The Writer's Daily Times

In her essay, “The Nature of Short Fiction; or, The Nature of My Short Fiction,” Joyce Carol Oates says that she is “greatly interested in the newspapers and in Ann Landers’ columns and in True Confessions and in the anecdotes told under the guise of ‘gossip.’ Amazing revelations!” She says she has written a great number of stories based on “the barest newspaper accounts…it is the very skeletal nature of the newspaper, I think, that attracts me to it, the need it inspires in me to give flesh to such neatly and thinly-told tales, to resurrect this event that has already become history and will never be understood unless it is re-lived and re-dramatized.”

Everyday the newspaper is full of stories that are incomplete. We know bits and pieces such as a man was hit by a car, a man fired his gun at another man, but we rarely know the details beyond the event that’s reported.

Someone else’s story can become your story when you dramatize the events. All around us are stories waiting for us to develop and turn into our own; they are skeletons waiting for the writers in us to add the vital organs, the flesh, and the muscles; to give it life.

Explore this technique:
Start a collection of articles that you can use as skeletons for your writing. Collect Ann Landers' columns, gossip columns, local news, and stories that seem to you to be in some form – either partially or wholly – the basis for a story. Often these news accounts will be the “end’ of the story and you will have to fill in the events leading up to the more dramatic event that made the news that day. Perhaps the story leads you to ask what is going to happen to that person now.

Apply this technique:
Once you’ve clipped and saved four or five items, outline a story based on one of them (or a combination of a few of them), indicating where the story begins, who the main characters are, what the general tone will be, and from whose point of view you want to tell the story.

Exercise:
Read the brief pieces you have been given in class, choose one, and flesh out the details that are missing. Think about the people, about what happened before, what caused it, what happens next… When you've written your story, post it on your blog and then leave a comment here to let us know it's up.