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Teaching ideas based on New York Times content.
Overview | What are the essential elements of a story? How can writing flash fiction help us become better writers? In this lesson, students will consider the nature of stories and learn to write more concisely by reading and writing flash fiction.
Materials | Computers with Internet access, student journals, copies of the article “Going Long. Going Short.”
Warm-Up | Before students enter, project or write the following famous short short story, attributed to Ernest Hemingway:
For sale: baby shoes, never worn.
When students enter, ask them to copy the story and consider whether or not they think it is a story. Once students have had time to record their ideas, come together as a class to discuss the following:
Related | In this Opinionator article,” Grant Faulkner, executive director of National Novel Writing Month, muses on what writers can achieve when they “go short”:
Flash fiction, which is defined as being a story under 1,000 words, goes by the names of “short shorts,” “miniatures,” “sudden fiction” and “postcard fiction,” among many others. Flash communicates via caesuras and crevices. There is no asking more, no premise of comprehensiveness, because flash fiction is a form that privileges excision over agglomeration, adhering more than any other narrative form to Hemingway’s famous iceberg dictum: only show the top 10 percent of your story, and leave the other 90 percent below water to be conjured.
This form speaks to the singularity of stray moments by calling attention to the spectral blank spaces around them; it can perfectly capture the disconnections that existentially define us, whether it’s the gulf between a loved one, the natural world or God.
Questions | For discussion and reading comprehension:
Activity | Here are two activities for working with flash fiction before students are invited to compose their own pieces.
Close Reading Flash Fiction: Choose several works of flash fiction to read and discuss. Below, we have provided four, but you can choose from many others via these links.
In the summer of 2012, novelist Curtis Sittenfeld wrote a flash fiction series for the Times Magazine. Learn more about how she composed them in her post for the 6th Floor blog, “The Story Behind My Very, Very Short Stories.” Here are two she discusses:
In 1987, when Jenny Ficker and I were in sixth grade, our goals were to have a double wedding at which we married the McMasterson twins, to trick my sister into drinking a glass of pee and to sneak in the middle of the night to Boland Square and put a bra on the Grecian-woman statue on top of the fountain. Weirdly enough, I did marry Andy McMasterson, but I lost touch with Jenny years ago; whenever I drive by the Boland Square statue, the bronze bosom still hangs there for everyone to see.
On my 21st birthday, my father revealed two facts about himself: that he was colorblind and that before I was born, he’d served four years for armed robbery. I suspect the colorblind disclosure was a test of my maturity, and if I’m right, I must have barely passed. After he told me, I became petulant and said, “I just think it’s really weird you hid that for my whole life.”
If you’d like to have students read even shorter works, here are two stories highlighted in a New Yorker review of “Hint Fiction: An Anthology of Stories in 25 Words or Fewer”:
“Jermaine’s Postscript to His Seventh-Grade Poem Assignment,” by Christoffer Molnar.
“Ms. Tyler, the girl part was about Shantell. Please don’t tell anyone.”
“Houston, We Have a Problem,” by J. Matthew Zoss.
I’m sorry, but there’s not enough air in here for everyone. I’ll tell them you were a hero.
Invite students to read one story at a time on their own, annotating as they go. (Or, recording their thoughts via a double-entry graphic organizer.)
Then, have students meet in pairs or small groups to further the discussion. Some of the questions they might discuss:
When students are finished, ask groups to share observations about the stories and follow up with these questions for the whole class:
Classics in a Flash: Tell students that they are going to try their hand at condensing a classroom text into very few words. (Note: Set the word count at whatever limit you like, but it is generally true that the fewer the words, the harder the task.)
Begin by showing students some examples of classroom literary classics summed up in six words like:
The times were good. Also bad. “ A Tale of Two Cities”
Kids sneak around, get married, die. “ Romeo and Juliet”
Desperate, noble poor get shafted. Repeatedly. ”The Grapes of Wrath”
Ask that small groups begin by considering what is essential to the text under construction, thinking about character, setting, theme, and plot. What is the bare minimum a text needs to reveal its story?
Once students have crafted their mini-masterpieces, discuss the following:
Going Further | Now it’s your turn. Write a piece of original flash fiction, 1,000 words or less, perhaps for submission to the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards for flash fiction.
Scholastic Art & Writing Awards homepage" width="480" height="320" />
How to begin such a challenge? Take a look at the essentials of microfiction and consider these tips from The Guardian newspaper.
Here are some sources for flash-fiction inspiration:
Share stories with a classroom festival, then workshop your stories to fine tune them for the larger world.
Reading
2. Determine central ideas or themes of a text and analyze their development; summarize the key supporting details and ideas.
10. Read and comprehend complex literary and informational texts independently and proficiently.
Writing
3. Write narratives to develop real or imagined experiences or events using effective technique, well-chosen details and well-structured event sequences.
4. Produce clear and coherent writing in which the development, organization and style are appropriate to task, purpose and audience.
5. Develop and strengthen writing as needed by planning, revising, editing, rewriting or trying a new approach.
Speaking and Listening:
1. Prepare for and participate effectively in a range of conversations and collaborations with diverse partners, building on others’ ideas and expressing their own clearly and persuasively.
2. Integrate and evaluate information presented in diverse media and formats, including visually, quantitatively and orally.
Language:
1. Demonstrate command of the conventions of standard English grammar and usage when writing or speaking.
3. Apply knowledge of language to understand how language functions in different contexts, to make effective choices for meaning or style, and to comprehend more fully when reading or listening.
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Mary Clark October 3, 2013 · 4:06 pmI just shared this with the English Language Arts teachers at my middle school. This lesson exemplifies how engaging Common Core lessons can be! More of this, and soon school districts might stop buying all the dry and boring “Common Core-aligned” nonsense I’ve been seeing. Thank you!
I don’t understand the question, “Why is it so particularly interesting that William Faulkner wrote a piece about flash fiction?” Is this a typo and did you mean Grant Faulkner?
Hi Shannon–I think the original question may have gotten a bit garbled in translation as it went through copy-edit, but thank you for calling it to our attention. I’m removing it since regardless of which Faulkner was meant, I’m not sure it makes enough sense to keep. I’ve replaced it with another. –Katherine
