Craft Takeaways

If this course had been a year long, the readings would have been many more — but the craft principles would not have changed. The good news about literature is that the lessons are few. The bad news is that they take a life to learn. Here are the ones I most hope you carry with you.

The Craft of the Short Story

Twelve Principles

1. A story is a change. Something is different at the end from the beginning. If nothing is different, you have a vignette, not a story.
2. Begin in the middle. Start as close to the moment of change as you can. Backstory enters in small doses.
3. Desire is the engine. Tell me what the character wants. The story is the friction with what stands in the way.
4. Character is what they do under pressure. Not what they look like. Apply pressure; watch the choices.
5. Scene shows, summary tells. Use scene when the moment matters; summary to cover ground. The ratio is the music.
6. Dialogue is action. People do things to each other with sentences. Look at what they don’t say.
7. The iceberg. Seven-eighths of the story is below the surface. Know it; do not put it all on the page.
8. The small thing carries the large. Chekhov names the story after the dog. Notice the small thing.
9. The first line is a promise. Make sure you keep it.
10. The last line is a door, not a wall. End so the story keeps moving in the reader’s mind.
11. Cut your darlings. The sentence you love most is almost certainly the one to cut.
12. Trust the reader. They are smarter and slower than you think. Leave them work to do.

The Dos and Don’ts of the Short Story

An Outline for the Short Story You Don’t Yet Know You’re Writing

Most working writers do not outline in the way English teachers describe. They sketch. Seven questions whose answers, on the back of an envelope, contain a story.

1. Whose story is this? One sentence describing the protagonist.
2. What does she want? Concrete and present-tense.
3. What stands in her way? Another person, a circumstance, herself.
4. What is the inciting incident? The event that breaks the equilibrium.
5. What is the moment of pressure? The scene at which she must choose.
6. What does she choose? And what does she lose?
7. What does the last image carry? Not a sentence of explanation. An image.

Twelve Story Ideas to Begin From

1. A character returns to a house they have not entered in twenty years.
2. Two siblings divide their dead mother’s possessions over an afternoon.
3. A teacher receives a letter from a student who is now older than she is.
4. A woman tells the wrong person, by mistake, the truth.
5. A man buys a thing he cannot afford and tells no one.
6. A child watches an adult lie to another adult and understands.
7. A small animal dies and the death is the center around which a family forms.
8. A first marriage ends not in a scene but in a slow, ordinary morning.
9. A character is given the power to refuse the thing they have been pretending to want.
10. Two strangers find themselves alone on a long train ride.
11. An immigrant receives a phone call from the country they left.
12. A retired teacher attends the funeral of a former student.

The Craft of Poetry

Twelve Principles

1. The image is the smallest unit of meaning. Without an image, the poem cannot stand.
2. The line is the smallest unit of music. A poem’s rhythm is decided line by line.
3. No ideas but in things. Williams’s law. Abstractions need objects.
4. Form is restraint, not decoration. A villanelle is a wall.
5. White space is content. The blank around the poem reads.
6. Compression is the secret. Three concrete details beat thirty abstract ones.
7. Voice is earned by reading aloud. If you cannot say the line, the line is not yet a line.
8. The lyric “I” is a mask. The speaker is not the poet, even when they share a face.
9. Repetition is structural. When a poem repeats, the repetition is doing work.
10. The poem may ask the reader a direct question.
11. Music first, sense second. The reader hears the poem before they understand it.
12. The best poem is one you can carry in your pocket. Short, dense, memorizable.

The Dos and Don’ts of Poetry

Six Generative Frames for Poems

1. The List Poem. Ten lines, each beginning with the same phrase. The last line earns the change.
2. The Address Poem. Speak directly to a person, an object, or an absent body.
3. The Object Poem. Describe one object in twelve lines without naming any feeling.
4. The Memory Poem. Write toward the smallest, sharpest detail of a remembered scene.
5. The Question Poem. End on a direct question to the reader.
6. The Sonnet, Loosened. Fourteen lines. A volta around line 8 or 9. The turn is the poem.

Twelve Poem Ideas to Begin From

1. An ordinary object, looked at as if for the first time.
2. The weather of the day you were told the news.
3. A walk you took alone.
4. A meal cooked by someone who is no longer alive.
5. The face of a stranger that, briefly, you loved.
6. A photograph you have not looked at in years.
7. The voice of one parent answering the phone.
8. A piece of music heard through a wall.
9. An animal you watched closely for an hour.
10. The body of someone you love, sleeping.
11. The room you grew up in, as it is now.
12. A door you wish you had not closed.

The Craft of Memoir

Twelve Principles

1. Memoir is not autobiography. Memoir takes one strand and tells its truth.
2. The double structure. Two voices in every sentence — the one who lived it, the one telling it.
3. Choose your narrator. The older self is not always wiser. Decide who is telling.
4. Scene matters more in memoir than in fiction. Write the moment, not the conclusion.
5. Restraint is more persuasive than rhetoric. The undertelling carries the over-truth.
6. The first sentence is the contract. Write it last.
7. Honor the dead. Write about them as if they will read it.
8. Honor the living. But not at the cost of the truth.
9. Memory is unreliable. Be honest about that.
10. Composite is allowed. Invention is not. You may not invent the meaning.
11. The strand is not the whole rope. Stay on the strand.
12. The reader’s belief is earned in details. The brand of the toothpaste, the weather.

The Dos and Don’ts of Memoir

An Outline for the Memoir You Have Been Carrying

1. The strand. One sentence.
2. The older self. Who is telling? At what age?
3. The first scene. The most charged moment.
4. The cast. Five or six people, no more.
5. The arc of meaning. What did the lived self believe? What does the older self see now?
6. The objects. Three or four physical objects that will carry the recurring weight.
7. The last image. Not the last fact. The last image.

Twelve Memoir Strands to Consider

1. One year of caring for a parent.
2. A childhood friendship that did not survive adulthood.
3. The country you left, and the country you arrived in.
4. A teacher who changed you.
5. The room of a house, told over decades.
6. An illness, your own or someone else’s.
7. A meal you cooked, weekly, for someone.
8. The work you did that was not your vocation.
9. A faith you kept; a faith you lost.
10. The marriage that ended; the marriage that didn’t.
11. One language replaced by another.
12. The dog or cat who lived with you for fifteen years.