FICTION WORKSHOP: DYSTOPIAN FLASH (R)evolution October 24, 2015 2 PM – 5:30 PM
Leaders: Curriculum Committee Member Kate Schmier Workshop Team Member Jane Porter WMP Coordinator Emily Yost
Craft Talk Speaker: Helen Phillips
2:00 – 2:10 PM Sign-In & Snack
2:10 – 2:30 PM Welcome & Opening Lines: This Is The Story Of A World…
2:30 – 3:15 PM Craft Talk: Helen Phillips
3:15 – 3:40 PM Share & Discovery: 3 Types of Flash
3:40 – 4:00 PM Community Announcements, Part I & Break
4:00 – 4:10 PM Community Announcements, Part 2
4:10 – 4:45 PM Freewrite: To Make A Long Story Short…
4:45 – 5:05 PM Group Reimagining: Trick or Tweet
5:05 – 5:15 PM Closing Lines: If You Like It, Then You Should Have Put A Title On It
5:15 – 5:30 PM Closing & Pair Journals
247 West 37 Street, Suite 1800, New York, NY 10018 212 336 9330 • www.girlswritenow.org GWN Fiction Workshop, 2015
OPENING LINES: This Is The Story Of A World…
Flash fiction comes in many forms. One form of flash fiction, Twitterature, makes use of Twitter, the social networking site and digital tool that imposes a 140-character limit on each communication, or “tweet.” The 5 tweets you see below each describe a dystopian world that’s different from ours. These tweets are our prompts, and provide an inside view into a dystopian world.
Select one of the tweets below as a starting point. Take 10 minutes to begin writing a story that is set in, or is about, this dystopian world. You can write this story from any point of view—it’s up to you!
1. The end of the world didn’t go down the way I thought it would.
2. They marched into the square in a ragged, slow line. Some men. Mostly women.
3. The elixir would soon take hold. Nothing else mattered. Waiting, waiting. Counting each breath. Enduring each heartbeat.
4. The day I aged to 16 was the first day I saw my own reflection.
5. Most girls would scream if they found a ninja assassin in their room, but Alexandra grinned. Finally, she was important enough to be found.
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CRAFT TALK: Helen Phillips
Helen Phillips is the author of the novel The Beautiful Bureaucrat and the collection And Yet They Were Happy, which was named a notable collection by The Story Prize. She is the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award and the Italo Calvino Prize in Fabulist Fiction. Her work has been featured on Selected Shorts, and in the New York Times, Tin House, and Electric Literature. An assistant professor of creative writing at Brooklyn College, she lives in Brooklyn with her husband, artist Adam Douglas Thompson, and their children. Her collection Some Possible Solutions is forthcoming in 2016.
Write 1-2 questions for Helen here:
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SHARE & DISCOVERY: 3 Types of Flash
Here are 3 different examples of dystopian flash fiction. Use the next 10 minutes to read each example independently. When 10 minutes is up, you’ll discuss these examples with your group.
1.“Lightning Bugs,” by Julianna Baggott
In the suitcase: two gas masks, an extinguisher, the letters bound with a blue rubber band, the girls’ rusty barrettes, jumper cables, the Polaroids melted on the edges. When the smoke clears, we’ll go in. But for now they’re all asleep. The truck is small, lined as it is with dead freezers and the cages covered with cut-up tarps and cloths. I don’t look in the cages. The girls’ mother told me not to. She said that it was better I didn’t know, better I couldn’t describe the beasts. I said, Will they turn on us? She just stared at me. “You think I’d let them near my own if they were deadly? Jesus, haven’t you read the letters? We need these beasts to survive.” I have read the letters, but I don’t know if they’re authentic. How can you tell? Yes, they’ve got the government seals, but before all this any computer could have doctored up some seals. Still, I know the mother would die for the letters. She told me so. She said, “I’d let the girls die too so others can live. Wouldn’t you?”
I told her about my one little problem: my will to live. It’s strong and irrational. I’ll kill before I get killed. Not much I can do about it. She didn’t like this answer, but what choice does she have. She has to trust me. I don’t know if trust is still trust when it’s the only option. It’s like believing in God as someone cocks a gun against your temple. The girls sleep on top of the freezers on one side—twins, can’t tell them apart. One turns, the other turns, and back again. The mother’s asleep on the freezers on the other side. Sometimes I slide open the window—where the kids used to gather for ice cream and striped popsicles—and look out at the night. The smoke’s still too thick. Two gas masks won’t do it for four of us anyway, not to mention the beasts.
I hear wings. I hear tick, tick, tick, like a beak or nails. Sometimes there’s a low growl, a thud. One of the cages isn’t a cage. It’s a terrarium. It’s small and beneath the cloth that hangs over it, there’s a dim shifting glow. I think of lightning bugs that I used to catch in jars in my childhood. I slip my hand under the cloth, put my hand to the glass. It’s warm. These aren’t lightning bugs. This is not my childhood. This might not be anyone’s childhood.
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2. “Indefinite Inevitable,” by Lauren Groff
There were no portents, no blotting of the sun, no crows dropping dead from the clouds. It took a week to understand that all the babies being born were male. The newscasters spoke of it in a hush, a wobble to their lips. Nobody understood what was happening. Our own child was due at that time and we, who had seen clefts so clearly ghosting on the screen, held hands and went to the hospital. We were meek like veal.
