Category: Reading Like a Writer

Posted on

Read/Write Challenge – Day 9

Welcome to week 2 of our Read/Write Challenge guys, and our next two short stories. Today we’re going to look at “Girl,” by Jamaica Kincaid. This very short story is wonderful to read but even better to listen to. You can hear it at the New Yorker’s Fiction podcast, read by Edwidge Danticat. The Fiction podcast enlists contemporary authors to read and comment on short stories by their favorite authors, chosen from the magazine’s archives. I highly recommend it, as well as the New Yorker’s Author’s Voice podcast, which showcases authors reading their own short fiction, from current issues of the magazine.

One Thing I Noticed: If Ursula Le Guin’s story “Walking Away from Omelas” defies genre, then Kincaid’s story “Girl” defies form. In it, a mother gives instructions to her daughter, both mundane (how to do laundry, how to make pumpkin fritters) and revealing (how to negotiate a man’s world). The tone varies from motherly and thoughtful, to aggrieved and accusatory. The story is not only very short, it is a single sentence. Kincaid employs repetition in a way that makes the piece incantatory, that begs you read it aloud. In this way, it blurs the boundary between fiction and prose poetry. The piece also does not have a traditional linear narrative. It offers instead a glimpse, much like a piece of flash fiction and is structured as a list story.

One Idea: Write a story in which the narrator gives the reader “the rules for surviving in this place.” Maybe the “place” is a physical location (the New York subway), maybe it is an occupation (tenured university professor), a role (motherhood), a relationship (marriage). Try to reveal something about the narrator and the person he or she is speaking to through the narrator’s elucidation of “the rules.”

See you tomorrow for another story!

Posted on

Read/Write Challenge – Day 3

Hi readers, on Day 3 of our Read/Write Challenge we take a look at “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas,” by Ursula Le Guin. There is so much going on here! I had a hard time choosing just one feature to discuss.

One Thing (Okay, Three Things) I Noticed: The story defies genre. It describes Omelas, a beautiful town on a sparkling bay, surrounded by majestic mountains, and inhabited by a peaceful people with rich traditions and a seemingly perfect life. It is speculative fiction, in a “what if,” sense, but not true sci-fi or fantasy. It has elements of magical realism and fairy tales, but those don’t seem quite right either. Omelas is a place without government, war, political struggle, or poverty. But there is just one thing. The town has a dirty little secret that makes all of that possible. It is revealed to us–though we know it already–that privilege like this is built on a foundation of injustice.

The story also demonstrates the power of naming things. This is not “once upon a time there was a town.” It has a proper name, Omelas (fun fact, Le Guin came up with the name while looking at a sign for Salem, Oregon, in her rear-view mirror). So do the Green Fields and the Eighteen Peaks. Names make a place come to life. They evoke many things. Most of all, they tell us what features of this place the inhabitants find important.

Finally, this is a great example of metafiction, “a form of literature that emphasizes its own constructedness in a way that continually reminds the reader to be aware that they are reading or viewing a fictional world.” Le Guin wants to paint a picture of a certain kind of place. She gives her readers some options here. Maybe the town is like this. Or maybe it is like this. Maybe the people do this, or maybe they do this, or this, instead. She invites us to incorporate whichever of these details do the trick for us as readers. By doing this, she reminds us that the place is not real-real. It can’t be, because she hasn’t told us its horrible truth. Le Guin then addresses us directly, asking if that terrible piece of information doesn’t make the place more credible in our minds. And it does. Le Guin achieves something powerful here. We are no longer innocent bystanders. In a way, we have helped her construct this world, from our own experiences. We are complicit.

One Idea: Write a story in which you describe a place, person, or event in different ways, addressing the reader directly and leaving it to him or her to decide which details ring true, which best serve the story.

I hope you enjoyed our first two weekend stories! See you tomorrow for more weekday writing!

Posted on

Read/Write Challenge – Day 2

Okay readers, time for the first short story on our list, “Ghosts,” by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. As promised, here is one thing I noticed about Adichie’s writing and one idea the story gave me for my own writing. 

One Thing I Noticed: The story is written from the first-person singular point of view. The narrator is a retired professor who runs into an old acquaintance who he thought died years ago. The two have a somewhat tentative conversation, and the narrator realizes how much their paths have diverged. Rather than tell us about the main character through third-person exposition, Adichie gives us his background story in bits and pieces, through the conversation and through the memories that the conversation sparks in the narrator’s mind.

First-person is a good point of view to use when blurring the line between what is real (here, what happened to the narrator’s family after the war) and what may not be (the visions of his wife’s ghost visiting him) because everything that is happening to the narrator is real, at least to him.

One Idea: Write a story about a person who does not believe in ghosts and is visited by one.

* * *

Read more here about Biafra and the Nigerian Civil War.

And check out both Adichie’s novel Half of a Yellow Sun and Chinua Achebe’s (author of Things Fall Apart) 2013 memoir There Was a Country.

If you would like to read ahead this month, here is the whole reading list of short stories. Happy reading!