NOTE TO STUDENTS: WHILE THIS SYLLABUS IS POSTED TO GIVE YOU AN OVERVIEW OF THE COURSE, IT IS SUBJECT TO CHANGE. IF YOU HAVE ANY QUESTIONS OR CONCERNS, PLEASE CONTACT THE WRITERS’ PROGRAM AT (310) 825-9415 OR VIA EMAIL AT WRITERS@UCLAEXTENSION.EDU.

WRITING THE SHORT STORY: Intermediate Workshop (Online) Instructor: Charles Wyatt Course Manager: Wayne Wong E-mail: coursemanager@uclaextension.edu Description and goals: There’s a certain grain of stupidity that the writer of fiction can hardly do without, and this is the quality of having to stare, of not getting the point at once. The longer you look at one object, the more of the world you see in it; and it’s well to remember that the serious fiction writer always writes about the whole world, no matter how limited his particular scene. -Flannery O’Connor, Mystery and Manners This is a course in the study and writing of short fiction. Separately and in the workshop together, we will endeavor to prove the truth of Flannery O’Connor’s theorem. Because we are addressing the short story, we’ll be very much concerned with beginnings and endings and how the special requirements of short fiction affect form and the many other aspects of the craft. You should have taken one prior fiction course as a prerequisite for this course. There will be prompts for new projects with each week’s assignments. You may choose to make new beginnings or to continue with a previous project. I do expect you to practice editing and revising. By the end of this class, most of you will have at least two “complete” stories taken well into the revision process and several promising

beginnings. (By “complete,” I mean stories with beginnings, middles, and ends.) We’ll use the discussion forum to share our thoughts about our writing - the work itself, and perhaps more importantly, the process, how we get the job done. Course Procedure Each Wednesday, I will post lectures and assignments. Please read the lectures and complete all written, reading, critiquing and discussion assignments no later than 12 midnight on the following Tuesday. I won’t be able to read or comment upon work that arrives after that time. If you are taking the course for a grade and miss a deadline, you will receive no credit for that particular assignment. Where to Post Your Writing Assignments: -Go to the Discussion Board. -Find the Discussion Forum with your name; click on it. -Click the tab that says “New Thread.” -In the “Subject” line, type: “Week 1 Writing Assignment.” -In the “Message” box, type or paste your writing assignment. -You will follow this procedure and create a New Thread for each week’s writing assignment. I have been advised to remind you that it is a good idea for you to compose (and save often) your written assignments on a word processor, then copy and paste. Grades: There are four elements to the class: a. Writing Assignments b. Discussion of Reading c. Participation in the workshop

d. Overall participation/cooperation While the creative work is paramount, no student will receive a passing grade who does not participate fully in the reading forum and the workshop. I believe the most important quality we can bring to our writing is effort, and this will be my main criterion in establishing grades. I’m not here to wield my subjective sense of the quality of students’ work - I'll try to make this figure as little as possible. I do believe it is important that you be willing to try some of my suggestions for revising and improving your work. Even if you don’t agree with a suggestion, the undertaking may be worthwhile as practice (and might apply to a future need). The good news is that you get to make the final decision about what goes into (and what doesn’t) the final version of your work. I only ask that you treat my suggestions as practice, in the same way a musician looks at scales and arpeggios. Reading: We’ll use two texts for this course. I’ll post a list of recommended further reading under Course Documents. I hope that all of you will make suggestions concerning reading. I never teach a class without learning about new books to read. In my college classes, I ask the students to subscribe to a literary magazine, to make a research project out of it. We won’t make that a requirement, but I’ll post a list of magazines with some comments. Required Texts: Burroway, Janet, Writing Fiction, A Guide to Narrative Craft (7th edition) Munro, Alice, Too Much Happiness

