Critical Evaluation Essay Instructions and Specifications
Mission
Your task is to read and evaluate the stories from the list below and argue for which two stories best execute at least two narrative criteria. Then your task, via compare/contrast, is to argue for which story is the better of the two, based on analysis of at least two or three standards of literature.
This is an evaluative essay in compare-contrast form, as your job will be to compare/contrast your chosen story with others from the List of Eligible Stories below. The points of comparison will be the standards of literature you select for comparison/contrast. See this effective guide on Compare and Contrast. Focus on the point-by-point form.
You will decide which stories to compare/contrast, and also the narrative standards on which you are basing your comparison/contrast. Do not choose to evaluate more than two, or at most, three narrative criteria. Attempting to evaluate all six will lead to heartache. Instead, focus on no more than two criteria to evaluate, since each criteria has multiple standards that need to be evaluated. And remember that when you select a criteria to evaluate your analysis should be based on the standards. For example, if you are examining plot, you will need to address some o all of the following substandards:
•	Sequence of events should be driven by realistic characters and seem natural rather than artificially contrived.
•	The narrative should be complete, meaning there is a beginning, middle, and resolution (conflict, crisis, and resolution). See What Makes a Story a Story: Narrative Structure – that the principal characters have been altered from the way there were in the beginning to the way they are at the end of a story. There needs to be a transformation.
•	The resolution should seem believable rather than “neat” or “happy” or tied-up in a bow. Sometimes, endings are “fully” unresolved on purpose.
•	The resolution should seem “real” rather than “ideal” or contrived by the writer.
•	The sequence of events should be clear and orderly via careful application of temporal transitions.
For example, the thesis should be about the highest quality story as opposed to what you personally “like.” You job is to explain why your favorite story is the best in terms of quality. For example, I like “Who wants to Shoot an Elephant?” better than “Jack, July,” but would argue that “Jack, July” is a better story that effectively develops most all narrative criteria.
One more constraint: Do not analyze all narrative features included in the Narrative Features Lecture, but focus in on two or three you think are most important in illustrating which of the stories is of higher caliber.

1.	The essay, both draft and revision, should be from 1,500 words to 2,000 maximum.

2.	The essay must be in MLA Manuscript Format. Hyperlinks are allowed if research is incorporated.

3.	Research is not required in this essay, but is allowed. If included, it won’t be scored. But it would be good practice for you for the approaching research paper.

Submission Instructions

Draft: Submit an MS Word version of your essay to D2L Brightspace Assignments (for me) and Discussions (for peer workshopping). Save as file name “DraftNarr_last name.”

Revision: Submit PDF file to D2L Brightspace Assignments only.

List of Eligible Stories
The list of stories you may choose to argue for which is best from Best American NonRequired Reading, 2015 are as follows:
“The Christmas Miracle,” Rebecca Curtis
“Isaac Cameron Hill,” Ammi Keller
“You are in the Dark, in the Car . . .,” Claudia Rankine
“Things you’re not Proud of,” Tom McAllister
“Miracle in Parques Chas,” Ines Fernandez Moreno
“Fear Itself,” Katie Coyle
“What the Ocean Eats,” Kawai Strong Washburn

Stories that are NOT Eligible to be Argued as Best
The stories that I have evaluated/analyzed for instructional purposes (many of which are forthcoming in the next section of this lecture), are not eligible for argument. Specifically:
Online Stories: “Boiled Peanuts with the Undead,” “Bee Man,” and“The Birthday Place”
Stories from Best American Nonrequired Reading, 2015: “Who Wants to Shoot an Elephant?” “Jack, July.”
The Standards of Storytelling

This lecture will guide you toward the draft of your Critical Evaluation Essay, where the main purpose is to write a review -- supporting a judgment -- on written narratives. Your writing purpose is to judge the quality of the stories and determine which is the most skillfully written, and offer reasoned support for your judgment. You will support your judgment (thesis) with sound, fair, thorough evidence from the stories themselves. You will explain "reasons" for you judgment beyond personal taste (what you "like"). And you will make comparisons between many of the stories.

Objectivity: Reasoning over Feeling, Judgment over Taste
The key to the success of a critical evaluator ("reviewer") is to suppress the "fan" or the "hater" in favor of giving the objective thinker a chance to uncover the truth about the quality of a subject. Check your feelings at the door. For instance, I might choose to argue that “Jack, July” from The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2015 is the best-written story because of its unique point of view. The problem, though, is that this is my favorite story of the bunch, particularly because it handles black humor so well. I like the story because it fits my personal taste-preference in storytelling, not necessarily because it is well-crafted, and therefore my critical evaluation would be superficial. Instead of analyzing the story fairly, I would instead be attempting to rationalize why I like the story.
That is the wrong tack.
Many judgments are based on taste, which means, “I like something because I like it.” No reasons are necessary. A taste-decision does not demand sound reasons to support it. When someone says, “I hate country music,” they are offering a taste-based judgment, when they may not have a solid understanding of the conventions and criteria used to evaluate country music in a fair manner. The judgement is simply a matter of personal preference, an unsupported opinion.
The purpose in this writing assignment, however, is to offer sound reasons to support a judgment. The judgment you make in this essay must go far beyond “What I like is good because what I like is good.” In this essay, you need to tell the reader “why” your judgment is correct by offering strong support by analysis of the subject itself.
Judgments are supported, first, by establishing a base of “Evaluative Criteria,” which are sets of standards used to fairly judge the merits of a particular subject. In the case of judging literary stories, the standards already exist, and it will be your job to learn these criteria and standards as the basis for your writing within the course.
And thus, the following section is the most important to understand. In “The Standards of Storytelling,” I will be using the following stories as illustrative examples of effective use of the narrative standards, so please have read them prior to reading the lecture.
“Who Wants to Shoot an Elephant?” and “Jack, July” from Best American Nonrequired Reading, 2015.
Preliminary Terminology
Before I explain the narrative standards, I will define two critical terms that are paramount throughout the course: “Literary” and “Narrative.”
“Literary,” according to the Oxford Dictionary, concerns “the writing, study, or content of literature, especially of the kind valued for quality of form” and concerning language, “literary” is “associated with literary works or other formal writing; having a marked style intended to create a particular emotional effect.” Below, I will define “literary” more specifically.
A “narrative,” put simply, is a full, complete story. The Oxford Dictionaries.
And in this lecture you will learn, in detail, the standards used by writers to create powerful stories. These are the building blocks by which stories are judged -and within each criteria are more specific standards that need to be employed to satisfy the main “criteria;” thus, this lecture will dig deep into the criteria for judging narratives.
I will start each section with a general definition of the features and then provide specific examples from the following stories, so it is paramount that you have read these stories prior to reading this lecture:
Online Stories
“Boiled Peanuts with the Undead”
“Bee Man”
“The Birthday Place”
Stories from Best American Nonrequired Reading, 2015:
“Who Wants to Shoot an Elephant?”
“Jack, July.”
I will be writing an analysis of the standards as applied on the above stories, with the purpose of showing how the storyteller “works” the standards to enhance story quality. What I will be doing here is similar to what you will be doing in your Critical Evaluation Essay, where you will be evaluating stories via the same process.



