Week 8

This week we continued our dive into the world of flash fiction. This week unlike last week focused on not just reading the short-shorts but in looking at the smaller mechanics of the stories and getting a better understanding of exactly what makes the stories work. The exercise for today was to take our favorite short so far and identify the terms in the story and notice how they work to make the story a complete piece.

The homework for this past week, reading and writing, really begged me to take a more critical eye to whatever I may read. For exampleI've noticed a lot more surprises hidden in stories since reading the piece on how to use surprises. I've also taken notice to exactly how the writers use surprising language and themes to draw my attention into a story. It brings a whole new angle to every story I read. At the beginning of this section I was whipping through the stories without really understanding the finer points of their crafting, but now I have felt myself slow down and take little mental notes about the use of language tools in each piece.

The short-short I wrote my 250 word essay on was "Dismantling the City". That piece by far has been my favorite just because the whole story is filled with surprising images and the story itself is just a very cool idea. The assignment really let me know how well I understand the terms we've been studying and forced me to use them in a way that we hadn't yet in class.