WEEKLY SCHEDULE Week 1 June 30 Burroway Chapter 1 The Writing Process “Shitty First Drafts” Anne Lamott “Why I Write” Joan Didion “Dimensions” Alice Munro Week 2 July 7 Burroway Chapter 2 Showing and Telling “Big Me” Dan Chaon “The Things They Carried” Tim O’Brien “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been” Joyce Carol Oates Week 3 July 14 Burroway Chapter 3 Characterization, Part I “Gryphon” Charles Baxter “Every Tongue Shall Confess” ZZ Packer “Rock Springs” Richard Ford “Fiction” Alice Munro Week 4 July 21 Burroway Chapter 4 Characterization, Part II “A Visit of Charity” Eudora Welty “Bullet in the Brain” Tobias Wolff “Tandolfo the Great” Richard Bausch “Deep-Holes” Alice Munro Week 5 July 28 Burroway Chapter 5 Fictional Place

“The English Pupil” Andrea Barrett “Wickedness” Ron Hansen “Love and Hydrogen” Jim Shepard “Too Much Happiness” or “Free Radicals” Alice Munro Week 6 August 6 Burroway Chapter 6 Fictional Time “The Swimmer” John Cheever “Mrs. Dutta Writes a Letter” Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni “A Serious Talk” Raymond Carver Week 7 August 11 Burroway Chapter 7 Story Form, Plot, and Structure “The Use of Force” William Carlos Williams “Happy Endings” Margaret Atwood “Everything That Rises Must Converge” Flannery O'Connor “Child’s Play” Alice Munro Week 8 August 18 Burroway Chapter 8 Point of View “Orientation” Daniel Orozco “Who’s Irish” Gish Jen “Gusev” Anton Chekhov “Wood” Alice Munro Week 9 August 25 Burroway Chapter 9 -10 Comparison / Theme “The First Day” Edward P. Jones “Hotel Touraine” Robert Olen Butler “A Man Told Me the Story of His Life” Grace Paley “Winky” George Saunders

“This Is What It Means to Say Phoenix, Arizona” Sherman Alexie Class ends September 1 Week 1 Assignment READING: Burroway: Whatever Works: The Writing Process 1-24 (This included the selections from Annie Lamott and Joan Didion.) Alice Munro, “Dimensions” in Too Much Happiness. On Writing Assignments - Exercises My exercises usually begin with a model - then I try to suggest some things to try that the model may demonstrate. I’m interested in giving you plenty of room to experiment - I don’t say, for example, “Describe a table set for four. Make sure the plates are blue. Give me exactly 250 words.” Now some of us could do this exercise and it might possibly be useful. If I did it there would be several pigs under the table. My exercise wouldn’t be any fun for me without the pigs under the table. I want you all to feel free to put your pigs under the table and buzzards (if you want them) perched on the backs of the chairs. Writing assignments page 22 in Burroway. This one appealed to me -- “Sketch a floor plan of the (first) house you remember. Significant events that happened there.” You might want to begin by describing that room, that house, that garden, that place - in great detail. “Identify the kernel of a short story from your experience from one of the following:” (See that list.) I use the writing process itself as a means of discovering the story but you are welcome to outline and cluster to your heart’s content.

Model, a misfit story Read "Dimensions" Can you write a story in which one character has committed (or commits) some kind of terrible action? Or a story in which letters that reveal hidden secrets (or even insanity) figure? Look at the foreground action: a wife visiting her husband in prison or asylum - background action: the unveiling of his crime. Is he changed or unchanged? How will the wife react? See if you can get three or four pages (or more). Recapitulation: read pages 1 - 24 in Burroway and “Dimensions” in Alice Munro’s Too Much Happiness. Choose your writing assignment from the prompts above. Where to Post Your Writing Assignments: -Go to the Discussion Board. -Find the Discussion Forum with your name; click on it. -Click the tab that says “New Thread.” -In the “Subject” line, type: “Week 1 Writing Assignment.” -In the “Message” box, type or paste your writing assignment. -You will follow this procedure and create a New Thread for each week’s writing assignment. Week 2 Assignment Part 1: Reading Chapter 2 Showing and Telling (25-79) Part 2: Commenting on Other Students’ Writing Assignments