Criteria and Standards
The purpose of your first major course essay will be to analyze and evaluate the qualities of stories via compare/contrast, and to do this, you need to know the criteria and standards that are used to fairly and accurately judge the quality of stories. Oxford defines “Criterion” as “a principle or standard by which something may be judged or decided.”  Note also that “criteria” is plural; “criterion” is singular. Criteria is synonymous to “Standard,” with a slight difference. Think of “criteria” as a minimum requirement, like needing a Master’s degree to teach college English, whereas a “Standard” refers to the specific level of quality that is needed to satisfy a criterion.
So, to meet the minimum criteria of “plot,” a writer just needs to have a plot. But in order to have a quality plot, it must meet the specific standards of the criteria. Below, the “standards” needed to satisfy the criteria are the items in bullet-points.










#1: Plotting (and some Characterization)
These criteria are usually explained separately but, but since the plot is more often than not, at least in literary stories, driven by the principal characters, and since Point of View is always directly tied to Character, I tie the three together.
First, a plot, defined simply, is the sequence of events that work together logically to tell a story about a character(s). Second, the  . . .
Standards of Literary Plots
•	Sequence of events should be driven by realistic characters and seem natural rather than artificially contrived.
•	The narrative should be complete, meaning there is a beginning, middle, and resolution (conflict, crisis, and resolution). See What Makes a Story a Story: Narrative Structure – that the principal characters have been altered from the way there were in the beginning to the way they are at the end of a story. There needs to be a transformation.
•	The resolution should seem believable rather than “neat” or “happy” or tied-up in a bow. Sometimes, endings are “fully” unresolved on purpose.
•	The resolution should seem “real” rather than “ideal” or contrived by the writer.
•	The sequence of events should be clear and orderly via careful application of temporal transitions.
Before digging into these standards further, it is important to define what “literary” plotting and characterization means
“Commercial” versus “Literary” Stories: A Compare/Contrast
[Read "What Makes Literary Fiction Literary" by a literary agent on the differences between commercial and literary stories. He uses film connections to explain the differences.”]
Difference in Purpose
In this class, we analyze “literary” rather than “commercial” stories. The primary purpose of commercial writing is to entertain, or "escape,” and although literary fiction is often entertaining, the primary purpose is more pompous: to explore the nuances of the human experience, to get to the bottom of reality, not fantasy, to dig deeper into reality rather than escaping it. Escapism's goal is to “sweep-away" the reader whereas a literary writer’s purpose is to make the audience look closer into the realities of everyday life, to go deeper into reality.
John Gardner writes of the value of storytelling as “not just that it entertains us or distracts us from our troubles, not just that it broadens  our knowledge of people and places, but also that it helps us to know what we believe, reinforces those qualities that are noblest in us, leads us to feel uneasy about our faults and limitations.” (The Art of Fiction 31).
Literary writing digs deeper into the human experience rather than escaping from it.
Difference in Emphasis: Stereotypes and Cliches
The biggest difference between the genres is that commercial stories generally emphasize plot, which often leads to formulas in the form of stereotypes and clichés. What makes these story forms popular is that there is a level of familiarity, or predictability, that makes audiences comfortable. It is like being on vacation and looking for a place to eat, and choosing Applebees (reliable, familiar) to a smaller, local restaurant in the community, which can be hit or miss. With this said, literary writing also contains plots; however, the plotting is usually subordinate to characterization. Plotting in literary writing exists, but is subtler, and literary writers try to hide it, to make the formulas invisible, hidden beneath the surface of a story whereas a commercial story’s plot is front and center.
As an example, you could bundle all of the Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings stories together and they would have a straight-ahead plot structure of a “Heroic Quest” (which we will analyze below). In that sense, if a reader of the books or a viewer of the films breaks down the plots, they can almost predict the actions and results of the stories, i.e. the hero/protagonist always ends up winning in the end. This predictable element of plot is called a trope. And a trope that is used over and over repeatedly is called a cliché.
Literary writers, on the other hand, try to avoid commercial genre tropes. Here are some examples:

Romantic Comedy/Drama Genres

An unlikely man and woman from differing socio-economic classes fall in love, face obstacles, declare their love, break up and then get back together again because one of the characters interrupts their lover's wedding ceremony just in the nick of time, right before the vows, and delivers a heartfelt speech that draws tears. The characters are funny and bumbling in the comedy romance, and way more serious and solemn in the “drama” subgenre.

