that you are all now creators of things. However you feel about your short story (proud, ambivalent, invested, uninvested, relieved it's over), you made it. It's yours. You wove it out of words from that mysterious place in your mind where your creativity resides. So you made a thing. Now what? I hope that some of you will consider submitting your work for publication. There's nothing quite like readying your work for submission. In some ways it's like preparing your college essays, I guess, because you know someone will read and evaluate your work. But the stakes are lower with a piece that you submit, and no one in the whole world is dictating to you what you must write. You are in complete control of your work, which is liberating and terrifying at the same time. If you decide you want to submit your work for publication, the first thing you have to do is find a call for submissions that matches your piece. Some calls for submission are very broad: basically the only requirement is that the writing be good and that your piece fits into the often unknown specs of the magazine or literary review a group of editors is preparing. Other calls are more specific and require a piece to explore a certain theme or genre or writing. Some calls for submission are for all writers, while some are specific to young people or people from a certain part of the world, or at least writing about a certain part of the world. Some publications have free submissions, some require the writers to pay fees that range from $3 to $25. My strong recommendation is to stick to the free ones. If you find yourself interested in submitting, here are some resources to help you start exploring publications:
After you submit your work, there are two possibilities. Your piece will either be accepted or rejected by the publication. Please remember that the majority of pieces submitted to any call are rejected for many different reasons. I recommend approaching the process with a kind of measured hope. If you receive a rejection, read it carefully in case there are any insights embedded within it about your work. Then shrug it off, and possibly revise and submit the piece to a different place. If you are accepted, I recommend dancing around your house in celebration. There's nothing quite like sharing your work with readers out in the world.
Well done on your short stories! Just take a moment to celebrate: where there was once nothing, there is something. You created people and stories out of thin air. What once was a blank page is now painted with a world that you created. It's kind of amazing when you think about it. Your second drafts are due Friday. We've already discussed and practiced the strategies for micro revision, now let's zoom out and consider your short stories from the macro angle. When we talk about macro, we're talking about structure. Do you have all the major elements you need for a successful short story? In this post, we'll consider three different macro aspects of your story:
1. StructureWhat even is a story, y'all? How can we define it? For our purposes, let's define it like this:
At each step of the way, you're piece must address each of these aspects of story. Another very helpful way to think about your structure is to ask yourself the question: What shifts over the course of my story? Usually, hopefully, there is a shift in at least one of your characters: internal or external or both. Also ask yourself this question: What causes the shift? In other words, what is the nature of the conflict? 2. CharacterConsider your people. Many of us didn't give our characters names. There were some exceptions to this, but in almost every case, the story could have been improved by simply giving the characters names. You want your characters to be unique, and names are the first, most easily accessible unique feature about us. Think about the ways we learn who the people are around us: the words they speak, the decisions, they make, the way they dress, the things they like, the place they live, the actions they take. Then ask yourself: What have I used to build my characters? What do my readers see when they think about my characters? At least one of your characters needs to be well-developed. 3. SettingOne of my writing teachers once told me that it sometimes helps to think about your writing as designing the stage for a play: if you don't put it there, it doesn't exist. For many of us, our characters are floating around in a non-descript place. Not paying attention to the setting is like not paying attention to one of the three dimensions. It's just one of the things that a story needs to come alive. A story needs space, time, problems, and people. Settings are developed through specific details, sometimes filtered through the perspectives of characters. Think about the "Yellow Wallpaper." Then reflect on this question: What is my setting built out of? ConclusionThe awake student will perhaps notice that these are all the same questions we consider when we analyze the literature of other people. Remember my analogy: if we were architecture students there's only so much we tell about Notre Dame by just looking at it from the outside. To really see the bones of the thing, to see how the building works, we have to go through the door and look at the inside. To have a deep understanding of how a short story works, we have to make one.
Heeeeeyyy class! I just finished grading a clump of your "Yellow Wallpaper" Dialectical Journals. I was struck by how much you've all grown as writers and analytical thinkers since the beginning of the year. If you want to check out your own development and give yourself a moment of celebration, go look at your DJs for "A Clean Well-Lighted Place" and compare them to your DJs for "Yellow Wallpaper." Then take a moment to celebrate what you've accomplished. In this post, I'll be discussing strategies for revision. I'm dividing these strategies into two major groups: the micro and the macro revision techniques. For this revision, we'll start with the micro. Keep reading until the end for the big reveal of a SECRET REVISION WEAPON. The Micro: Revision on a Sentence and Word LevelIn class I discussed how some revision techniques are universal and applicable to any piece of writing, whether it be a short story or an analysis. These techniques are what I refer to as the "micro" revision strategies. With these strategies, you look at the fabric of your text: the words and the sentences. Then you see if you can locate opportunities to strengthen your writing. List of Micro Revisions:
1. Revise for VerbsStories are composed of action, and action happens in verbs. One easy way to increase the effectiveness of any piece of writing is to locate all the instances of the verb "to be" and look for places where you can turn the linking verb into an action. You can either highlight each instance of the verb on paper, or you can control "f" the difference forms of "to be." The first step is to gather data and see how many times you used the verb. Then try to make that number smaller. Here are all the forms of the verb "to be" you need to look for:
2. Revise for Sentence LengthDo you vary your sentence length? Do you use the different types of sentences as a way to enhance the meaning of your words? Or are all your sentences about the same length? Either using two different color highlighters on old-school paper or using the highlighter function in your word processor, highlight the sentences of your short story in two different colors. Then you will be able to see the lengths of your sentences and the texture of your prose will become visible to you. Armed with this information, revise the length and structure of your sentences for variety to enhance your prose. 3. RepetitionSome words seem to come out into our writing more than others. For example, in a piece I wrote a few weeks ago, I noticed I used the word "thrumming" multiple times. The first "thrum" was effective and evocative, but the second "thrum" was boring and redundant. Check your work for repeated words. When you've located them, revise to avoid repetition. SECRET WEAPONAll these revision techniques involve collecting data about your writing and using that to find areas where your prose can be strengthened. Since we live in the time of computers, there's actually a tool we can use to bypass the whole data collecting step. It's called ProWriting Aid, and you can find it in Google Docs as an add-on. Once you add it (you might need to use your personal email account), you'll be able to run the free "Summary Report" and see all kinds of data about your writing. Maybe even too much data. My favorite is the sentence length graph. Below is an example of a visual for "Yellow Wallpaper" sentences.
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AuthorI'm a Houston high school teacher. Welcome to my adapted, socially-distanced, quarantined AP English Literature and Composition classroom. Archives
May 2021
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