This is the first week when everyone will comment on other students’ work -- in other words, the workshop begins. Each student should comment on the work of at least 3 other students in the class. If, when you go into someone’s folder to comment on his/her work, you see that 2 students have already commented, please move on to the folder of another student who has not yet received 2 critiques. That way, everyone’s work will have a chance to be discussed. The first part of this week’s assignment is to read and comment on the week 1 writing assignments of 3 other people in your group. To do this: -Go to the Discussion Board -Go to the folder of a fellow student -Go to the thread entitled “Week 1 Assignment” -Read the assignment -Click “Reply” and post your comments -Repeat this procedure for two other students in your group Guidelines for criticism We want to be critical and supportive at the same time. We certainly don’t want to stifle anyone’s creativity. We do, on the other hand, want to be honest about what strikes us as effective or ineffective writing. I’m going to help out as we go along in this area, but one useful way to begin is to observe what goes on in terms of structure. By this I mean, for example, you can observe that the story begins with a 1st person narrator who provides us with background exposition, then breaks into a scene with dialogue. Then there is a commentary on the scene by the narrator. Sometimes you will notice a pattern in fiction: Scene, reflection, scene, reflection. This pattern creates a rhythm which effects the pacing of the story. We’ll talk about this as the semester goes on. It’s important to recognize how the story is organized in terms of this kind of structure

from the beginning. Then you can ask yourself some of these questions: Is the dialogue realistic? What about the setting? What kinds of description does the author use? What part of the exercise (be specific) strikes you as most effective? Are there places where you get lost or confused? (be specific) What would you do to continue the exercise? What direction does it seem to lead in? In my classes on the ground, we generally begin the workshop with someone giving a flyover. A “flyover” is a kind of compressed summary of what went on in the story. We try to do these as elegantly as possible - there is no reason why writing about writing shouldn’t be interesting, too. A flyover can be about the events in the story or it can be about the structure of the story, the author’s choices. If you’re stuck with a commentary, try a flyover. Part 3: Writing Assignment Read Tim O’Brien’s “The Things They Carried.” This story, as you can immediately is a kind of list story. List stories often work by the simple effect of accumulating detail. This one, however, is much more complex than that. In the first place, its lists “the things they carried were...” are listed themselves. (Lists of lists.) We are looking at a kind of outline organization. Notice again, that there is a central scene in this story which is foreshadowed and assembled. There is more to this story than lists. Dorothy Allison has a list story called “River of Names” in which instances of abuse and violence in the narrator’s childhood are piled up. To what point, you might ask? There should be a point - in this particular story there is a relationship in the present which is being effected by the past. Ron Hanson’s story “Wickedness” (195) is a list of all the remarkable

things which happened in a great historical blizzard in Nebraska. You can also find both the Allison and Hanson stories in an excellent anthology of short fiction, The Viking Collection of Contemporary American Short Stories, Edited by Tobias Wolff. Sometimes lists make up parts of stories. Every description is a list. Every description consists of things observed and by omission, things not observed. John Cheever’s “The Swimmer,” (231) is an extraordinary story in which a man decides to reach his home by swimming across a series of backyard pools is structured essentially through a list of pools and backyards. Exercise: Begin a list story. Remember, trouble is more interesting. Remember also that you often must be knowledgeable (“The Things they Carried”) or do research (“Wickedness”) to be able to come up with enough interesting details. “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” Connie’s vanity and rebellion is exploited by a misfit character, Arnold Friend. However loathsome this predator is, his appearance in the second part of the story, precipitates a long scene in which Connie must make an important (life or death) decision. Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” is another story involving a misfit, in this case, an escaped criminal, who terrorizes a family in the final scene. There is a long scene between the grandmother and the criminal which ends in him shooting her - but not before she is forced to examine everything she held of importance (her religious values) in a new and most intense light. Exercise: Begin a misfit story. Find a character whose values might be suspect and put him/her to the test. Your misfit must be a worthy foe, not just a monster. (You can also continue to work on the previous