Westerns

There is a bad man who wears black clothes, and a good man, who wears lighter-colored clothes that always appear freshly washed unless he’s been in a recent tussle, but by the next scene, he’s cleaned up. The bad guy – damaged by some past trauma -- hangs out at saloon, gets drunk, and harasses the locals, plays an cheats at cards and drinks whiskey until drunk and harassing the locals for cheating him at poker, and then, with the help of a sidekick, humiliates the bartender in some way (shooting up the barkeep’s inventory), and then the good guy – motivated by a past trauma, usually a friend or family getting previously shot by the bad guy -- walks in the doors at the exact time, to protect the townspeople. Most plots are based on revenge.
Science Fiction
Western plots in space-settings.
Mystery/Suspense/Cop Stories
Cop stories often begin with a murder, but the narrator (or camera) only allows us to see the killer's shoes. The plot involves an old crusty cop who's battling alcoholism and marriage problems -- because he's been married to his job -- and he's two weeks from retirement when he decides to take on “just one more tough case,” for which his wife says he shouldn't, but like I said, he's married to his job, etc. Read “Keep them on the Edge of their . . .: How to Write Great Suspense.”
Fantasy Stories
Western plots in Medieval-type settings. There are dwarfs and wizards involved and they usually have the letters "x" or "z" somewhere in their names.
Nathan Bransford, a respectable literary agent, says, “. . . the plot in a genre novel usually involves things happening -- action sequences, love sequences, chases, shootouts... The things that happen are pretty much on the surface, and thus the reader can sit back and watch and see what happens.” Plot-driven stories work better for movies because they often involve ninjas flipping around in the air in slow-motion. In literary fiction, there are rarely ninjas flipping around in the air in slow-motion. Instead, the conflicts drive the plot and are usually more subtle, and often internal. Says Bransford, “In literary fiction the plot usually happens beneath the surface, in the minds and hearts of the characters” (“What Makes . . .”). That does not mean the characters in literary writing “do” less or that they just sit around think about stuff. It just means they do things like powerwash their siding and eat dinner and have conversations rather than flip around in the air like ninjas.
Figurative Language
A major characteristic of literary stories is that figurative language devices – metaphors, similes, images, symbols, puns, etc. are used as standards in nearly all of the major criteria (except plot, so that’s why I mention it here first, in the Plot criteria. Brilliant!) I will give specific examples in each criteria below.

Why “Jack, July” has a more Literary Plot than “Who Wants to Shoot an Elephant?”
The story “Jack, July” has a more “literary” plot because the actions are not as predictable as they are in “Who Wants to Shoot an Elephant?” The emphasis is on developing the character of Jack, getting inside his brain, knowing his contradictions and complications rather than wondering how the story will end.
The Hollywood Ending
Two critical standards in plot deal with story-endings, and perfectly explain the key differences between literary and commercial stories:
•	The resolution should seem believable rather than “neat” or “happy” or tied-up in a bow. Sometimes, endings are “fully” unresolved on purpose.
•	The resolution should seem “real” rather than “ideal” or contrived by the writer.
I will illustrate by examining some movies because they are a popular, and have the same dichotomy between “literary stories” and “Hollywood stories,”. Literary movies are called “art house” or “Independent.” The same dichotomy also exists in music genres, where popular country is on one side: Blake Shelton, Amanda Lambert, and on literary side is Americana Music, like Lucinda Williams and Jason Isbell.
This is just a guess, but I think there are two main reasons why audiences like stories (or songs) to end happily for the likeable characters, with every plot thread tied up in a neat bundle: 1) Hollywood stories are entertaining, and 2) people like happy endings because heroes inspire them, and hero stories have been around for centuries are hard wired into our nervous system.

Literary/arthouse films do not always end happily, and some are not fun or entertaining. For example, I just saw a movie called 1945, and it was a great movie, but not very entertaining. It dealt with the subject of Jewish people who survived the Holocaust returning to their homes, and the drama that created with the locals who took over their business. And the ending of the movie was bit subtle, using some specific imagery (smoke from a train) to match the film’s themes.
For example, the sequence of events in “Jack, July” all lead to Jack’s revelation, or discovery, that his throwing of the Frisbee is what caused his sister’s mutilation, so we have the realistic motive for “why Jack is the way he is,” which is the purpose of the story. This is a literary plot because all of the actions in the story focus in on the question of “Why is Jack so fucked-up”? If this were a commercial story, there would be more emphasis on the background actions in the plot, and the scenes toward the end of the story would probably be different because they would lead to Jack getting well, solving his drug problem. The ending would be happier. Instead of the final act of the plot being Jack trading sex to continue his drug habit, a commercial plot would have a happier, more inspiring ending, like Jack getting clean, reconnecting with his mother. That sort of thing.
“Who Wants to Shoot and Elephant?” has a more traditional “heroic quest” plot structure than “Jack, July,” with a focus on actions that lead to an elephant kill that lead to an ending that leads to the narrator’s expository interpretation of the meaning of the event: a lesson-learned. This plot, however, is also literary because the lessons are not easy, but complicated, as shown in the narrator’s conversation with his own brain:
“. . . I don’t hear you crusading for the pearl mussel, which can live for over a century.”
“But elephants are so splendid to look at,”
“Unlike a ten-point buck?”
Also in the end of the story, Wells Tower ends with an image that he leaves to the reader to interpret, of the buzzard puking on tourists. The image is central to the meaning of the stories, and is implied rather than revealed or explained, but there will be more on this in the Style/Imagery” Criteria below.

