Storytellersunplugged

by
George GuthridgeThis is my first essay in this, I am frankly a little unsure of what to write, so I will write about what I know best – the teaching of writing.

Some background: I am almost certainly better known as an educator than as an author. I have sold some 70 stories and several novels, but what little reputation I do have (other than my life as a serial killer, though that is another story) has come from my teaching. In the mid ‘80s I coached groups of Siberian-Yupik Eskimo students from blizzard-swept St. Lawrence Island in the Bering Sea – students previous teachers had called “uneducable” – to three national championships in academics. As you can imagine, it was a big deal for Alaska . . . the first time teams of Native youths had won a state academic competition, much less national ones.

One of the competitions that they won was in fiction writing. And so, this essay. Actually, “national” is inaccurate. The competition was international. There were over 2000 entries in each division – elementary, junior high, and high school – from a variety of places throughout the world. My students submitted 13 stories over a four-year period. That may not seem like many, except that there were only 41 students in the school, all but two of whom spoke English as a second language, had little world knowledge, and often had poor writing skills.

Nine of the 13 stories placed. One year I had the high-school runner-up and the next I had the junior-high international champion.

How did they do it?

Maestro, if you please. . . (drum roll) . . . I taught them a writing sleight of hand.

Essentially, they used the same method to write fiction as I had taught them for nonfiction.

*For years I have been preaching that all nonfiction can begin with an enthymeme, a structure that Aristotle seems to have been the first to write about. (Though he clearly did not invent it.)

Essentially, you reduce a nonfiction introduction to a single sentence that says “What because Why.” For example: “Shrinking sea ice may be endangering the polar bear population of Hudson Bay, Canada [what statement], because of changes to the bears’ hunting patterns, reproductive and weaning patterns, and energy consumption [why statement].”

The What Statement breaks down to two variables. Identifying the variables and making sure that they are in the What Statement is crucial, for the result is a binary relationship.

Once you have finished the enthymeme, the introduction – one sentence long – is complete. Aristotle himself once commented that there is no real need for a long introduction. I therefore limited (and continue to limit) my students to one sentence intros. Doing so impels them to focus.

Next (and this is the twist I brought to the theory of enthymemes) the student identifies which of the two variables constitutes Old Information (already known to the intended audience) and which constitutes New Information (info that is likely to be new AND likely to be interesting to that audience). The student then writes up the Old Information first, transitions to the New Information and then writes up the reason(s) why in the same order as in the enthymeme.

If both variables are Old Information, then the subject is not worth writing about – it would bore the reader. If both variables are New Information, then the student organizes the rest of the document by writing about the broader – more general – variable first.

Obviously, there is much more than this to the process, but that’s it in a nutshell. The neat thing is – it works for every type of nonfiction.

It also works for fiction.

*At the risk of sounding pedantic or writing about what you probably already know, let me start by reminding everyone that (with the exception of some avant-garde works) all fiction involves an emotional problem to be solved.

I taught the students, therefore, always to begin fiction with “I had a problem with X because of Y.”

The “I,” of course, is the narrator. (After students became adept at the system, I changed it to “Z had a problem with X,” with Z being any PARTICULAR character.)

The “X” is the situation the protagonist finds himself or herself in, and the “Y” is the problem to be solved.

Take the following prompt, for example – one that the state Department of Education gives to all teachers to assist them in helping their students prepare for state-mandated writing exams: You are on your way home from school and meet a talking dog. Write a story with a beginning, middle, and end.

Most students just jump in. The result is usually a hodgepodge of scenes and ideas, with little characterization.

My students brainstorm a Why Statement and then write an enthymeme.
“I had a problem with a talking dog I met on my way home from school because it had Tourette’s Syndrome.”

“I” is Old Information. Readers do not know you, but until the narrator is fleshed out, you are just a single letter. Not much characterization so far! Therefore, you begin writing NOT about meeting the dog but rather about your life with dogs up to that point. You use an example or two to help make the writing vivid.

Next, you write about the New Information variable – meeting the talking dog. You do that in great detail – in contrast to writing about the narrator, the first variable, which has less detail.

Then you transition to the Why Statement – in this case, taking the dog home (or having it follow you home) and having Mom grossed out by the dog’s filthy language.

Next, you supply an ending in which the protagonist solves the problem in an interesting way.

Finally, you throw away the enthymeme and – viola! – you have a short story. The story now begins with the narrator instead of with the enthymeme.

There are four basic ways to start a story – through action, characterization, setting, or clever use of language – and this starts with characterization. (There is a fifth way, through dialogue, but it is very tricky to do well.)

*It probably goes without saying that I think the process holds great promise for teaching people, especially young people, to write successful stories.

Just how successful were the stories? Well, the kids did more than place in/win an international competition against other youthful writers. One of the 13 stories sold to CHILD LIFE, another to the Native-American SF/F anthology, TALES OF THE GREAT TURTLE.