Reading and Writing Short Stories

by Kelsey Clark
I’m teaching a class called “Reading and Writing English Short Stories” right now, and I wanted to share an activity I did in the first meeting of that class. The goals of the activity were to get students thinking and talking about how writing/reading short stories is different from writing/reading other types of writing, and to help them understand the importance of choosing what specific details or scenes to include in their own creative writing. Anyway, this worked pretty well and led to a nice discussion, so here it is:

The lesson is centered around Hemingway’s famous 6-word “short story”–“For sale: baby shoes, never worn.” I gave my students a handout with this story and 5 other 6-worders from a fun Wired magazine collection that you can look at here. I had them read the stories aloud, and then they discussed the following questions:

1. What do you think of the “stories” above? What makes them interesting to read? What makes them short stories?

2. How do you think short stories are different from other types of writing? What makes short stories special?

You could definitely word these questions better/go a different direction with this. My students mostly talked about how the stories counted as stories because they had conflict, plot and characters, and how short stories are special because they’re all about choosing details to spark the reader’s imagination and leaving the meaning open to the reader’s interpretation.

I ended the mini-lesson by having them try to create their own 6-word stories in pairs. They then read them to the class. This was cool because it got them thinking about the need to edit/pick and choose what action they include in their stories.

That’s it! I hope everyone is doing well and look forward to seeing you all at conference. Expect updates on the Yale-China Cookbook!