Common Narrative Plot Structures
Most narratives (another word for "stories"), whether in a short story, novel, film, or play, rely on some variation of the three-act structure, which is more consciously adhered to by the screen and play writer than the short story or novel writer, but it exists in all narrative forms.
There are a number of ways of looking at this narrative structure. I will overview the main forms and give you resources to look at those forms in more detail, and then focus on my favorite way of looking at the form: the Heroic Quest Cycle.
In playwriting, you will often see the Three-Act structure talked about in terms of language applied by Aelius Donatus, a Roman scholar from the fourth century:
Act One: Protasis (Exposition)
Act Two: Epitasis (Complications)
Act Three: Catastrophe (Resolution)
Even before Donatus, who has nothing to do with the origins of donuts, in case you were wondering (I was), was Aristotle, who in his famous treatise on art called Poetics, talked about structure in terms of plot, or mythos. This was one of the first major works of western literature to look at storytelling structure in terms of a fixed plot. To see how he translated his analysis into the three-act mode, see Aristotle's incline for a nice cartoonish visual.


Freytag's Triangle
Another basic way of looking at the Three-Act Model is derived from Aristotle's explanation of dramatic structure. It looks like this (the three lines equal the three acts) and is called Freytag's Triangle:


Act I: Exposition
Act II: Rising Action and Climax
Act III: Falling Action and Resolution
Some argue that Freytag's Triangle is a Five-Act Structure consisting of:
I: Exposition
II: Rising action
III: Climax (or turning point)
IV: Falling action
V: Resolution
However, the "Climax" is typically seen as the end of Act Two (Rising Action) while the "Resolution" is the end of Act Three (Falling Action). The climax and resolution are not the act themselves, but the conclusions of the final two acts.
Freytag's Triangle is more or less an articulation of Aristotle's Incline using altered language to explain the same structure. What Aristotle called in Act I the "Set-Up," Freytag called "Exposition," and so on.
Another nice visual way of looking at the three act model is another version of Freytag's Triangle:







The Heroic Quest: Characterization and Crisis
I will explain the criteria of creating literary characters by talking more about plot, specifically by the heroic quest, because what drives plots in literary stories are the character’s quests to solve a problem, overcome some sort of obstacle, or work their way through a crisis. This basic story model has existed forever and all of these plot models above arise from the premise that without tension and conflict, there is no story. Therefore, there must be a problem or crisis at the root of all stories, and it is how the characters work through the problems that shows who they are, or like Kurt Vonnegut says, "what they're made of." Here is a note to writers from Kurt Vonnegut:
Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters,
            make awful things happen to them–in order that the reader may see
            what they are made of.
Every main character, or protagonist, including yourself if you are writing a narrative essay, should have a clearly defined quest, conflict, or crisis. Once the quest is established -- what the character wants, or what he or she is fighting against -- the character should strive toward the goal, face obstacles, and achieve some resolution, even if the result is a failure. The important thing is for characters to do things rather than just being victims of external forces. And in the end, by moving through these actions, the character should in some way be changed. The main character should be a different person from the one who existed before the story began.
For fiction writers: to clarify the significance of your story, write out the main character's essential quest in one simple sentence. If this cannot be done, the quest might not be clear. If the quest is clear, is it also important? Is there a lot at stake for the character? And when the conflict is resolved, has the character transformed (changed) in some way, even if subtle?
To understand the three-act models as described above, and the way that narrative functions best, and why it functions this way, it is important to look at it in terms of the Heroic Journey, best articulated in the works of Joseph Campbell. This is the clearest, oldest, and enlightening way to understand the core elements of good storytelling. To appreciate from where the power of storytelling derives, understanding Campbell's work is critical. View The Power of Myth.

Establishing and Resolving Conflict
“The writer’s characters must stand before us with a wonderful clarity, such continuous clarity that nothing they do strikes us as improbable.” – John Gardner
Characters are revealed by what they do, what they battle against. Without this tension and conflict, there is no story, and to create authentic, realistic plots, the writer must allow the character with freewill to create the plot rather than the other way around.  The writer should not enforce a series of events in order to make a point (as in composition), but instead, allow the “real” character, who develops naturally, to decide the course of events. The writer will trust the character to lead him or her because the writer knows something about the background of that character.
The general structure of a story that exists in most stories and movies is the heroic quest, and iti s based on a three-act structure, similar to all of the above models. Modern stories follow the same lines, though the literary writer tries hard to hide the “formula”:
            Act One: A hero/protagonist is identified and back-grounded.
                            The obstacles that seek- to “hold the hero back” are identified.
                            Challenges are clarified; hero knows what he or she must do.
            Act Two: Hero fights against the obstacles, comes up short.
            Act Three: Hero picks him or herself back up after a bout of self-doubt.
                              Hero fights back.
                              Hero wins.
To illustrate, let us plug the movie Rocky into this plot model:
Rocky, Act I
Rocky is presented in Act One as a small-time club-fighter, as nothing more than “A bum from the streets.” From the start, he’s very low in life, but then he’s presented with a challenge: Apollo Creed, the world boxing champion, asks his promoters to find a new opponent since he’s so good, he’s beaten everyone already.
His handlers find Rocky, and brainstorm a match between Apollo and this “Great White Hope.” At the end of act one, the promoter offers Rocky a million dollars to fight Apollo, and he’ll be paid whether he wins or loses. Rocky says “No.”
What’s going on here? Here’s a bum from the streets who doesn’t want to be a bum anymore, and he’s given the opportunity, even though he’s just a cheap club fighter, to make millions against the world champion, and he says no.
Here’s the clincher, and this will really amaze you and make you love the wonders of storytelling: the main conflict in the story is established: Rocky’s self-doubt. Rocky’s challenge is his own self-doubt, an internal conflict.
Rocky, Act II
Rocky battles against his self-doubt by falling in love, going up and down through mood swings based on his exercising like mad and getting tired. He believes in himself, then he doesn’t, and so on and so on. He finally makes a decision and re-establishes his real battle: he wants to “go the distance” rather than win the fight. If he can stay standing by the end of round 11, he’ll have won a personal victory over his self-doubt.
Rocky, Act III
Rocky makes a commitment to fight Apollo, exercises well, runs to the top of the Philadelphia courthouse steps and is ready to go. He finally fights Apollo, and at the end of the movie, when they have the big scene in the ring where he’s all bloody and hugging Adrienne and weeping, he’s victorious because he’s gone the distance. Then there’s a cut to Apollo, throwing his hands up in the air, became declared the winner. The real winner was Rocky, though. This is called a personal victory, like the Twins going .500 for the year. Some would call it a moral victory. This is the resolution of the story.
The conflict is resolved.
Rocky has the classic elements of story: Hero who starts off “low”, fights against the obstacles that want to keep him “low”, and beats those obstacles. Basically, whether you’re religious or not, this kind of story goes back to the story of Jesus. Every story you will ever read has the same essential characteristics.
The obstacles don’t need to be huge, like a dragon, an assassin, or a Russian submarine. Obstacles can be interior, too, a simple ethical decision. Think of the obstacles you as a hero face on a daily basis when trying to achieve the following goals:
•	To produce at work or school
•	To make money to support your family
•	To protect your children
Think of all the obstacles, and whether the authentic characters you create may face the same things.

