A novice teacher facing burn-out must learn the most valuable lessons aren’t necessarily the ones we teach.
About the Author
Michele E. Reisinger lives with her family near Philadelphia and teaches English at a New Jersey High School. Her short fiction has been featured online at Light and Dark Magazine, Prometheus Dreaming, 34th Parallel, The Mighty Line, and Dreamers Creative Writing, as well as the 2019 anthology Stories That need to be told. She loves to read stories that make her think and wonder and learn. Lesson Plans was inspired by StoryADay’s list prompt and her conversation with a burned-out colleague who questioned the value of careers in education. Michele credits StoryADay and its awesome community of fellow writers with encouraging her along every step of her writing journey. You can find more of her writing at My Name Was Supposed To Be Elizabeth Ann (mereisinger.com).
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Today, in preparation for StoryADay May I’m sharing one of the peptalks I recorded for the Superstars Group last year.
(Superstars is a year-long mastermind group and community, but during the challenge they also get enhanced content, just like this. Find out more about Superstars here.
This lesson is particularly useful going into StoryADay May, as some days you’ll need to get your story written quickly. I don’t give you a topic, but I do give you a method for getting your story written. Combine it with the Short Story Framework!
The Prompt
Write A Story In 40 Minutes
Audio Only Version:
TIPS
Use the short story formula from yesterday to help you brainstorm.
Set a timer!
Spend 5 minutes, for brainstorming
Spend 5 minutes writing an opening.
Spend the next 20 minutes complicating your character’s lives. Look at every individual action your characters takes, and imagine what’s the next domino that would fall because of the action they took or the thing that they said.
At some point during this 20 minutes your writing will begin to flow and you’ll start to understand what this story wants to be.
At the end of that 20 minutes, begin to write your climax and resolution. (You may have to type ‘[transition to ending]’ and move along, if you’re running out of time and haven’t written everything you wanted to write.
You’ve been working on this story for 30 minutes! You have 10 minutes left.
Now think about how you want the story to end. Do you want it to be a happy ending or a sad ending? If the character achieves their goal, it might be a sad ending, but not necessarily. If the character desired something that was wrong for them, and doesn’t achieve it, that could be a happy ending!
Make sure there is a moment in the story where the character makes a big choice that exemplifies the change that they’re making through this story.
Spend 5 minutes wrapping up the story in a sentence or two, then spend the final 5 minutes thinking about your opening and ending lines. Do they feel like they belong to the same story? Can you tweak them now to hint at the theme?
Then take the rest of the day off!
If you would like to access content like this throughout the StoryADay challenge AND get 12 months of writing support, consider joining the StoryADay Superstars
Leave a comment to let us know what you wrote about today, and how it went!
We are one month away from StoryADay May, people! This is not a drill.
Actually, yes, it kind of is.
This is THE PERFECT TIME TO WARM UP your writing (take it from someone who didn’t, the very first year I ran this thing. I thought it would be smart to save all my ideas until May. Um, wrong!)
One of the easiest ways to get into the flow of writing is to minimize the amount of stuff you have to invent. So today I have two prompts for you, from the archives, which help you take that ‘write what you know’ thing and have a little more fun with it than if you were simply journaling.
The Prompt
Read through these two prompts from the archives and decide which one is most interesting to you.
Try to get to the end of the story today. Bonus points: write to the other prompt tomorrow!
Remember, if the story is getting away from you, to limit it only to the essential characters, settings and details. Just enough to paint a picture for yourself.
Also: don’t worry if this story is not ‘good’. It’s only a draft.
Write a story set in a particular time or place and use dialogue to show us where we are, rather than telling us.
Suggested scenario: two characters who know each other well, but one is keeping a secret.
Tips
Don’t simply have characters say “In olden days people didn’t even drive electric cars” to show that we’re in the future. Look at this example from “The Era” by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah.
We’re in HowItWas class
“Well,” Mr Harper said, twisting is ugly body towards us. “You should shut your mouth because you’re a youth-teen who doesn’t know sh*t about Sh*t and I’m a full-middler who’s been teaching this stuff for more years than I’m proud of.”
The Era, Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah
You KNOW we’re not in a modern day school, right? The attitudes, the name of the class, the way description of ages…so much “show” and very little “tell”, even though we literally have characters telling each other stuff!
Or in this story when the main character has seen a photograph of her deceased mother in a museum and calls her dad to ask about it.
“She was a looker, wasn’t she? What is it, some kind of—do they call it street photography?”
“No,” I said. I described in euphemism what was occurring int he photo.
“There’s been some mistake,” my father answered, finally, resolutely. “That’s your eyes playing tricks on you.”
Natural Light, Kathleen Alcott
Watch how the father goes from open and generous to shut-down and in denial, without the author have to tell us any of that.
Or in this one, what do you infer about the setting, just from the dialogue?
“Y’all put that gator right back where you found him or I’ll pepper your asses with 177s.”
