The Art of Telling

Session 1 — What Is a Story?

Focus: The shape of the modern short story. What a story does and does not need. We begin with a story that famously withholds almost everything — dialogue only, no interior thought, no exposition — and ask what a story really is when almost everything conventional has been taken away.

Main Points of the Lesson

1. A story is a shape, not a subject. What makes fiction a story is not the topic but the arc — a change, however small, in a character or a situation between the first sentence and the last.
2. The modern story trusts the reader. From Chekhov onward, the story leaves out more than it says. What the reader supplies from a well-placed detail is often more powerful than what the writer supplies from an explanation.
3. Dialogue can do the work of exposition. Hemingway’s story is almost entirely dialogue, yet by the end we know the two characters, the situation, and the emotional stakes.
4. The last sentence bears extra weight. Story endings are not resolutions; they are placements. The final image is what the reader carries out of the room.
5. The modern story is short by design, not by accident. Compression is a positive craft choice, not a limitation.

Reading

• Ernest Hemingway, “Hills Like White Elephants” (1927) — Great Books Foundation (PDF)

In-Class Practice

Read the story aloud, then in pairs. Circle every line of dialogue that carries information the narrator does not otherwise supply. Discuss what the story assumes we can figure out. (10 minutes.)

Discussion Questions

1. What is the “elephant” in the story? Does the story name it? Why not?
2. How does Hemingway make you feel the tension between the two characters without ever describing what either one thinks?
3. What is the effect of the setting — the train station, the two sets of tracks, the hills — on the meaning of the story?
4. Whose story is this? The man’s, the woman’s, or the couple’s?
5. Change any one line of dialogue. What breaks?

Homework

Write a two-page story that is at least eighty percent dialogue, in which two characters discuss something they cannot bring themselves to name. Bring it next week.

Session 2 — The Seven Questions Every Story Must Answer

Focus: Point of view, desire, obstacle, choice, consequence, image, and last paragraph. Using Gilman’s uncanny story of a woman losing her mind (or seeing more clearly than everyone around her), we develop the seven-question checklist that every story, in some form, must resolve.

Main Points of the Lesson

1. Every story has a point of view — even omniscient ones. The angle from which the story is told is a moral position, not just a technical choice.
2. Every story has a desire and an obstacle. No matter how quiet, a story tracks something a character wants and something between the character and that wanting.
3. Every story turns on a choice. The character does something the reader has been prepared to feel the weight of.
4. Every story pays a consequence. The choice has a cost the story is willing to show.
5. Every story rides an image. One recurring picture carries the emotional weight the language cannot say directly. In Gilman, it is the wallpaper.
6. The last paragraph is the paragraph the whole story was written for. Read it first. Write your story toward it.

Reading

• Charlotte Perkins Gilman, “The Yellow Wallpaper” (1892) — Project Gutenberg

Critical Reception

• Charlotte Perkins Gilman — Poetry Foundation biographical entry — for context on Gilman’s public feminism and the personal experience that produced this story.

In-Class Practice

Take a story you have written or drafted and answer the seven questions on paper. Any question you cannot answer confidently is a place your story is not yet finished. (10 minutes.)

Discussion Questions

1. Whose story is this — the wife’s, the husband’s, or the wallpaper’s?
2. When does the narrator’s reliability change for you as a reader? Which sentence is the tipping point?
3. What is the story’s image, and how does it evolve from opening to close?
4. Read the last paragraph aloud. Now read the first paragraph. What has changed?
5. If Gilman had written this as a first-person recollection years later (“I once lived in a house…”), how would the story change?

Homework

Read a story you love. Answer the seven questions of that story on paper. Bring your notes; the class will pool what different readers found.

Session 3 — Scene & Summary

Focus: When to slow the story down. When to speed it up. Free indirect discourse. Mansfield’s braided family portrait is one of the great examples of a story that knows exactly when to be inside a character’s head and exactly when to zoom back out.

Main Points of the Lesson

1. Scene shows; summary tells. Both are necessary. The craft is knowing when each is the right tool.
2. Scene is what the reader will remember. Every important turn of a story should happen in scene.
3. Summary handles time. Weeks and years compress into a paragraph; the reader trusts the compression when the scenes that anchor it are strong.
4. Free indirect discourse is the great modern innovation. The narrator borrows a character’s diction and rhythm without the marker of “she thought.” Reader and character briefly share one voice.
5. Rhythm inside a story matters. The alternation of scene and summary is a story’s heartbeat.

Reading

• Katherine Mansfield, “At the Bay” (1922) — University of Adelaide edition

Critical Reception

• Katherine Mansfield — Poetry Foundation biographical entry — background on Mansfield’s modernist innovations and her influence on the twentieth-century short story.

