Class, Stories, and dialogue

As the class gets deeper into the fiction portion of the class, the assignments we get are geared to reading and writing a greater number of fiction short stories.  One of the books we are assigned to read is call “Wreckage of Reason”, a book I mentioned in a past blog.  During class, the class talked about the different stories we were assigned to read.  Divided into groups, the group I was a part of went into a discussion about a short story titled “The Blue Girl”.  The short story was about a group of teenagers and their mothers enjoying a day at the beach by a lake.  While they were at the beach, the family notices a girl drowning.  After saving the girl, the group takes the blue girl back to her house.  The author of the story does an amazing job at using descriptions, instead of just stating an emotion or sequences of events.  We talked about our theories on what the blue girl was and what the author was trying to convey to the reader.  At the end of the chapter, the author mentions about integrating fairy tales into her stories, so as a group we thought maybe the blue girl had something to do with fairies, which explains the “moon” pie the character likes so much.  One of my group members also talked about the ending of the story and how it didn’t have a clear resolution.  Overall the story was pretty confusing half the time, at least for me. 

For assignment about dialogues, I decided to remember a time when I was in the army.  In the army we had a lot of memorable talks and so choosing from the many number of dialogues was pretty easy.  I decided on writing about going to the NBC gas chamber because I thought of the dumbest things to get attention from my platoon mates.  I joked about some things others may consider offensive, but in basic training are considered appropriate.  Being in an all-male platoon also helped to develop colorful dialogue, that society would frown upon.  The short story I wrote was one of the milder dialogues I had with the other guys, so I thought it would be a good opportunity. 

Reading the book “Bird by Bird” kind of went along with my short story (dialogue) since the book talked about character and plot development.  Writing about a character is all about letting them do their own things and developing a personality.  Even though the short is about me, writing the story has to incorporate my “character’s” personality, in order to engage the reader.  The author of “Bird by Bird” goes into great detail in getting the reader to understand how to write a story.  Getting to know each character is important since they are the ones creating the plot.  For me, whose never written a book, this concept really help to allow me to focus on the important things, instead of how I normally though you write a short story. 

In class we also got to read fiction packets, which have several different types of short stories.  Though I initially didn’t understand the stories, as we talked about them during class, the discussions helped to open up my thinking process on fiction.  An interesting story was about an intern working at a mental health clinic.  The story starts off with the intern working with the patients, but as you read through the short story you begin to wonder whether the intern is a patient or will become one as his sanity goes down the drain.  The professor helped to show how the author had opposing concepts like scientific reasoning, but illogical train of thought.  For the assignment in the syllabus, we needed to finish off the 3^rd fiction packet and be ready to talk about the stories during class.  One of the short stories is called “The Falling Girl”, a girl at some fancy party that falls off the building, while people are asking “Where are you going? Why so fast? Who are you?” Reading the story, the author is probably wondering what people thinking about as they are falling off a skyscraper or even why they would in the first place.