Hellion, Julia Elliot
Pay attention to how you can use dialogue to tell us things other that what the character mean to tell us.
Reposted with permission from bookstore owner and writer Robb Cadigan. He says “Hope people have fun with it”, but reserves first dibs on the idea as kids’ book or published story…
A live video I recorded earlier this week full of positive ways to ride this thing out
The herd instinct is only a problem if you’re following the wrong herd.
Let’s see if we can put it to good use. Let’s circle the StoryADay wagons and help each other to write more of the stories that people need to hear—to distract them, to entertain them, to uplift and connect them.
Some things I’ve shared with people over the past few days
This is a wonderful time to catch up on your reading. Everyone has a pile of books they’ve been meaning to get to. Turn off the TV and open those books!
If you can’t get to a writing group because you need to protect your health, ask other people to turn on the voice memo feature on their phone and record the group discussion for you.
If you’re a member of a real-life writing group, ask the organizer to sign up for a free Zoom account. You can get everyone together for 40 minutes at a time under the free account, and chat about writing, or hold your critique meeting, or whatever you usually do.
You don’t have to be writing fiction if it doesn’t feel right, just now. Write letters to friends you haven’t seen recently. Write journal entries. Work on a non-fiction project you’ve been meaning to get to. Advocate for a favorite charity or write postcards for a political candidate’s campaign.
Use writing prompts to write tiny, throwaway stories that are only intended to amuse and distract yourself.
What other ideas do you have?
What can I do to help you?
Do you need an online writing hangouts this week, to keep you from obsessing about the news, or keep you sane while you work from home?
Do you need daily SWAGr check-ins at StoryADay.org for the next week, to keep you accountable?
Would it be helpful if I put together a bundle of links to the most popular articles on the site, so you can read something that isn’t virus-related?
Is there something else I can do to help you?
Leave a comment and tell me how you’re doing, and what you need. Also, if you’ve found something that helps you, please share that too!
This month’s theme at StoryADay is “Show, Don’t Tell”, that pesky little piece of writing advice that sounds so easy and will actually take us the whole month to unpack. It’s more than simply ‘showing’. It’s about using all our senses to immerse the reader in a moment, and it come more easily to some writers than others.
Let’s start practicing with today’s prompt. This week we’ll focus on making the setting immersive. Next week will be about showing through dialogue. The week after that we’ll work on when to ‘show’ and when to ‘tell’.
The Prompt
Your character walks into a room and sees something/someone they really, really don’t want to see. How do they solve this dilemma?
Relationships are tricky – romantic or otherwise – because at the heart of each relationship are two individuals who have expectations, often unspoken, about what they owe to each other.
This year during the Superbowl I noticed an ad that used the different types of love, as defined by the Greeks, to advertise their product. And it reminded me that, for those of us without a classical education, it can be useful to review frameworks like this, that underpin our cultural attitudes whether we know it or not.
Write a story combining featuring two different types of love relationships from the list. Notice how they interact, how they cause the characters to act, and where those actions are different and similar.
This month’s theme is Love: It’s Not Just For The Ladies. I’m going to be looking into all kinds of love and how our characters feel, express and reject it. Starting with this week’s writing prompt.
Write three, linked mini-stories about two people who love each other. Each moment illustrating one of the three aspects of enduring love: Intimacy, Passion & Commitment. Each section highlights a different moment. The overall story charts their relationship.
I’m planning to read a story for every day of this year. In this new series, I share my favorite short stories from the month. I hope it’ll help you find some new inspiration, some new authors to follow, and some new places to share your work.
This week is the anniversary of the birth of Scotland’s national poet, Robert Burns. While I’m cooking up some haggis and pouring a whisky in his immortal memory, I have a writing prompt for you that celebrates not just Robert Burns, but all poets.
It wasn’t a horribly-written story. In fact, it had amused me and a couple of other people who’d read it. My critique group had given me stunningly insightful feedback on what I needed to do to take it from ‘promising’ to ‘good’.
But instead, I put it away and will probably never look at it again.
How Do You Know When It’s Time To Give Up On A Story?
This is a question that comes up surprisingly often among writers.
Wouldn’t you think we’d KNOW if a story was worth working on, or whether it should be consigned to the darkest recesses of our cloud drives, never to be accessed again?
Sometimes it takes a traditional writing prompt to get us writing…and that’s perfectly OK. When you could write about absolutely anything, that’s too much choice, and can be paralyzing.
So this month at StoryADay I’m focused on providing prompts and info to get you to your writing as quickly as possible. Today, it’s a picture prompt.
Sometimes ‘writing’ doesn’t meant putting words on the page. Today’s prompt is designed to help you get comfortable with this reality of life as a writer.
Pick and implement a ‘tiny win’ for today, that doesn’t involve writing new words.
Tips
It’s very important to feel the reality that not everything in a writer’s life is about adding words.
These suggestions are designed to help you carve our time not just for writing, but for ‘writing’ (all the other stuff that goes with it).
