Snapshots
- Marilyn Singer, “The Magic Bow” “A short story is, in some ways, like a photograph – a captured moment of time…But while a photo may or may not suggest consequences, a short story always does. In the story's moment of time something important, something irrevocable has occurred.” - Marilyn Singer, “The Magic Bow”
“If the novel [is] a feature film, the short story [is] a snapshot…The short story, to me, is a blurred snapshot by an incompetent chronicler…The snapshot catches a moment in time, but the blur proposes an extension beyond the margins.” - Gregory Maguire, Author of Wicked
What Writing Is “It’s writing, damn it, not washing the car or putting on eyeliner. If you can take it seriously, we can do business. If you can’t or won’t, it’s time for you to close the book and do something else. Wash the car, maybe.” - Stephen King, On Writing Read and discuss “What Writing Is.”
A Story is like a House “A story is not like a road to follow … it's more like a house. You go inside and stay there for a while, wandering back and forth and settling where you like and discovering how the room and corridors relate to each other, how the world outside is altered by being viewed from these windows. And you, the visitor, the reader, are altered as well by being in this enclosed space, whether it is ample and easy or full of crooked turns, or sparsely or opulently furnished. You can go back again and again, and the house, the story, always contains more than you saw the last time. It also has a sturdy sense of itself of being built out of its own necessity, not just to shelter or beguile you.” -- Alice Munro
Free Write: Visualization and Narrative In a moment, you will see a series of photographs. Your job is to create a narrative based on one of the photographs. You may write from the perspective of an omniscient narrator, describing the scene and the story. You may write from the perspective from one of the characters, considering only their personal thoughts and feelings.
If these characters are having a dialogue, what are they saying?
What are the characters thinking?
Where was the snapshot taken?
How do these characters know one another?
What happened just before this snapshot was taken?
Think Pair Share Think Pair Share Consider why you created your narrative the way you did. Pair Get into groups based on which photograph you created a narrative for. Share Share your narratives with the group (either by reading aloud or by exchanging and reading silently). Are there similarities/differences? How can two people create two starkly different stories for the same narrative?
Homework Formalize your rewrite into a more polished narrative.