The Hero Model in Three Acts
Following are some examples of points in the three-act structure (screenwriters call them plot points) from movie scenes.
ACT ONE
Ordinary World
The ordinary world is the ho-hum everyday life of the hero prior to being called away. In Star Wars, Luke Skywalker spends his days repairing robots. He's in a rut.
II: The Call to Adventure: Some adventures are purposeful, by the hero's choice, and some are accidental, which means the hero is thrown into an adventure. In Star Wars: A New Hope, Luke S. chooses to go off and fight for the rebels; he's given the choice. The hero leaves on a series of adventures to recover something or find something.  The hero must move beyond known, conventional safety in order to undertake this journey.
Refusal of the Call and Meeting With the Mentor

Most heroes initially reject the call. They are afraid to leave their "comfort zones," as they say. Luke Skywalker initially rejects Obi Wan's call for him to take action. Obi Wan Kenobi is a class mentor figure. Then there's Gandalf in The Lord of The Rings. And the list of mentors goes on. Some heroes also have companions or sidekicks on their quest, like Frodo's friend Sam in the Lord of the Rings trilogy. The companions can serve a variety of functions. They may offer balance for the hero, they may help the hero in battle, they may help the hero learn valuable lessons.
Crossing the Threshold: After accepting the quest, the hero will be launched into the adventure, often in a physical place, crossing from one world into another. This would be the end of act one. The story is in motion. The cantina scene in Star Wars is a classic example.

ACT II (The Middle)
Trials
The hero must prove to be worthy of hero status by facing challenges. In Harold and Kumar go to White Castle, Kumar faces a challenge that many heroes in the history of storytelling have faced: meeting with the father, or "Atonement with the Father." In fact, this was the core challenge of Luke in the Star Wars series. In Kumar's case, his father has an expectation that Kumar will be a doctor, whereas Kumar is fighting against that expectation.
ACT III
The Return: The heroic quest includes a going and a return, and if the hero achieves the goal, and the hero usually does, the hero achieves the "Freedom to Live." There is often some sort of public ceremony in the end, like the end of Star Wars and the Lord of the Rings.
If this all sounds a bit cliche, it is because it is.
For more detailed explanation of the quest model, go here.
Video: Joseph Campbell and the Myth of the Hero's Journey


Plotting and Temporal Transitions
Plots are often difficult to follow for many reasons, but mostly because they can be complicated as far as timelines go, when writers shift tenses from past to present and vice versa. Clear, easy, linear structure is often difficult to find in modern literature. Because of this, it is critical that writers use well-hones temporal transitions to guide the readers through the stories.
A strong narrative will have clear transitional language to show exact time passing between scenes and within scenes. Temporal transitions, written well, will make it clear where the story is taking place, and in what specific time.  See these examples of temporal transitions from Writer’s Digest University.
Temporal transitions, as well as guiding the reader through the timelines of events, can also work to add detail to plot, characterization, and setting, as evidenced in the Narrative Essay lecture with the temporal transitions used to great effect in “Boiled Peanuts with the Undead:” “After his business trip accident in Jackson, Mississippi, in 1978 . . .” and “Before my dad had the crap knocked out of him by an ex-con named Ed after sleeping with his wife . . .”.
In “Jack, July,” Victor Lodato uses standard temporal transitions at the beginning of paragraphs indicate time and backstory: “That same year, Jack met Flaco” (36). There is also another, hidden temporal transitional: a simple space-break. On page 37, a scene in flashback ends with “No one could argue with that,” which is followed by a space break, and then the first paragraph after the break simply begins with an action, “Jack pulled the cord . . .,” which returns the reader to the present-scene.
In the story “The Future Looks Good,” which open Lesley NnekaArimah’s story collection What it means When a Man Falls from the Sky, uses may temporal transitions because of the major time and event shifts in the story, ranging the lifetimes of multiple characters in a small story:
“When he is twenty-one, the war comes . . .” (2).
“Almost a year into their courting . . .” (3).
“Her family is soon forced to flee . . .” (3).
“She will have two daughters . . .” (4).



#2: Characterization
A writer of literary stories tries to avoid the perils of commercial formulas by working through the following checklist:
•	Characters are round and complicated rather than one dimensional, cardboard, flat characters. Cliches (that predictably transform, such as “Father-Who-Works-too-Much” character-type who realizes that family is more important than work).

•	The personalities of the characters are revealed to readers by “showing” rather than “telling,” through action, dialogue, and description.

•	Characters’ emotions are presented with realism and subtlety rather than hyper-drama (melodrama), otherwise known as  Sentimentality.

•	Point of View, Voice, and Tone. If the story is told in first-person, is the narrator’s tone identifiable? I define tone and “mood” and “personality.” Is there is a discernable, unique, interesting personality?