In-Class Practice

Take a paragraph you have written. Mark it S for scene or U for summary line by line. Where does the story live? Where does it move? (5 minutes.)

Discussion Questions

1. Where in “At the Bay” does the narrator briefly borrow a character’s inner voice? Choose one moment and read it aloud.
2. Which character in the family did the story make you love most? Why? What did Mansfield do to make you love them?
3. What does the sea do in this story?
4. The story has no plot in the traditional sense. What holds it together?
5. If you were adapting this story for the screen, which paragraph would you insist on preserving as-is?

Homework

Write a two-page scene followed by a one-paragraph summary that covers a week of story time. Bring it in.

Session 4 — Character & Desire

Focus: The character who does not know what she wants until the story reveals it. Chekhov’s late masterpiece is the most influential short story in modern literature. It also happens to be about two people who do not admit, until it is too late, that they love each other.

Main Points of the Lesson

1. Character is desire made specific. A character without a want is a character without a shape.
2. The most powerful desires are the ones the character will not name. Chekhov’s story is about two people whose stated desire (an affair) is a mask for a desire they cannot yet say (a life together).
3. A story often reveals its character to us before revealing it to the character. The reader sees Gurov change before Gurov does.
4. Chekhov’s endings do not resolve — they open. The story ends where the difficult work begins.
5. The great short-story writers write as if they know what will happen next but decline to tell us. They give us enough to imagine it.

Reading

• Anton Chekhov, “The Lady with the Dog” (1899) — Bartleby full text or Project Gutenberg selected stories

Critical Reception

• Anton Chekhov — Poetry Foundation biographical entry — a portrait of the writer widely credited with inventing the modern short story.

In-Class Practice

Write down what Gurov wants in three registers: (1) what he tells himself, (2) what he tells Anna, (3) what the story tells us. Where do the three disagree? (5 minutes.)

Discussion Questions

1. When does Gurov change? Point to a specific sentence.
2. What does the dog do in the story, and why does Chekhov keep bringing it up?
3. The story is set in Yalta, Moscow, and the provincial town where Anna lives. What does each place do to the characters?
4. The story ends without resolution. Is that satisfying? Why or why not?
5. Chekhov famously said that the writer’s job is not to solve problems but to state them correctly. Where in this story does he state a problem exactly right?

Homework

Take a character in your own writing and answer, on paper: what do they say they want, and what do they actually want? Write a scene that turns on the difference.

Session 5 — Image & the Poetic Line

Focus: Where the poem breaks and why. We begin the poetry unit by looking at four poets who trust the concrete image and shape the poem line by line. Bishop, Frost, Williams, and Oliver — very different writers who share one belief: that the poem lives in what you can see.

Main Points of the Lesson

1. A poem’s line is a unit of meaning. Every line is a small decision about what the reader takes in at once.
2. The image is the fastest way into a poem. A concrete picture reaches a reader before an abstract statement can.
3. Enjambment is a rhythmic weapon. Where a line breaks changes what the sentence emphasizes.
4. The first line makes a contract with the reader. The rest of the poem either honors it, adjusts it, or breaks it deliberately.
5. Reading aloud reveals the poem’s shape. The eye can miss what the ear catches on the first pass.

Reading

• Elizabeth Bishop, “One Art” — Poetry Foundation
• Robert Frost, “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” — Poetry Foundation
• William Carlos Williams, “This Is Just to Say” — Poetry Foundation
• Mary Oliver, “Wild Geese” — The Marginalian

In-Class Practice

Read each poem aloud. On a second reading, mark the enjambments (lines that break in the middle of a syntactic unit). Note which enjambments create surprise and which create emphasis. (10 minutes.)

Discussion Questions

1. What is Bishop’s poem actually about? Is “the art of losing” mastered by the end?
2. What is Frost’s poem “really” about — sleep, death, or the responsibility to keep going? Or all three?
3. Williams’s poem is a note left on a refrigerator. Is it a poem? What makes it one?
4. What does Oliver’s “You do not have to be good” do that a direct statement would not?
5. Choose one poem. Rewrite it as prose. What did the line breaks give the poem that the prose loses?

Homework

Write a twelve-line poem in free verse in which each line contains one concrete image. Bring it in.

Session 6 — Voice & the Lyric "I"

Focus: Who is speaking. To whom. From what distance. The lyric “I” is not a diary; it is a mask carefully worn. This session reads three poets — Heaney, Kenyon, Clifton — whose speakers are unmistakable, and asks what makes a voice on the page unmistakable at all.