Choose from one thing from this list (or make up something similar) and carve out 15-20 minutes to focus on it. Turn off all your notifications and just allow yourself to focus.
Then report back, to let us know what you did, and to celebrate!
Find a tiny notebook in your stash (you know you have a notebook stash!) and commit to carrying it with you every day for a week, so you can capture ideas. Start by writing down something you can see, hear, taste, touch and smell right where you are, right now.
Read a story by someone else and write down everything you love and hate about it.
Go for a walk or get some other kind of exercise that gets your blood pumping. Bonus points for getting out of your usual space. (Your brain is connected to the rest of your body. Take care of them!)
Write a review of a book you loved and always meant to get around to reviewing. Bonus points: write a letter to the author, if they’re still with us (you can send it to the publisher listed in their books). Connecting to the rest of the writing world builds your commitment to your craft, and reminds you that authors are just people. Hey, you’re a person! Maybe you DO have a right to write, too!
Ask another writer how they’re doing. This can be someone who seems to be doing “so much better” than you. (Connect on Twitter or some other social media site.) Trust me they’ll appreciate it. And again, building your connections with the greater writing world will help you feel more committed, and stop you from slinking off and saying “I could never be a real writer so I might as well not try”. Of course you can be a writer. And having connections with people in the writing world helps remind you of that.
Revise a short story or scene that you’ve previously written. Focus on crafting one sentence you really love, somewhere in that piece.
Rework a story or scene to cut it down by 10% of its word count. Be ruthless (work on a copy if you have to!). What does that do for the story and your prose?
Set a timer and spend 20 minutes (no more! It’s a rabbit hole!) researching publications you might want to send stories to.
Doodle or illustrate a story you previously write. You might draw a portrait of a main character, sketch the house they live in, or splash colors on the page to represent their personality.
Make a Pinterest board of interesting characters and places you can use in stories (thanks to MoniqueAC for this suggestion!). Again, set a timer, because this is meant to be a tiny win, not a new lifetime project!
Go on–or book–what Julia Cameron calls an Artist’s Date. What inspires you? For me it’s often music. For you, it might be art. Can you book an outing now, to an art museum, a live music concert, a play? Can you put a time on your calendar to walk in your favorite park, or call your funniest friend?
What other tiny wins can you think of? What did you try and how did it go? Leave a comment and share your ideas!
This month’s theme for prompts at StoryADay is: playing in other people’s sandbox, or in other words: writing fiction based in somebody else’s universe.
The Prompt
Take a universe you love and write story where the values are reversed: the good guys are bad and the bad guys are evil
This month’s theme at StoryADay is the idea of alternative stories: writing new stories in other people’s universes. This can mean fan fiction or it can mean taking folk tales, history, or myth and writing in that. Perhaps you and a writing buddy swap universes for a day and you write about their characters for a change.
Stay tuned each Wednesday this month for more ways to play in other people’s sandboxes.
The Prompt
Yesterday, people in the UK celebrated Guy Fawkes’ Day, a family friendly festival celebrating the gruesome end of a would-be revolutionary. Write a story inspired by that of Guy Fawkes
Julia found it in a pile of old stuff. She didn’t want it so she said she would give it to Therese.
I love this as an example of starting in medias res. We dont know what it is of who they are, but THEY do.
In medias res means in the middle of things but it doesn’t necessarily mean a car chase or a fight. In the middle of a conversation where the participants know their world better than we do, counts too.
The Reading Room is a series of posts where I review short stories with a writers’ eye.
The opening
“It was back in those days. Claudius Van Clyde and I stood on the edge of the dancing crowd, each of us already three bottles into one brand of magic brew, blasted by the music throbbing from the speakers. But we weren’t listening to the songs. I’d been speaking into the open shell of his ears since we’ve gotten to the party, shouting a bunch of mopey stuff about my father. Sometime around the witching hour, he stopped his perfunctory nodding and pointed towards the staircase of the house. “Check out these biddies,” he said. Past the heads of the dancers and would-be seducers I too saw the two girls he meant.”
Today’s Write On Wednesday prompt was inspired by reading Wendell Berry’s story The Great Interruption: The Story of a Famous Story of Old Port William and How It Ceased To Be Told (1935-1978) in this year’s Best American Short Stories. (Read my review here.)
The Prompt
Write a story from your childhood memories, keeping in mind your audience and what changes there have been since the time of your story
This story’s full title is The Great Interruption: The Story of A Famous Story of Old Port William and How It Ceased To Be Told (1935-1978). It’s a great example of the benefits of writing a lot, and never trying to sound like anyone else.
The Opening
The style of this short story was a challenge, for me. Its long, complex sentences, so unlike most of what I read these days, slowed me down. In fact, I had to read a page or so, out loud, to get myself into the rhythm of the narrator’s voice.
Even the title was confusing—until I untangled it, when it became intriguing.
It read like Mark Twain, like Charles Dickens: of a time and place that is not mine.
But I knew straight away it was going to be worth it. Here’s how it starts.
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