week’s prompt.) Recapitulation: Try one of the exercises listed above. If you are involved with last week’s project and want to continue with it, that’s fine, too. This new edition of WRITING FICTION includes many more writing prompts at the end of each chapter -- see page 77 for this chapter. Because writers come in all shapes and sizes (and so do readers), I don’t believe we can have too many ideas for getting started. If you feel overwhelmed and have difficulty deciding, please post me, and I’ll help. But remember, writing is always about making choices -- picking a prompt is only that, making a choice. Some stories work out and some get left behind. Good writers are the ones of us who have learned this simple truth. Week 1 Lecture Lecture 1: General Issues This course will have several components. The first and most fundamental part is your own creative work. I will provide an exercise or prompt (or sometimes a choice of prompts) each week. Because this is an intermediate class, many of you may have projects already in mind at the outset. However, I know from my own experience that it’s useful sometimes to get more than one plate spinning. Think of every project as a kind of plant, and plants can at times demand a bit of dormancy. At minimum, your weekly writing should be from two to four pages in length. I expect you to bring at least one, and possible two stories to a stage, if not of completion, of second draft or beyond with beginning, middle, and end in place. You may also have (and I hope you will) several beginnings which have come from the prompts that you can attend to later on. It’s not easy to predict what a story will want to do during any nine week period. That’s why I like the notion of more than

one project at a given time. I can tell you that my own stories sometimes take years to grow and develop from their beginnings. The second component of the course is reading. The required text for this course is Janet Burroway’s Writing Fiction (seventh edition). I’ll give you a reading assignment each week, usually a chapter. The Burroway text includes an excellent anthology of short fiction, and we’ll also be reading from Alice Munro’s Selected Stories. I’ll often suggest additional reading for you. The suggested reading is just that - suggested, optional, something to get around to when you have the time. I hope that each of you will be suggesting reading for me and for the rest of the class as well. The third component of this course is the workshop. This will be conducted through the discussion forum. We’ll use the discussion forum for other purposes but its principal use will be the workshop. Since you have all had experience with online workshops before, I won’t go into great detail about what the concept of a workshop is. Workshops online, much like workshops on the ground, will always have individual character. In my workshops, I expect the readers to be honest, considerate, and supportive. It’s wonderful for us as writers to have a body of thoughtful readers to look at our work with fresh eyes. And in the forum, we can ask questions which will bring further insights from the group. One of the reasons why I enjoy teaching online is the wonderful variety of the readers. You don’t have to be a trained critic to participate in a workshop. You only have to be a reader, a person who loves to read and who is willing to share his or her experience with others. Now here’s a tune you are going to hear from me repeatedly. Readers and writers have a different approach to story. (I’m going to use “story” in the broadest sense - I want it to mean anything from a passage of narrative, to a complete short story, to a novel chapter, to an entire novel, and anything in between.) Readers experience what John Gardner

called “the vivid fictional dream.” We are hard-wired, I think, to experience narrative in this way. We just throw ourselves into the story and identify with the characters and their joys and difficulties and we don’t give a damn how the story teller did the job. We’re there; we’re reading; we’re in the story, experiencing. Writers, on the other hand, have to think about how to get the job done. Writers have to think about when and where to use dialogue and about whether to use fully realized scenes or summarized action, etc. - there are countless choices writers make that readers shouldn’t (and don’t want to) notice. In the workshop process, we move back and forth from the reader state to the writer state. We experience the story as readers and then we put on our writers’ hats and figure out how it did its magic. One of the most interesting things to come out of the workshop for the writer is to learn what the rest of us experienced as readers. Was it all on the page? Sometimes we imagine things so vividly that we can’t make the distinction between what we got down on the page and what’s still in our minds. Did the readers get it? In just the way that people “get” a joke. Here’s the good news and the bad news, writers. Some folks are going to “get” your writing and some aren’t. Henry James is a pretty good writer, but some folks just don’t get his stuff. Some don’t like Faulkner. When an old and dear friend of mine told me he just didn’t like Annie Proulx, I had an odd insight. First it was, “How could this really smart guy not like The Shipping News? He must be nuts.” Then my second thought was, “If smart people like R. can have such different tastes, I’ll bet there are readers out there (there must be - like life on other planets) who will read and enjoy my own work.” I have found this to be an odd but reassuring truth - all those different tastes out there. But the workshop will help you to see how many folks “get” your work. If hardly anybody gets it, you may need to rearrange the furniture. While we’re not all together in the same room with sweaty palms and