Main Points of the Lesson

1. The lyric “I” is a persona, not an autobiography. Even the most personal-sounding poem has been made — chosen, shaped, revised.
2. Voice is a bundle of habits. Diction, syntax, rhythm, punctuation, silence. What a voice does not do is often more identifying than what it does.
3. Every speaker has an implied listener. Some poems address a lover, some a reader, some a self, some a God. The address shapes the meaning.
4. Distance matters. The speaker can be inside the moment, remembering it, dreaming it, or preparing to write about it. Each distance produces a different poem.
5. Voice is the closest thing poetry has to a plot. It is what carries a lyric through.

Reading

• Seamus Heaney, “Digging” — Poetry Foundation
• Jane Kenyon, “Otherwise” — Poetry Foundation
• Lucille Clifton, “won’t you celebrate with me” — Poetry Foundation

In-Class Practice

Read each poem aloud, then trade poems and read a stranger’s aloud. What changes when a voice not your own says these lines? (5–10 minutes.)

Discussion Questions

1. Whose voice is Heaney’s speaker in “Digging”? Is he the boy at the window, or the man remembering the boy?
2. Kenyon’s poem repeats the phrase “It might have been otherwise.” What does the repetition do to the poem’s emotional temperature?
3. Clifton’s poem is fourteen lines and eighty-eight syllables. What makes it feel bigger than that?
4. Choose one of the three speakers. Where in your life have you heard a voice like that speaker’s? What made you recognize it?
5. Rewrite one of the poems as a letter to a specific person. What survives? What disappears?

Homework

Write a short lyric in which the speaker is a version of yourself twenty years older or twenty years younger. Bring it in.

Session 7 — Compression

Focus: The poem as an act of leaving out. Returning to Williams, Oliver, and Clifton, we examine how the shortest poems in the language do the most work. Compression is the technique the beginner most often mistakes for simplicity — and it is anything but.

Main Points of the Lesson

1. Compression is not brevity. A short poem can be diffuse; a long poem can be tight.
2. The great short poems are stripped, not sparse. Every word is loaded. Removing any one word would break the poem.
3. White space is a poetic material. What the poet does not say is felt.
4. Repetition, in a short poem, is a musical resource. A word repeated in a fourteen-line poem behaves differently than a word repeated in a fourteen-page one.
5. A short poem invites re-reading. The reader completes the poem by returning to it.

Reading

• William Carlos Williams, “The Red Wheelbarrow” — Poetry Foundation
• Mary Oliver, “The Summer Day” — Loyola Marymount posting
• Lucille Clifton, “the mississippi river empties into the gulf” — search Poetry Foundation for Clifton
• Ezra Pound, “In a Station of the Metro” — Poetry Foundation

In-Class Practice

Take Pound’s two-line poem. Try to expand it into a stanza of four lines without losing what makes it a poem. What breaks? (5 minutes.)

Discussion Questions

1. Williams’s “The Red Wheelbarrow” opens with “so much depends / upon.” What depends? The poem never says. Why does it work?
2. Oliver’s “The Summer Day” ends with a question that is not quite a question. What does the poem ask of the reader?
3. Pound’s poem was published in 1913 and is often credited with inventing modernist poetry. Why?
4. Which of the four poems is the shortest? Which feels shortest?
5. Compression sometimes fails. Choose a short poem you have written and one line you could cut. Try the cut. Does it survive?

Homework

Write a poem of five lines or fewer that makes a claim about something you care about. Bring it in.

Session 8 — Memory & the Memoir Impulse

Focus: Why we write from a life at all. We open the memoir unit with the most consequential American memoir ever written — Frederick Douglass’s Narrative of the Life. Douglass wrote to change a law; he also wrote, inescapably, to make himself into a writer. Both purposes are on the page.

Main Points of the Lesson

1. A memoir is not a diary. It is a shaped account of remembered experience for a reader who was not there.
2. The memoirist is always two people at once. The person who lived it and the writer who is telling it. The tension between them is much of what memoir is about.
3. Memoir is a claim on the reader. Why should a stranger read about your life? Douglass gives us the first great American answer: because your life is bound up with mine.
4. Selection is the memoirist’s most powerful tool. What you leave out is as important as what you put in.
5. A memoir has a subject beyond itself. The best memoirs are about a life and a country, a life and a family, a life and an idea. Douglass’s memoir is about slavery, but also about the making of an American voice.

Reading

• Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845) — Preface and Chapters 1–2. Project Gutenberg

Critical Reception

• Frederick Douglass — Library of Congress biographical guide — a substantial gathering of Douglass’s public life and writings.

In-Class Practice

Write one paragraph beginning: “I was born , in , of ___.” Whatever comes after those three blanks is a first pass at a memoir opening. (5 minutes.)

