Words by Caleb Jacobo

Story sketchs, writing prompts, and dialogues

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Elephantine

Elephantine – a new story sketch by Caleb Jacobo

I don’t know much about elephants, except that they’re very large and very intelligent – intelligent enough to use about twenty-five different sounds for communication. But as little as I know, I thought I was certain about one thing: elephants are not capable of speech.

Nevertheless, yesterday afternoon, at Salt Lake City’s Hogle Zoo, I came face to face with an elderly African elephant named…

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I Just Wanted to Help It was shortly before one o’clock on Sunday afternoon. I was sipping a cold cup of coffee while reading the news on Facebook, a habit I find pleasurable despite the incessant reports of violence and corruption.

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My Robert is Dead!

A bus stop somewhere in Northern Utah. It’s nearly eight o’clock in the evening and the summer sun is just now realizing that it has overstayed its welcome. A woman, about fifty years old, sits on the bench, scratching her newly styled hair. It’s short, curly, and dyed the color of old blood. A man, who can’t be younger than seventy, shuffles breathlessly to the bench and lowers himself beside…

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The Wolf of Wasatch

Think fast, Destiny. He can’t be more than a hundred feet away.

I could keep the rifle and try to force him to take me to a hospital. But I don’t know how to use a gun; I don’t even know how to hold a gun. Even if I managed to shoot him before he came into the tent, I’d be killing my ticket off this mountain. I push the rifle back into its clips on the bottom of the chest.

Still, I need to…

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Mother When my bedroom door is securely locked, I rush to my desk, push my MacBook Air aside, and lift the heavy Olympia onto the desktop.

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I Didn't Ask for This

I Didn't Ask for This — a scene sketch

This can’t, like, really be happening to me. What have I done to deserve this? It’s been hard enough just trying to get through middle-school with nobody liking me, but at least there was always the hope that high school and college might help people forget how much they enjoyed looking down on me and calling me names. If they find out about this, about me, they’ll have an actual reason for…

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The Walking Dead

The following is my response to today’s Daily Writing Prompt: “A bobblehead collector is talked out of suicide by a member of his collection.”

Saul burst into his home office and slammed the door so hard that all of the bobbleheads, occupying the nine shelves of the three bookcases lining the wall opposite of his desk, began wagging their heads. Although he was no longer crying, his labored…

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Daily Writing Prompt: Oculus Rift

After receiving the Oculus Rift to review, a young tech blogger finds herself trapped in an alternate reality when she turns it on for the first time.

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What is Conflict?

In my diagram, conflict begins with a desire — the feeling of wanting to have something or wishing that something will happen — then introduces an opposing force — which can be internal or external — and together they create conflict.What is Conflict?

In a previous investigation I talked about what a story is and I defined thirteen potentially essential elements of a story; that is, thirteen things that every story must have. But there was something missing, a driving force that may not exist in the most mundane story, but should be present in any good story. That force is conflict.

Conflicts drive a narrative forward; they are the challenges…

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Character Development Web — Part II

I’ve been toying around with my character development web, or character chart, a sort of visual character sheet to help me quickly identify the key attributes of a fictional character.

This is a work in progress and I will continue to add, remove, and rearrange items as time goes on. You are free to use this character chart in your own storytelling process. Please leave comments below or on Faceb…

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Life Changing Technology

The following is my response to a writing prompt from the book 642 Things to Write About: “Describe something you wanted badly and, once you got it, never used.”

I’m not promoting this book at all. I got it for Christmas from my wife, so I figured I would put it to some use. I hope you enjoy!

When I was fifteen years old, all I wanted was a smartphone. I had these grand ideas about handheld…

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Adam and The Storm

The following is a story sketch I wrote up in response to a writing prompt I got out of the book 642 Things to Write About. I wrote the whole first draft in two hours and spent only enough time editing and cleaning up to make it readable. I don’t want to present these sketches as finished pieces, but as they are: rough sketches done for practice. I hope you enjoy the sketch. If you like this…

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The Mystic Mexican

Yesterday, after taking a break from Christmas shopping for my wife, I stopped to grab a bite at a Mexican food restaurant. After, I wrote down the following story because I couldn’t stop thinking about it. This isn’t a story sketch so much as a recording of this event so I can reference it for future stories. I do this whenever something happens to me that sticks in my head.

I’d been wanting to…

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Themes to Write On

I like to write down themes in my writing journal so I can refer to them later when working on a new story. The following are some themes I wrote down yesterday along with a brief note on thought.

Themes to write on:

The role of the teacher

Tolerance as an intellectual covering for intolerance

Division as conflict: as long as there is a division between observer and observed, there is division…

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Character Development Web

I will be going into whether Character is an essential element of story or not in a followup entry on “What Is a Story?” but for now, since I know for sure that all of the stories I will be writing will contain characters, I have started working on a “character web” which allows me to determine the basic attributes of any character I write about.

This character web, or character chart, is a work…

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What Is a Story?

When trying to define something, one is categorizing it, taking a set of elements which are present in one or more things and grouping them with a label. So in order to define what a story is, I must uncover the set of elements which are present in all stories, from the daily stories we tell ourselves and others to professional stories.

Like songs, stories are easier to recognize than to define.…

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The Faceless Woman

The following is an observation I jotted down in my Evernote after witnessing an intriguing family at the grocery store. This entry is direct from my personal journal.

There was this faceless redheaded woman at the store tonight with her two sons. The family drew the attention of everyone who saw them.

The mother was bone-thin. I never saw her face. It was obscured by her long, strangely red…

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