First, let me admit I have no idea what I’m doing, but just three days before my first class meeting of English 398: Fiction Writing (junior level) I seized upon the idea of incorporating a flash novella writing project: 15 installments/15 weeks. Mind you, my syllabus for the 398 I taught in the Fall was a lovely thing, low stress and high creativity, and several students wrote me afterward to say how much they enjoyed the class. So I had no good reason to change the syllabus. That said, I couldn’t shake the notion of a flash novella assignment.
I did assume that the assignment, layered in with the usuals–two other submissions, exercises, readings, peer preview, etc–would drive some of the bodies out of my overloaded section, but I was wrong. To my delight and terror, more than half of the students in my class are fresh from Poetry Workshop. The Flash Novella doesn’t faze them. In fact, they seem a lot more confident about it than I am.
Several of my writer friends are intrigued by the idea as well, and I thought I would post the basics here–for there are only basics at the moment. I’m making this thing up as I go along.
Week One: prompt writing, Reading The Collectors, by Matt Bell, discuss and practice options for sustaining an interesting narrative beyond/beside conventional “plot”
Weeks 2-14 Post flash drafts * (small group peer reviews as we progress)
Week 15 select, arrange, edit, prepare as formal manuscript (The formal ms part is just a way to focus their energies–the thing itself is not so important, and I’m fully aware that years from now my students will say, “I remember Prof Scott. She taught us how to format stuff.” That’s fine with me, sometimes teaching is about distraction. What’s meaningful to me is that by May they will have done a thing–a 15 part thing.)
*For the students who need more guided help, I’ll ask them to at least settle on a powerful element as subject matter (situation, character, place), and to write from its various pasts, presents, futures from multiple points of view. For further inspiration, I have developed two sets of word lists. These are not the sort of bomb sets that Meg Pokrass develops (and for which we’re all thankful)–I purposely chose words and phrases that I thought would be versatile for the long run. Set one comes from flipping through The Lover and Jane Eyre. Set two comes from flipping through Alice in Wonderland and American Gymnopedies. The words are mostly in the order that they appear in the texts, and I only thought to combine them later–also in rough order.
set one
1 the same silence, wander, resist, not a hint
2 we ate garbage, streak of light, broken hum
3 crossing the river, a noxious thing, mad cat
4 space existed in me, remove his doubt
5 during this journey, a wicked heart
6 he says he’s lonely
7 suddenly it’s deliberate, mercy, liberty
8 beneath the man’s hat, dropped asleep, music
9 sober as a widow, burns
10 don’t love them anymore, creeping under tables
11 who took the photo, only the spark
12 Leave me alone, iron gates
13 throughout our affair, a message
14 his courage in the forest, wild beast
15 in the black car, purity, doom
set two
1 down and down, slick, turquoise
2 cool fountains, throwing papers
3 large letters, row houses, Borealis
4 poison, jazz from the 1920s
5 question, shiver, lily
6 that kind of thing never happened, blue wings, yellow guitar
7 an angry voice, father’s suede fedora, rusted drum
8 when she heard her voice so close, candle, little worm
9 taken into custody, black leather
10 creatures got so close, verandas, tulips everywhere
11 the judge, sugary sand, wrinkled feet
12 the crowd below, harmless swallow
13 a history of the accident, moon, pink light
14 like an honest man, dreaming fake, caved
15 a mile high, worship, jump
Wish Tank 