As Ann Charters writes, these standards are important to identify as readers, and critical for writers to think about all the time:
Are the characters believable? Are they stereotypes? Are they sympathetic or unsympathetic? Do they suggest people or abstract qualities? Is there one protagonist or several? How does the author tell you about the main character: through description of physical appearance, actions, thoughts, and emotions . . Does the main character change in the course of the story? If so, how? Why? (Charters 1674)
Characterization Terminology
	The following terms are from The Purdue Online Library.
•	Characterization: “The ways individual characters are represented by the narrator or author of a text. This includes descriptions of the characters’ physical appearances, personalities, actions, interactions, and dialogue.”

•	Antagonist: A character or characters in a text with whom the protagonist opposes.

•	Anti-hero: A protagonist of a story who embodies none of the qualities typically assigned to traditional heroes and heroines. Not to be confused with the antagonist of a story, the anti-hero is a protagonist whose failings are typically used to humanize him or her and convey a message about the reality of human existence.

•	Archetype: “a resonant figure or mythic importance, whether a personality, place, or situation, found in diverse cultures and different historical periods” (Mickics 24). Archetypes differ from allegories because they tend to reference broader or commonplace (often termed “stock”) character types, plot points, and literary conventions. Paying attention to archetypes can help readers identify what an author may posit as “universal truths” about life, society, human interaction, etc. based on what other authors or participants in a culture may have said about them.

•	Dialogue: Spoken exchanges between characters in a dramatic or literary work, usually between two or more speakers.

•	Protagonist: The primary character in a text, often positioned as “good” or the character with whom readers are expected to identify. Protagonists usually oppose an antagonist” (“Literary Terms”).

“Hero” versus “Protagonist” in Literary Stories
I want to start discussion of characterization by comparing/contrasting a story’s protagonist with the definition of a hero, as mentioned in the plotting section. Here I will throw around some definitions of the characteristics of a hero as a character in literary narratives.
According to the life-coaching industry, the qualities of the hero are courage, virtuosity, sacrifice, determination, passion, wisdom, focus, perseverance, honesty, loyalty, conviction, and responsibility. Literary writers would probably argue that this is the definition of an “ideal” person rather than a “realistic” person, and literary writing aims to reveal what “is” rather than what “should be.”
It does not seem like it, but the above definition of a hero creates a cardboard, wooden, flat, or one-dimensional character because all of the character traits are positive; therefore, a hero is a perfect person, and perfect people are hard to find in reality. So, the life-coaching definition of “hero” does not work for literature/reality.
The main standard in characterization: Characters are round and complicated rather than one dimensional, cardboard, flat, or wooden characters. Another term for wooden characters is “Stock Characters.” Peruse the list of examples.
Instead, I will use the term “Protagonist” rather than “hero” when referencing the main character in a story.
Characters are typically divided into two categories: primary and secondary. The protagonist is a primary character; a secondary character might be a character who appears in just a few scenes. In “Jack, July,” Jack is the main primary character and Bertie is a secondary character. (See Point of View below, and note that all of these criteria overlap.
Any character that provides an obstacle to the protagonist’s quest, or makes the protagonist’s problem worse, is an antagonist.
In literary stories, however, the protagonist is not necessarily good and the antagonist is not always just plain “bad.” Instead, a literary story presents characters like real human beings: complicated, hypocritical, funny, serious, sure of themselves, unsure of themselves, etc. In this context, a “hero” does not just have positive character qualities, but negative ones as well. And in literary stories, characters drive plot whereas in commercial stories – not always, but in general – emphasize plot. When you hear people say, after a movie, “Man was that slow,” chances are they saw a literary movie.
Literary characters should be round, complex, complicated. They should be multi-dimensional.
Jack in “Jack, July,” is presented as neither good or bad, but a real person, and there is a sense of empathy in the portrayal because readers, once they know the character, begin to understand why he is the way he is. This empathy is garnered by the character being presented without judgment. Instead, Jack is presented through his actions, dialogue, and by the way he is described, and also by revealing his thoughts. He is a character who is presented by the invisible narrator as morally ambiguous.
Empathy does not mean “like;” it means “understanding” a character, not necessarily “liking” the character. Says Oxford:
People often confuse the words empathy and sympathy. Empathy means ‘the ability to understand and share the feelings of another’ (as in both authors have the skill to make you feel empathy with their heroines), whereas sympathy means ‘feelings of pity and sorrow for someone else's misfortune’ (as in they had great sympathy for the flood victims).
Read how this passage not only presents Jack, a drug-addict, as multi-dimensional, by breaking stereotype, but also evokes empathy in the reader.
The sun drilled the boy’s head, looking for something. He closed his eyes and let the bit work its way to his belly, where the good stuff lived, where the miracle often happened: the black some reverting to pure white crystal. A snowflake, an angel. He smiled at himself in the dark glass. It was so easy to forgive those who betrayed you, effortless – like thinking of winter in the middle of July. It cost you nothing . . . He’d have to remember to speak on this, when he made his documentary. (23)
In the middle of a drug high, the reader is presented with the exact contents of Jack’s brain, which reveals his elation over his mania-induced insights, but also his intelligence and his desire for good things. We are in the addictive surges with him, and connected to him in a way. He wants to make a documentary of his drug-induced insights! Who doesn’t love a guy who wants to make a documentary?
We can also name Jack an anti-hero, though, according to Purdue Online Writing Library’s definition: “An anti-hero is a protagonist of a story who embodies none of the qualities typically assigned to traditional heroes and heroines. Not to be confused with the antagonist of a story, the anti-hero is a protagonist whose failings are typically used to humanize him or her and convey a message about the reality of human existence.”
Jack is a classic anti-hero; he is his own antagonist.

