Project Brief 1: “Story Time” – Reflection
The writing of my short story, “Numbers” was an experience in which I found planning to be extremely difficult. As a novel writer and reader, I found containing my story so that the reader would feel satisfied within it’s telling a trying affair.
In it’s creation I focused on the “now” of the story – the reader would have no back story for the character or plot, and I had to remember this. As Brander Matthews stated in “The philosophy of the short story“, my short story had to be “…complete and self contained” (Matthews, 1901). This was a point I kept note of in my original planning – what was a story I could tell that required no prior knowledge?
When it came to writing my actual piece, I took advice from “The Lamb and the Slaughter” (Roald Dahl), keeping both my character description, dialogue and world building short and sharp. On more than one occasion I had to inspect a sentence and ask myself; does this push the plot forward? Can the reader survive without this piece of information?
Matthews states that a short story “…must be concise and compression is essential” (Matthews, 1901). This was ultimately my biggest struggle, as I find my enjoyment of fiction in the details of the plot and backstories. Though I took much inspiration from Matthews and Dahl, I also included my own tactics, employing the notion that a reader should not be given all information, and that to fully grasp a story, they must connect the dots.
R E F E R E N C E S
- Brander Matthews, The Philosophy of the Short-story, 1901, New York: Longmans, Green, and Co.
- Roald Dahl, ‘Lamb to the Slaughter’ (originally published in Harper’s Magazine, September 1953), http://www.classicshorts.com/stories/lamb.html
rebeccaskilton • March 13, 2016
Steven Cheng March 15, 2016 - 1:19 pm
Hey Rebecca, firstly I’d like to say I thoroughly enjoyed your story and I feel that you’ve reflected greatly on Matthews’ ‘The Philosophy of the Short-story’ but there are a few things that I feel you could improve on.
The main thing I would work on are some of your phrases and expressions – I feel that you could improve upon them by either simply rewording them or cutting them down shorter and more precisely. ‘I could feel the small ‘o’ my mouth had fallen to’ to me sounds more comical than probably intended and let’s face it, an ‘o’ mouth can be expressed in many different ways. I’d probably change it to something more simple yet stronger, ‘I found my mouth wide open’ or something like that. It’s shorter and paints a more concrete picture in my head as a reader.
Being a short story as well I’d expect it to be obviously short but also as descriptive as it can be to keep me engaged – and with the phrasing again, ‘her numbers falling with every second’ to me feels kind of bland whereas to add an even stronger impact I’d replace ‘falling’ with something more descriptive like ‘withering’ because ultimately this story is about death and in using a word like ‘withering’ it can reflect even greatly the fragility of life.
Overall however I thought you did a solid job in creating this story as I was thoroughly engaged the whole way.