butterflies, what we’re doing is really more like real life for the writer. We’re giving each other the experience of critical readers - like editors, like other writers, like the readers we all hope to reach some day. Even if you’ve done this before, I’m providing you with the basic procedure for participating in the workshop. Each week you’ll post your writing assignment in the following manner: -Go to the Discussion Board -Find the Discussion Forum with your name; click on it. -Click the tab that says “New Thread.” -In the “Subject” line, type: “Week 1 Writing Assignment” -In the “Message” box, type or paste your writing assignment. -You will follow this procedure and create a New Thread for each week’s writing assignment. Beginning with the second week, I’ll give you instructions for commenting on other students’ writing assignments. What We Do 1. We write - creative work – I’m going to provide ideas for starting new work and Burroway is full of them at the end of every chapter. Stories take their own shapes. You can’t push a string, lead a horse to water, make a story or a scene exactly four pages, or five inches, or six years long. We write, that’s the main thing. 2. We read - Burroway and Alice Munro and the newspaper and stuff we tell each other about. We think about it and it helps - what? That stuff up there with the number one in front of it - our writing. 3. We participate in the workshop forums. We serve as readers for each other. We encourage, question, suggest. We develop our critical skills. We get better at that stuff up there with the number one in front of it - our writing.

Burroway Reading Whatever Works: The Writing Process 1 - 24 Some teachers of creative writing have a very organized approach. You are going to see one such organized approach in Janet Burroway’s text. I think the division of writing into its elements is essential for us to understand fiction analytically. I’m not convinced that the writing process itself is very analytical, however. My feeling is that we know much more about the way stories work than we realize. I like to use the written story as a kind of pattern or model. You’ll see that I tend to use existing stories as representatives of story types and that my idea of a writing assignment is a kind of total immersion undertaking. “Here, write one like this.” If this doesn’t work for you, I’ll have plenty of other suggestions for ways to get started. (Notice Burroway’s list of story types beginning on page 11.) In a recent AWP Writers Chronicle, Teresa Jones said “virtuosity of language, the workmanlike fitting together of physical act and attitude, consistency of voice, able manipulation of point of view, appropriate dialogue, compression of time and timely compression, vivid rendering of scene, knowing when to show and when to tell and how, growing motifs, preserving unity - all of this is necessary to the health of a short story.” I would say that I concur absolutely, but don’t worry about all those categories until you get to the third draft or so. The writing process is a séance with your instincts and your unconscious. We’ll talk about these issues of craft as we go along and you'll think about them when you revise. Free Writing Free writing and clustering are ways to generate story ideas. I sometimes employ clustering to try to solve problems that come up in longer works - clustering as trouble shooting. It’s a more organic way to organize – to

cluster, choose a word that represents your central subject (or problem) – then free associate and jot down associated words connected with lines