The term narrator is also important. The narrator is the person or being that tells the story. Since “Jack, July” is told in third-person limited point of view, the narrator is not a character in the story, and is unknown; there is no person revealed as the narrator.
Also, do not confuse the narrator with the writer in fiction stories. In creative nonfiction, such as “Who Wants to Shoot and Elephant,” since it is written by the author, the point of view is first-person point of view without question. The writer is the narrator. In fiction, identifying the narrator is sometimes trickier.
Jack is presented as being a slave to his drug addiction, but also as a smart person: “Walked around the block to see if he could trick it. He’d done it before. Pull one over on time. Circle back and confuse it. Like one of those aborigines (page)#.
Similarly, literary writers do not always – but do sometimes – try to tell entertaining stories, but still dig through the complex realities of human behavior; thus, there are many characters that are neither good or bad, but somewhere in the middle. Many are morally ambiguous, like Jack.
Whether writing fiction, poetry, or nonfiction, realism is key. “Reality” is defined as “What is,” not “what should be.” Some argue that realities are different for different people, but that is impossible. There is only one reality, though many people have different “perceptions” of reality. It’s those perceptions that the writer is concerned with: how to craft believable, authentic characters and events in order to uncover meaning.

Conflict is the Heart of a Character’s Journey
Again, in literary stories, characters are revealed by what they do, what they battle against. Without this kind of tension and conflict, there is no story, and to create authentic, realistic plots, the writer must allow the character with freewill to create the plot rather than the other way around.  The writer should not enforce a series of events in order to make a point (as in composition), but instead, allow the “real” character, who develops naturally, to decide the course of events. The writer will trust the character to lead him or her because the writer knows something about the background of that character.
The writer’s way of making events realistic, in stories, is called by John Gardner, author of The Art of Fiction, “Verisimilitude,” a “vivid and continuous” (31) dream, and anything that pulls the reader away from the dream – that shocks the readers’ suspension of disbelief or “pulls them from the story” is not good.

#2.1: Show, don’t Tell: Description, Action, and Dialogue
(What some call the “Show, Don’t tell” principle)
“The importance of physical detail is that it creates for us a kind of dream, a rich and vivid play in the mind” (30).
-- John Gardner, The Art of Fiction
The “Show, Don’t Tell” principle in the storytelling craft is not technically one of the six standards to just narraives. Howeve, it is so important, since the eay a writer handles action, description, and dialogue is the way that the the story is delivered to the reader. And since action, description, and dialogue are most important in developing character, I’ve made this is sub-sectionof character development along with point of view.
I have an advanced degree in Creative Writing and have been teaching English full-time for over two decades, so I can do this.
This section is especially critical for fiction writers, but no less for ENGL 1121 students in evaluating stories and how they are craftily delivered.
To emphasize the importance of this section: Being able to write strong action and description and good dialogue are the most important, and thus the baseline, basic skills of any story writer. To create and maintain believable characters – even in nonfiction narratives – writers reveal their characters best through action, dialogue, and description. These are the three skills should be most applied.
Pre-emptory note: the craft principles contained here apply to all modes of storytelling (except screenplays, which are 90% dialogue.)

Exposition versus Scene

But exposition is not confined to only the beginnings of stories. It is usually sprinkled into narratives throughout, as defined by the Literary Devices website (italics are mine):
“In literature, exposition is a form of writing that explains what’s happening or has happened in the story in a very matter-of-fact way. Exposition may present background information of the plot or characters, explain details about the setting convey a sense of the historical context, and so on. Authors are often counseled to keep exposition to a minimum so as not to bore the reader, or at least to include exposition in such a way that it doesn’t bog down the story. However, exposition is a necessary part of almost all stories as a way to convey important information” (“Definition of Exposition,” Literary Devices).
Exposition is always used in narratives, unless a writer chooses to write in 3rd person Objective Point of View (but more on that later). The main premise of the “Show, Don’t Tell Principle” is that exposition should be used sparingly because it slows pacing and clarity, whereas “showing” by the methods of scene-writing creates visceral reactions in readers. Scenes heighten engagement of the reader while exposition can bog a story down. Thus, when I say in my critiques of students’ stories and narrative essays that they need to “write with more scene than exposition,” I am furthering the “Show, Don’t Tell” principle that has been taught and believed and practiced by story writers for a long, long time. Here is a perfect definition of scene:
. . . dialogue and action that take place between two or more characters over a set period of ‘real time.’ Like a story, on its own small scale, a scene has a turning point or mini-crisis that propels the story forward to its conclusion. Scene is always necessary to fiction, for it allows us to see, hear, and sense the story’s drama moment to moment (Burroway 195).
The key for story writers is to show characters’ actions and behavior rather than telling the reader how they are acting or being. This is the most important skill of a writer, and it takes a lot of practice and revision. Stories should be presented through scenes that readers can see, where characters are revealed by what they do, how they look, where they live, and what they say.
As you write, think about what the reader sees and hears in their brains based on the words you provide. Can they visualize “scenes” just like in a movie?
Description/Action Techniques
John Gardner, in The Art of Fiction, probably the most famous craft book on storytelling, says “[The writer] must present, moment by moment, concrete images drawn from careful observation of how people behave . . . the exact gestures, facial expression, or turns of speech that, within any given scene, move human beings from emotion to emotion, from one instant in time to the next . . . Vivid detail is the life blood of fiction. [I would include nonfiction narrative, too].  (26)
Concrete Language
To write good description, use concrete rather than abstract words. Concrete language “shows” characters and events. Abstract language is non-specific, sometimes vague, and open to interpretation. Words like "courage," "confusion," "joy," and "beauty" are abstract.
Concrete language, on the other hand, is specific and cannot be argued with: "run," "jump," "snap," "computer," "eyebrow."
Concrete words express physicality, whereas abstract language expresses ideas, concepts and beliefs, things we can't access with our senses. Abstract language provides no vivid image, but creates cloudier associations for the reader.
Concrete language shows how things look and how people behave. Instead of writing, "Jamie was sad," a writer using concrete language might write, "Jamie covered her face with her hand but a tear seeped out." By her actions being described, the reader knows she was sad and doesn't need to interpret her "sadness."
In this passage from the narrative essay “Who Wants to Shoot an Elephant?” Wells Tower employs many basic descriptive methods:
Through the brightening dawn, the Land Cruiser bucks and rockets along miles of narrow trails socked in by spindly acacia trees, camellia-like mopani shrubs, and a malign species of thornbush abristle with nature’s answer to the ice pick. No elephants are on view just yet, though a few other locals have come out to note our disturbance of the peace. Here is a wild dog, a demonic-looking animal whose coat is done up in a hectic slime-mold pattern. Wild dogs, among the world’s most effective predators, are the biker gangs of America. They chase the gentle kudu to exhaustion in a merciless relay team (Best American . . .  3)
And in this passage in “Jack, July,” note the concrete words and how even though most of this is exposition, it is still active:
Again, the word proved thin, suspect. “Mama,” he said, testing another – an utterance that stopped him in his tracks and caused his torso to jackknife forward. Laughed to spitting. He could picture her face, if he ever tried to call her that. She preferred Bertie. Only sixteen years his senior, she often reminded him. Bertie of the scorched hair, in her sparkle tops and toggle pants. ‘What’s it sort for’ he once asked of her name. She’d told him that his grandfather was a humongous piece of shit, that’s what is was short for (Lodato 21).
Using Adjectives
Tower uses precise adjectives – words that describe -- to modify concrete nouns: “brightening dawn,” “narrow trails,” “spindly acacia trees, “camellia-like mopani shrubs,” and “malign species” (“Who Wants . . .” 3). This is the most basic method of description, used mostly in setting or character descriptions. In “Jacky, July,” pithy descriptions like this one rely on lists of adjectives: “”Rhonda made an irritated snort, half laugh, half fart” (Lodato 25).




