"Writing Short Stories" from M&M, page 87 through 106:
"The peculiar problem of the short-story writer is how to make the action he describes reveal as much of the mystery of existence as possible. He has only a short space to do it in and he can't do it by statement. He has to do it by showing the concrete -- so that his problem is really how to make the concrete work double time for him." (98) What does "double time" mean here in this context? How do you make "double time" happen?
"When you can state the theme of a story, when you can separate it from the story itself, then you can be sure the story is not a very god one. The meaning of a story has to be embodied in it, has to be made concrete in it. A story is a way to say something that can't be said in any other way, and it takes every word in the story to say what that meaning is. YOU TELL A STORY BECAUSE A STATEMENT WOULD BE INADEQUATE." What does Flannery mean by "inadequate'? How does a story "embody" a statement?
Key concept: objective correlative. Write down an abstract emotion. Then construct a scene depicting that emotion without using the abstraction.
Draft of your final short story. Exchange with a partner. Analyze each other's stories based on the "key concepts."
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