Short Story Project 2024: Week 2

Stories about identity

How did you do in Week 1? Did you write a draft?

I played around a bit with what story to respond to. I love “The Enormous Radio” but couldn’t quite figure out an angle. I wanted to write something like “Stone Animals” because I love stories that center on houses, but I couldn’t figure that out either. In the end I wrote a draft in response to “Speaker” (the story where a human and hyena can hear each other’s thoughts). The story I wrote wasn’t great, but it also wasn’t bad.

The really important thing for me was that I wrote an entire draft. Here’s why:

I’ve been working on a new picture book. We’ll call it, I don’t know, Teakettle. I like Teakettle. I’m into the story. But every time I work on it, I think, “oh, this sounds too much like an allegory for something, and I can’t figure out how to make it just a story.” I was putting way too much pressure on it.

The story I wrote for The Short Story Project, which I’ll call Duckpants, was silly and a little simple. It could probably also be an allegory for something, but I didn’t worry about that. I just wrote it. There was no pressure. I was just goofing around (which, I’ll remind you, is the whole point of The Short Story Project).

I realized I’d been getting in my own way with Teakettle and I’d never be able to fix the potentially overwrought symbolism if I didn’t write the story in the first place. So I sat down and finished it, with an air of “just play around and see what happens.” It went in a fairly weird direction once I let it loose, and that’s fine. Now my job is to see what I can do with it in revision.

On to Week 2!

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Who are you? This is such a fundamental element of stories (and life). Characters figuring out their identities end up helping readers on their own journeys of self. 

When you are a little kid, you are often told how to be, and who you are. Sometimes what you are told feels correct, and perhaps other times it does not. Reading books where characters struggle with identity can show young readers that they don’t have to be exactly how other people tell them to be. We Are Definitely Human, Your Name is a Song, Frederick, I Talk Like a River, Neville, and Julián is a Mermaid are just a few picture books about identity. There are hundreds. 

I find I am always riveted when there is a story where a character decides not to be who they were told to be. I love a story where a character realizes it’s possible to go in a different direction than they’ve been shown. It’s so relatable to watch their missteps and triumphs as they venture out in new terrain, and how extremely consequential it is, when they are not only walking down a path, but walking that path as a new person. 

We have so many ways to write about identity, thanks to the structure of picture books. It can be about a massive realization (“I’m a blue crayon!”) or it can be something smaller, the first time a character says no thank you to the food they don’t like, or chooses sparkly socks. 

One of my favorite books growing up was Dooly and the Snortsnoot by Jack Kent, which is about a giant who is not giant-sized. As an adult, I went on a bit of a Jack Kent collecting spree, and one of the ones I got is the 1968 book Just Only John. In it, a little boy named John “had been a little boy named John for over four years and he was getting tired of it.”

So he goes to the shop and buys a penny magic spell, so he can turn into something else. When he gets home, his mom says, “Where has my little lamb been?”

Every time someone tells him who he is or calls him something (a bunny, a pig, a little man) he turns into that thing, until he breaks down. It’s troubling to have the outside world so drastically shape your identity! In the end his parents tell him the trick is for him to remind himself who he is, and he remembers he is “just only John” and that breaks the spell.