or arrows when you sense a gravational relationship – each new word will have its own associations. Free writing suits my temperament best for finding new story ideas. See Burroway 4. Here’s (my version) of a free writing exercise from the poet Tom Lux. Every day for a week write two pages (or for twenty minutes, thirty minutes) - you decide what the contract is going to be. During that writing time you must not stop writing. (This works best with a word processor but you can do it any old way.) Don’t even look at what you’re writing. Grammar and spelling don’t matter. Just keep writing. When you’re finished, put the pages away. Don’t look at them. After a week, or after you have as many pages as you have agreed with yourself to try, go through the material. 98% of it will be garbage, complaints about having to write, about not being able to stop and the like, but some of it will be promising. I’ve had good luck with free writing for poems. Try it sometime. (This isn’t an official assignment.) When I’m really stuck, I start a new journal. (I tend to forget about the

journal when I’m deeply involved in a writing project.) Annie Lamott on writing Annie Lamott seems to give you permission to shut off your internal editor. (I can’t tell you how important this is. You’ve got to get words on the page before you can have anything to edit.) If you haven’t read Bird by Bird, put it near the top of your list. It’s a wise and funny book. I had the privilege to teach a workshop at The Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference with Annie Lamott and I’ve never had so much fun. The fifth edition of Writing Fiction included a piece by Annie Dillard which described the writing process as a more laborious and organized undertaking. While I won’t argue against the notion that writing can

sometimes be the hardest of hard work, I think the first draft should be as much a voyage of discovery as possible. (I take no map, no compass, but if I see an interesting character by the side of the road, I absolutely will stop to ask directions – there is nothing more valuable to the fiction writer than conversations with strangers.) Joan Didion, “Why I Write” For this one I’ll just direct you to the first of Burroway’s writing prompts on page 23. (Prompts 2 and 3 are also very popular with students.) Alice Munro, “Dimensions” Alice Munro’s stories are long - translated into a double-spaced ms. in 12 point Times New Roman font, this one would be over 45 pages. I’ve given some suggestions on how to use it as a prompt in Assignments. If you wish and so request, I can supply you with much more extensive notes on it. Week Two Lecture Showing and Telling 25 – 79 This may be one of the most vital and useful distinctions for the beginning writer to understand. All writing consists of showing and telling. We should take as our working rule that showing is more effective than telling. Read the examples in this chapter. You’ll see that showing usually results in a scene. Scenes contain setting, action, dialogue and many significant details. If you are a little kid and you really want that candy bar in the check out lane (really, really want it) - what do you do? You Make A Scene. You fall down on the floor and scream and pound your fists and roll around. Everybody notices. When you want everybody to notice in a piece of fiction, make a scene.

One of those rules (which I have told you to be very suspicious of) that we hear often in creative writing workshops is “show, don’t tell.” This showing/telling thing may be a function of style (and even of literary fashion). In a typical 19th century novel an important scene might take a half page with a few lines of dialogue. Then the author would likely go on for another two pages telling the readers how each person in the scene felt. We rarely find this kind of detailed instruction to the reader (telling) in contemporary fiction. Modern readers like to decide what is going on themselves. Contemporary writers are careful about how much they tell. Excessive telling may be “old fashioned.” Let me point out that sometimes we want to write in an old fashioned style - we all need to develop an understanding (I almost said mastery) of the art of blending showing and telling. Showing is strongest, but telling has its place, too. There is a rhythm of showing and telling in every story. You’ll begin to notice this in your own work. Showing and telling and the use of significant detail have an important effect on pacing. There are different kinds of rhythms in fiction. There is the rhythm of the sentences themselves. They may be short, declarative and staccato. They may be long, sinuous, and illusive, prolonging their meaning with complex, digressive interjections. Sentences may become paragraphs; paragraphs can become pages. Lists can take over entire stories. The next kind of rhythm we begin to notice in fiction is structural. Here, I’m not so much talking about conflict, crisis and resolution or connection/disconnection (these are structural terms that have to do with the dynamics, the engine of the story). I’m talking about a more obvious structure (the kind I mentioned when I was talking about our critiques) scene, exposition, partial scene, summarized action, flashback, etc. The movement from scene (dramatized action) to exposition (a narrator telling us stuff), in other words, the movement from showing to telling and back again, creates another kind of rhythm in the story. The reader

