Short Story Project 2024: Week 1

Stories about technology and new things

Welcome to this year’s installment of The Short Story Project! I’m excited to get back into this with all of you. While I do read short stories all year long, and I often play around with writing a story in response to them, there is something extra-generative about amassing all of these stories and reading them with all of you. 

These are the themes for Short Story Project 2024, and the dates.

• October 8, Technology and New Things

• October 15, Identity

• October 22, Writing the Unforgettable and Surprising

• October 29, Poetry (plus some bonus assignments)

A recent (other) area in my life where I am embracing play is a new hobby: making soap. I love fancy soap. If there is soap that has layers and exfoliant and is made of goat milk and smells like citrus or pine trees or dirt (ironically), I will pay $8 for it. But I don’t want to pay $8 for soap. So I decided to learn how to make my own.

My kid Ramona and I made our first batch of soap, and it smells amazing and is the ugliest soap you’ve ever seen.

It was supposed to be layers/stripes. And not quite so gray.

I want you to approach the Short Story Project with this soap in mind. You are playing. You may make something that is ugly and soft, but smells nice. Who cares if your soap (story) is ugly? You’re just figuring out how to make soap (write stories).

I am not giving up on soap. Just like I know that soap can be better than my first batch, you have read an amazing picture book, and you know what that looks like. So let’s keep playing. Our first attempts might be ugly, but we’ll keep trying.

This is how I, personally, approach writing within this project:

1. I read the story uninterrupted. I either print it out (sometimes this is difficult, if the story is very long or formatted oddly) or read it online with focused-reading elements in place (I pull the tab out into its own browser and close all other tabs, or I turn on Freedom).

2. After I read the story, I free write. What parts did I like? What parts didn’t I like? What part stood out the most? These are all highly subjective. I’m not taking notes to write a detailed analysis. I’m noticing what my feelings are after reading it. Most of the time, I end up writing a picture book riffing on what I liked the most. But if I really didn’t like the story, that’s interesting too. If I hated it, why? What did I hate? Did it fill me with dread in a way that made me uncomfortable? Did I think it was poorly written, and if so, why? Although I like to get inspired by things I like rather than things I don’t, sometimes it does happen, that I don’t like a story, and that’s interesting.

3. I think about how I could take the elements that stood out to me and translate them to a picture book. If I liked the relationship between the characters, what would that relationship be like if the characters were children? If I liked the feeling I got while reading it, what kind of picture book would evoke the same feeling? If the structure is interesting, what would the picture book version of that be? If the story is about being able to communicate via thought with a hyena, what would that be in a picture book? (That short story is “Speaker,” see below.)

4. I reread the story, now looking specifically at how the elements I liked work in it. In this reading, since I know what’s going to happen, I look more closely at the language. Often I notice things I missed the first time. Now I take notes. I note beautiful passages, and think about why they’re beautiful. I note particularly well-done bits – where there is nuance and layer in the language, or the tension builds in a cool way, or any parts where I can see the weight of a particular sentence. Short stories, like picture books, put a lot of weight and importance on the language and words, because there isn’t much space.

5. I write the picture book, long hand, in my notebook. I do my best to get all the way through to the end. If I get stuck, I free write, right there in the notebook, about what I think should happen next, what I want to happen, what I want it to feel like. And then I keep going.

Technology 

This week’s stories all center around technology, something that has become unavoidable in our lives, and therefore is showing up in fiction, although from what I can tell is making more inroads in adult fiction than in picture books. I think technology in picture books has the potential for being preachy and didactic (like, let’s not write The Boy Who Couldn’t Stop Looking at His iPhone or whatever), but I think there are a lot of interesting directions when we start thinking about what role technology plays in our lives, and how we might translate our emotions about it into a story. That sort of thinking leads to much more interesting books, things like It Fell From the Sky by the Fan Brothers.