Brevity is the soul of wit

School is hard. I just got some very positive feedback (via e-mail) from my fiction writing professor, but I’ve been having some trouble with assignment two.

One of my problems is that I have trouble making stuff up. And her only criticism was that my “free writing” exercise was too logical. I can’t seem to non-sequitur. She should hear me talk. I think I should write down my dreams instead.

Another irritant is that I’m not sure I “get” short stories. I haven’t really tried to write them before because I don’t tend to read them. Even if I like an author, I usually skip over their collections of shorts.

We have two textbooks. One contains fairly modern short stories, which don’t seem to follow the “conflict, crisis, resolution” pattern. And I’ve decided to be formulaic here. I’ve been instructed to have the crisis create a significant change, and dammit, it’s going to be significant. No mere changes of mind here.

The other book, a paperback, is a collection of old-school short stories. Like, the classics. But the Washington Irving story about a woman with a ribbon around her neck who turns out to be a decapitated corpse, and the E.B. White one about the machine that drives a car…they read like jokes to me; the endings are punchlines, not resolutions.

However, I discovered a bunch of short stories posted (with typos) online. Among them, three Roald Dahl stories. I’m a fan. I read, uh, I guess only three (possibly four) Roald Dahl books as a kid (and saw the Danny DeVito movie of “Matilda”). Turns out, his short stories are good models. They’ve got twists, changes, conflict and most importantly, endings. And they’re very readable too.

I remember my brother reading a book of his short stories on a plane once. Remember that, A?