Week 7: Getting Ready for Fiction

We're leaving poetry behind and starting short fiction this week. We've got some very good stories on the horizon. All of the skills that we've learned for analysing poetry are useful to us here too. Even the work we've done on form is useful; although stories have a different form from poems (a study of the scansion or the rhyme scheme will rarely be fruitful) they are always written in a deliberate form, and that is something we can and will talk about.

For Friday, please read pages 62-67 in our text book, and Chinua Achebe's story “Dead Men's Path”, on pages 269-271.

Journal Activity

I want to help you shift your thinking from poetry to fiction by asking you to write some fiction.  Your journal activity for this week is to write that most scorned of all forms of fiction: fan fiction.

Have you ever read or watched a story and wished it wouldn't end? Or wished it had ended differently? Fan fiction is a way some fans of literature, comic books, movies, tv shows, and even real life have expressed this desire. Writing your own piece of fan fiction will likely encourage you to think about your chosen story in a new way, and to understand a little bit more about the process that went into writing the original.

Any story you choose is fair game, from classical literature to your favourite soap opera, but please note what the original story is and who wrote it. Your piece of fan fiction need not be a long continuation of the original--4 or 5 paragraphs should do--but feel free to make it as long as you like, or as long as you need to to do justice to your story.

If you'd like to see some examples, check out http://www.FanFiction.net/ where you'll find some good and some not-so-good attempts. Let the good ones inspire you and the not-so-good ones encourage you that there's no reason you can't do this too.

One more note about fan fiction: it is often used as wish fulfillment, and sometimes as erotic wish fulfillment. That's not the kind of thing I'm hoping for here.

Looking Ahead to Next Week

For next week going more in depth in our readings of fiction.  Please come to class on Monday having read Timothy Findley's "Stones" as well as pages 68-91 of our text book.