may not be consciously aware of it, but it is working to create an effect. These moments of telling, of reflection after something dramatic has happened in a scene can be contemplative, rhapsodic, even poetic. (Yes, the language in fiction should be just as carefully wrought as the language in poetry.) These moments of poetic telling, or rhapsodic interpretation I like to call “flights.” All fiction writers like to take flights. It’s the lyric impulse taking over. When narrative (story/scene) is chugging along, we're moving forward, moving in time. When these flights happen, time slows down. The lyric impulse (think of a wonderful poem like Elizabeth Bishop’s “The Fish” - the lyric impulse tends to stop time. ...Here and there his brown skin hung in strips like ancient wallpaper, and its pattern of darker brown was like wallpaper: shapes like full-blown roses stained and lost through age. He was speckled with barnacles, fine rosettes of lime, and infested with tiny white sea-lice, and underneath two or three rages of green weed hung down. While his gills were breathing in the terrible oxygen --the frightening gills, fresh and crisp with blood, that can cut so badly-- I thought of the coarse white flesh packed in like feathers, the big bones and the little bones, the dramatic reds and blacks of his shiny entrails,

and the pink swim-bladder like a big peony. I looked into his eyes which were far larger than mine but shallower, and yellowed, the irises backed and packed with tarnished tinfoil seen through the lenses of old scratched isinglass... (Find this poem and others like it in Elizabeth Bishop's The Complete Poems -- it’s also widely anthologized.) In stories, you can have an alternation: narrative/lyric/narrative/lyric. Narrative will have a subtle internal rhythm of movement; lyric will pull back -- something like the way we rock a car back and forth that’s stuck in the mud. Detail and Pacing This week we’re reading three stories that thrive on the use of detail, especially O’Brien’s “The Things They Carried.” But all stories depend upon detail. When you look at the specific details in Elizabeth Bishop’s poem, you see that they are mostly visual, but they involve the other senses as well. The harder she looks at the fish, the less we become aware of the passing of time. I’m going to post the entire poem for you along with a contrasting poem which depends much more on narrative. Do read more of Elizabeth Bishop for her wonderful ability to bring time to a halt. Another special favorite of mine is “In the Waiting Room.” You’ll have to find this one on your own. You’ll notice that when you’re telling a story and there is a lot of action that the narrative resists a lot of detail. Here’s a bad example of a good idea: A woman is walking down a dark street at night. She hears steps behind her. She begins to walk faster, then to run. The steps pursue.

Now she’s climbing a chain link fence. . . As all this action mounts, you probably aren’t going to describe the patterns of rust stain on the fence. Details like this would slow down the pacing of the story. On the other hand, a great deal of detail might make the chase seem as if it has been put into slow motion. What kind of effect would that have? What I’m saying is that (usually) details have the effect of slowing the pacing of narrative. Filtering Read this section and think about it. I think it is truly complex and that it is related to issues of attributing dialogue and pacing as well as showing and telling. The pacing of dialogue is another issue which I’ll talk about later in the semester I agree with Janet Burroway that it is more vivid to simply show the reader what a character sees. If it doesn’t create confusion in the story, why not just show it? However, like telling, filtering isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Sometimes it’s important for us to see an event through the eyes of another character. I’ll talk more about this issue as it comes up in our writing and reading. Active and Passive The use of the passive form is often an attempt to avoid responsibility. It even has moral implications. Charlie Baxter points out this statement of the Nixon administration after Watergate: “Mistakes were made.” The mistake-makers seem to have been wished out of existence. There are, of course, rare instances when the passive form may be the best choice, but it is best avoided. Stories Dan Chaon “Big Me” Tim O’Brien “The Things They Carried” Joyce Carol Oates “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?”

For your questions and comments on this and on the reading, please go to the Discussion Board, then click onto Week 2 and you will find a discussion thread where you can click reply and post your questions and comments.