Two days later, we brought our son home to his pink bassinet, to the ponies I’d so carefully painted on the wall back when he was to be our girl. We had no choice, we were happy he
5 GWN Fiction Workshop, 2015 was hale and well. Afterward, everywhere we turned there was a scrum of toddlers, our sons’ sweaty necks, all things turned to guns: sticks, spoons, dolls. We hoarded the color purple, because it had become precious. Our own son was gentle, musical, he loved mint ice cream and hammocks and curling the big soft lunk of his body in our laps, where we could barely contain him. The last girls were in his class and they glowed with a sickly sheen, they were upheld as paragons. They rarely smiled, these girls, they were so terribly serious. When our son was in high school, with the flood of boys at his back, the rhetoric grew harsher, darker: the borders were locked down, skirmishes flared. And when our first crop of boys turned 18, the pandemic that had been latent so long blossomed in their blood.
Our sweet son grew distant, focused. He stopped going to school and only watched the news. We felt a darkness nearing, but we could do nothing. One morning, our boy was gone. We called our friends; their sons were also gone. The wailing was awful in the streets, then, and even now there are times I still hear it in my ears. How belated, our rage, when we should have raged at the beginning. Of course, our boys failed to return. Our son came home on leave once, and then he died in a desert, alone. The last girls grew older, became mothers themselves, but they were only the mothers of boys. How sweet were these last babies, these boys who grew strong, who went off singly and ill-starred, our boys with no boys to replace them.
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3. “The Thirteenth Woman,” by Lydia Davis
In a town of twelve women, there was a thirteenth. No one admitted she lived there, no mail came for her, no one spoke of her, no one asked after her, no one sold bread to her, no one bought anything from her, no one returned her glance, no one knocked on her door; the rain did not fall on her, the sun never shone on her, the day never dawned on her, the night never fell for her; for her, the weeks did not pass, the years did not roll by; her house was unnumbered, her garden untended, her path not trod upon, her bed not slept in, her food not eaten, her clothes not worn; and yet in spite of all this she continued to live in the town without resenting what it did to her.
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Group Discussion Discuss the following questions about the flash fiction examples you just read with your group.
Questions Which story did you respond to the most and why?
Were you surprised to discover that the genre could include such different forms?
How did your expectations of the genre differ or align with the examples given?
How were these stories different or the same?
How would you describe the style each story used?
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FREEWRITE: To Make A Long Story Short…
Return to the story you started working on during Opening Lines – It’s time to turn it into an official flash fiction piece!
How? • Choose one of the 3 flash fiction examples we read and discussed in Share & Discovery, and use it as inspiration to re-write or add to your original story! • Be sure to edit your story down to three paragraphs, or about 500 words. It needs to be a full story with a beginning, middle, and end!
You have 20 minutes to write. Good Luck!
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FREEWRITE: To Make A Long Story Short…
Now, let’s get flashier! Edit down and re-write your flash piece into only 5 tweets! Make sure to stay true to the story and remember— tweets are 140 characters, including spaces, punctuation, and letters! We’ve already mapped out the character spaces for you below.
Hint: It may help you to underline or circle which points of the story are most crucial first.
Tweet 1
Tweet 2
@GirlsWriteNow #girlswritenow #gwn #gwnrevolution
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Tweet 3
Tweet 4
Tweet 5
@GirlsWriteNow #girlswritenow #gwn #gwnrevolution
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GROUP REIMAGINING: Trick or Tweet
Turn to the person sitting next to you. Take turns sharing 1 of your 5 tweets. Then, using the information gathered from this 1 tweet, guess what you think your partner’s flash story is about.
After making some educated guesses, share with your partner either the remaining 4 tweets or the 3-paragraph story to fill them in on what your flash piece was about. If you have time afterwards, share your discoveries aloud with your group.
Thought Questions: What clues did you find in the tweet that relate to the full story?
Was the story very different from what you expected it to be?
Based on the tweet, what style would you guess the writer used as inspiration?
Is there any feedback you’d like to give the author on ideas where her story could go next?
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CLOSING LINES: If You Like It, Then You Should Have Put A Title On It
Beyoncé just called: She saw your dystopian tweets! She wants to know what you’d title this flash story made of tweets so she can use the title for a new dystopian song she’s making. Write as many titles as you can think of to impress Beyoncé in 3 minutes!
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APPENDIX: Exercises and Resources
Dystopian Flash Fiction Writing Exercises Describe your shoe from the point of view of an alien who has never seen a shoe before.
Choose an adjective. Write a story that sounds so adjective that it doesn’t sound true, but in the world you’re writing about, it is true.
Write a story about a house that has a crush on its homeowner.
Write a story about an object that becomes a person, and how this new person navigates her former daily life.
Make up a rule or statement you wish were true in the world today (ie, when you think about food, it appears in front of you; there is no such thing as fear; hugs are used as currency; the ground is naturally purple). Now imagine there’s a world where that rule is true, and tell us about what life is like in that world.
Suggested Readings Gigantic Worlds Anthology Invisible Cities – Italo Calvino Black Box – Jennifer Egan (A story written in tweets!) Modern Life - Matthea Harvey The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas – Ursula LeGuin Sea Oak, Civil Warlands in Bad Decline, & Pastoralia – George Saunders Flash Fiction: 72 Very Short Stories – Tom Hazuka, Denise Thomas, & James Thomas Wearing Dad’s Head – Barry Yourgrau
Suggested Authors Julianna Baggot Lydia Davis Lauren Groff Jamaica Kincaid J. Robert Lennon Helen Phillips Kamy Wicoff
Online Articles Four Dystopian Authors Imagine a Not-So-Bright Future – bullettmedia.com Dystopian Fiction: An Introduction – tor.com Stories in your pocket: how to write flash fiction – theguardian.com
Publishing Opportunities Check out Flash Fiction: A List of Resources from thereviewreview.net for links to publishing and contest opportunities!
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