by George Guthridge
Today I spoke at one of the colleges in
Let’s take a high school student named Danny. (This is based on a real incident in a high school where I used to teach, in a Siberian Yupik village on St. Lawrence Island in the
I want to be an ivory carver.
We then apply the first of two formulas that I previously have had the students memorize. “Old Information” is likely to be old OR not interesting to the intended audience. To be “New Information,” it must be have a high probability of being new AND interesting to the audience. We analyze each variable independently: “I” is old because, though you are a stranger to an audience, without getting the audience taking the time to get to know you, you are not interesting. “Ivory carver” is also Old, particularly if the audience is another Alaskan.
We apply a formula that, with much gnashing of teeth, the students have also inculcated: Old + Old = Poor Subject; Old + New = Good Subject; New + New = Great Subject. (The students also know that the subject is effective whether it is good or great; it just cannot be poor.)
Danny’s idea is Old + Old. It’s a poor idea – as indeed it is. Thousands of Alaska Natives carve ivory. He would just be another small fish in a large – very cold – pond.
Danny and the class then narrow the focus, like focusing a binoculars that can be focused one lens at a time. He focuses ivory carver to ivory swan, but runs into the same problem: his dad is a famous carver (his dad, incidentally, has no fingers, only thumbs), so it is unlikely that Danny’s swans will sell well if compared to his father’s.
Through a four-step process I have developed for subject selection, Danny eventually settles on “I would like to sell ivory swans in hunting scenes.” First, no one else is doing that; and, secondly, he has a secondary market – hunters – besides the usual tourist one.
We next work on why he wants to carve this particular artwork. At first he says, “because it’s fun.” However, the rules of the game say that the why section cannot in any way duplicate any part of the What Statement (it would produce circular reasoning), nor can it be predictable.
The class helps Danny with the four steps, and he comes up with, “I would like to carve ivory swan hunting scenes because my dad has opened markets.” After more fine-tuning – during which we discuss how middlemen from the city rip off village carvers by offering low prices – the class comes up with “I will sell ivory swan hunting scenes on consignment because I can use the markets that dad opened.”
The class is now off and running. Everyone works through a goal. Thereafter, we turn out attention to fiction writing. We start with the prompt that the state education department gives everyone for practice: You are on your way home from school and you meet a talking dog. Write a story with a beginning, middle, and end.
We start the story as we do all stories in the system I have developed: “I had a problem with X because of Y.” In this case, the X is given: I had a problem with a talking dog because of Y.”
We work through our four steps involved in generating ideas and decide upon, “I had a problem with a talking dog because it made prank phone calls in Siberian Yupik.” We then have to decide how to characterize the narrator. To simplify the process we examine the New Information variable: talking dog. We take half of the binary and apply it to the narrator. Turned vertically, the story frame looks like this:
Introduction: I had a problem with a talking dog because it made prank phone calls in Siberian Yupik.
Old Variable: Narrator – I + dogs
New Variable: Event – meeting a talking dog
Why Section: Problem – prank phone calls
Ending: Solution
We role-play each section, writing down snatches of dialogue, plus we list sensory details, useful verbs, information we have researched, and so on. We then eliminate the introduction.
The result: a story that starts with a narrator with an emotional problem – in this case, his or her love of dogs. Then the narrator meets the talking dog, and next the fun really begins.
We have used this method to teach short story writing to kids for many years. When I lived on the island, the students submitted 13 stories to an international fiction-writing competition. There were approximately 2000 stories submitted per age division. Nine of my students’ stories placed, including the high-school runner-up and the junior-high international champion. Those wins came from a school of 41 kids. Two of the stories were later published professionally – one in the well-received anthology Tales of the Great Turtle, and the other in Child Life.
The following is a story by a student of one of the teachers I recently trained. It is not atypical. She sent me 30 such stories. I have interpolated the sections
The Dancing Shoes
Kailani Elliott
[OLD] My name is Kailani. I am six years old. I am in the first grade. I take dancing class. The teacher teaches us ballet.
When we dance, we wear special shoes. They keep us from getting our feet hurt. I like to wear purple dancing shoes because purple is my favorite color.
[NEW] One day my mom took me shopping for a new pair of purple dancing shoes. I needed new shoes because I was going to be in my first recital.
[WHY SECTION] I had a problem with my new purple dancing shoes because as soon as I put them on at home, they started dancing all by themselves. My mom told me to stop jumping around.
“But Mom,” I said, “The shoes are dancing all by themselves.”
My mom didn’t believe me. “That’s impossible,” she said.
I said, “Look Mom. They are tapping and I don’t know how to tap dance.” Then she believed me.
[ENDING] Then I had an idea. I gave them to the class bully and they danced out of my life. Good bye forever!
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