Self Eval for Topics in Craft: The Short Story
Every Friday morning I walked to EDH, coffee in hand. Inevitably I’d spill some of it on the walk over, coffee sloshing over my hand and wrist. Eventually, the hot coffee on my hand would soothe the cold that began to grip at me and the trees. I would arrive to class smelling like a latte, my cup free of an inch of caffeine, but I was okay with that because I knew the coffee trail would guide me back home after three hours.
In this Friday morning class, I became a better writer, speaker, and most importantly, a better reader. This semester, I spent three hours each Friday in class with several other student writers. We had vibrant discussions where almost everyone contributed as we taught and learned from one another.
I am really proud of how our class community grew during this semester. At the beginning of the semester, I was intimidated by all of my fellow students who seemed to be advanced story writers. I wanted to contribute to discussions but often felt like I was saying the “wrong” thing, even though there is no such thing. Slowly, I gained confidence, as well as the vocabulary, to discuss the work we were digesting in class. By the end, I felt like we were so familiar with each others’ styles and tendencies that it was fun and easy to discuss work.
At the start of class, when we were reading published short stories and preparing to write our first, I wasn't sure what to expect from myself. I knew I would be able to write a story, but I had no idea what would come out of me until I started writing. I am someone who thrives when I am around other people, having conversations. I tell stories almost every minute of every day as long as someone will listen, and sometimes even when they don’t. Telling the story was not what I personally needed to learn how to do. The trick was to get my voice to come out of my fingers instead of my throat. To tell the story to trickle out of my typing digits. This was the most difficult lesson for me to learn.
My fingers were most familiar with poking poetry onto a google doc. In high school I learned how to write poems, and that's how I learned to tell my stories. When our first writing assignment came along after the first week of class, I felt lost and unable to produce a product. I didn’t know how to begin writing a short story. So I did what I knew best; I let myself start writing a poem. The first story I wrote for the class, Breakfast, could easily be a long form poem, although I think it is also whatever you want it to be. The beauty of that story is that it is both poem and prose, a result of walking the line between them like a balance beam.
The first rough draft I turned in of Breakfast was wobbly. I did not yet know how I wanted to work. I did not know how to write words that weren’t inspired by my own experience. I did not know how to write a story that used poetry as a special spice, and not as a foundation. But after some peer editing, I found some footing. I decided on plot points, I found my characters’ histories. This lesson was important to my growth as a writer; I learned that in order for a story to feel real in the way I want it to, I must develop a character in my mind past the point of their poetic image and into the realm of layered history.
In class we presented on short stories we read from the book The Art of the Story. Reading works by published authors was good practice in dissecting a story and learning from the way it is put together. I prepared a presentation for G-String by Nicola Barker. Reading the story with the goal of crafting questions for a class discussion pushed me to read the story in a deeper way. I was looking for ways to begin discussions, looking for decisions Barker made that we could interrogate. I brought this way of reading into subsequent stories we were assigned, and reading this way made me more prepared for class discussions, and ultimately made my own writing practice more dynamic.
For the second writing assignment, I felt more comfortable in my ability to craft a story. After reading and discussing my classmates’ work for four classes, I had gained an understanding of what I was inspired by, and the styles I wanted to experiment with. The workshop process allowed me to familiarize myself with my fellow writers’ work, and also to discover what I as a writer was most excited about.
When I was writing 12 Quarts of Cold Brew, I knew that I wanted to focus on character in order to create a sense of place. In many ways, Jamie herself is the place, in the same way that Filter Coffee is a character. Writing the rough draft I struggled with falling into a character study instead of establishing a clear plot. After peer editing it seemed more clear what I needed to do: figure out what Jamie wants.
I am not sure if the final draft of 12 Quarts did figure that out, or even if Jamie herself knows what she wants. I debated revising the story, but I decided that I need to sit with it more, and I need to revise it in the coffee shop back in Chicago that inspired the Filter I wrote into that story.
By the end of this class I feel like I have a belly full of inspiring stories. My pockets feel full of tactics I can use to craft stories. Now I know how to search for and identify the things that interest me in a piece of writing, and how to ask myself my own discussion questions. I am proud to say that I am always learning how to craft a short story. Now I often find myself thinking about writing everyday happenings into stories. And I think that kind of inspiration, that kind of desire to harness my excitement into a plotline, is what makes me the writer that I am.