Discussion Questions

1. What does Douglass’s Preface do that his narrative could not do on its own?
2. Read the opening two paragraphs of Chapter 1 aloud. What voice is that? Where have you heard a voice like it before?
3. Douglass writes: “You have seen how a man was made a slave; you shall see how a slave was made a man.” What is the shape of that sentence, and what does it promise?
4. What is the difference between an autobiography and a memoir? Where does Douglass’s Narrative sit?
5. Douglass omits many facts of his life to make the story readable in a hundred pages. What does the selection make possible? What does it cost?

Homework

Write one page beginning “I remember” — an incident from a life, told the way Douglass tells his: with clear scenes, without sentimentality, and with an argument you are trying to make. Bring it in.

Session 9 — The Double Structure

Focus: Situation and story. The narrator looking back. Vivian Gornick’s craft distinction — that every memoir has a “situation” (the events) and a “story” (what those events came to mean) — is the single most useful concept in the form. We test it against two great American immigrant memoirs, Mary Antin’s and Booker T. Washington’s.

Main Points of the Lesson

1. A memoir has a situation and a story. The situation is what happened. The story is what the writer, looking back, now sees.
2. The narrator is a made character. The “I” who tells the memoir is not identical to the person who lived it. Voice, distance, and self-awareness are all constructed.
3. The best memoirs are honest about the gap between the two. Antin and Washington both know that the child they were is not the writer they became.
4. A situation without a story is a diary. A story without a situation is an essay. Memoir is both.
5. The double structure permits self-criticism. The memoirist can be both loyal to and skeptical of her past self.

Reading

• Mary Antin, The Promised Land (1912), Chapter 1 — Project Gutenberg
• Booker T. Washington, Up from Slavery (1901), Chapters 1–2 — Project Gutenberg

Critical Reception

• Mary Antin — Jewish Women’s Archive — biography and cultural context for one of the first great American immigrant memoirs.

In-Class Practice

Take an incident from your own life you might write about. On a sheet of paper, write “Situation” at the top and describe what happened in three sentences. On the flip side, write “Story” and describe what it means, now, in three sentences. Notice the gap. (10 minutes.)

Discussion Questions

1. Read the first paragraph of Antin. Who is the narrator? How old is she in the moment of telling?
2. Washington opens with: “I was born a slave on a plantation in Franklin County, Virginia.” What does the plainness of that sentence do?
3. What is Antin’s “story” — not what happened, but what she came to understand?
4. Where do you feel Washington restraining himself? What is he not saying?
5. Choose one paragraph from either memoir and identify: which sentences are “situation” and which are “story”?

Homework

Rewrite last week’s “I remember” paragraph, adding a second layer: the voice of the writer you are today reflecting on the moment. Do not lose the incident. Add the reflection.

Session 10 — Revision: How Writers Re-See

Focus: How a memoir becomes a story becomes a memoir again. Sherwood Anderson wrote and rewrote “Death in the Woods” over more than a decade, and it exists in three published versions. The story is a masterpiece of American realism and a working document about how writers revise.

Main Points of the Lesson

1. Revision is not correction. Revision means, literally, to see again.
2. First drafts capture. Second drafts choose. Third drafts refine. Anderson’s three versions demonstrate all three.
3. A writer often does not know what a piece is about until the second or third draft. The subject reveals itself through the writing.
4. The great revisions are structural, not sentence-level. Moving a paragraph. Cutting a scene. Changing whose story it is.
5. A piece of writing is finished when the writer stops rewriting it — not when it is perfect. Endings are decisions, not discoveries.

Reading

• Sherwood Anderson, “Death in the Woods” (1926 / 1933) — americanliterature.com

Critical Reception

• Sherwood Anderson — Poetry Foundation biographical entry — for context on Anderson’s role as a bridge between the nineteenth-century American story and the modernists (Faulkner, Hemingway) who read him as a mentor.

In-Class Practice

Bring in a page of your own writing from earlier in the course. Cross out one paragraph you think the piece could do without. Read the piece aloud with the paragraph gone. Is it better? Worse? Different? (10 minutes.)

Discussion Questions

1. Who is the narrator of “Death in the Woods”? How does the story position him relative to the woman whose death he narrates?
2. Anderson tells us early that he is going to tell this story a second time. Why does he frame it that way? What does the framing buy?
3. What is the story’s argument about ordinary lives?
4. If you were revising this story, what would you cut? What would you keep intact under any circumstances?
5. The story ends with “This story I am now trying to tell.” What does that sentence do to the story you have just read?

Homework

Take one of the earlier pieces you wrote in this course and revise it. Not correct. Revise: cut a scene, move a paragraph, change the voice, restart from a new opening line. Bring both versions to the next session if we hold one; otherwise, keep them.