Figurative Language as Descriptive Devices
“A simile makes a comparison with the use of like or as, a metaphor without. Though this distinction is technical, it is not entirely trivial, for a metaphor demands a more literal acceptance. If you say ‘A woman is a rose,’ you ask for an extreme suspension of disbelief, whereas ‘A woman is like a rose’ acknowledges the artifice in the statement” (Burroway32).
Tower uses three metaphors in one passage. First, the full passage:
Through the brightening dawn, the Land Cruiser bucks and rockets along miles of narrow trails socked in by spindly acacia trees, camellia-like mopani shrubs, and a malign species of thornbush abristle with nature’s answer to the ice pick. No elephants are on view just yet, though a few other locals have come out to note our disturbance of the peace. Here is a wild dog, a demonic-looking animal whose coat is done up in a hectic slime-mold pattern. Wild dogs, among the world’s most effective predators, are the biker gangs of America. They chase the gentle kudu to exhaustion in a merciless relay team (“Best American . . .” 3)
The Metaphorical Breakdown
1.  “. . . species of thornbush abristle with nature’s answer to the ice pick.” This metaphor compares the plant to an ice pick – creating an image to help describe the plant -- thus making the description visceral and powerful instead of just saying the plant “has sharp leaves.”
2, 3. And then he uses two consecutive metaphors: “Wild dogs, among the world’s most effective predators, are the biker gangs of America. They chase the gentle kudu to exhaustion in a merciless relay team.” The wild dogs are both “biker gangs” and “relay teams.” Thought one usually associate relay teams with competitive bicyclists and not motorcycle biker gangs, there is just enough connection between both metaphors – two-wheeled vehicles -- to avoid being a mixed-metaphor, which compares two or more unconnected images.
Here are some descriptive metaphors from “Jack, July:” “a strip-mall jungle (21),” a “bearded Mexican with a voice like a balloon losing air” (Lodato 22).  He describes buses as throwing “cannonballs of heat.” The imagery is violent and hostile, like the setting itself.
And note how some of his descriptive similes also contribute to Jack’s character development, to describe his wild, racing mind: “The word sounded funny, like a flute (25), and describing  a sensation “under his cheek bones, near his eyes” as “like a tuning for an organ at the back of a church (Lodato 26).” Similes can be long, too, like that one, which works to add humorous effect to the tone of the story.

Blending Descriptive Devices
“In the fly-eye of his mind he saw them, curled up like caterpillars . . . (Best American . . . 21) uses a metaphor and a simile in a single sentence describing two things, and on the above passage, Towers’ simile “camilia-like mopani shrubs” combines adjective-description with simile description.
Description and Action Techniques in Exposition
This sounds crazy, but even exposition can pack more wallop and keep the narrative pace moving. I will parse one passage from “Jack, July” to illustrate how descriptive devices are used to create quality exposition.
Adjectives
Well-chosen adjectives to describe nouns is the most common descriptive device:
People going fast rearranged the furniture, or crawled around looking for carpet crumbs. Anything that used your hands, which, compelled by the imaginative fervor of your mind, became tools in a breathless campaign to change the shape of the world. It was art, essentially. Jack wondered why more people going fast didn’t do crafts. He suddenly wished for construction papers and Elmer’s glue; glitter, cotton, clay. Once, when he was little, he’d made a kick-ass giraffe from a walnut and some toilet-paper tubes. The legs, ingeniously, had been chopsticks (Lodato 27).
Concrete Nouns
I have highlighted the nouns in the paragraph:
People going fast rearranged the furniture, or crawled around looking for carpet crumbs. Anything that used your hands, which, compelled by the imaginative fervor of your mind, became tools in a breathless campaign to change the shape of the world. It was art, essentially. Jack wondered why more people going fast didn’t do crafts. He suddenly wished for construction paper and Elmer’s Glue; glitter, cotton, clay. Once, when he was little, he’d made a kick-ass giraffe from a walnut and some toilet-paper tubes. The legs, ingeniously, had been chopsticks (Lodato 27).
There are, by my count (mathematics is not a strength of mine) eleven concrete nouns and only two abstract nouns: “People,” “He,” and “Shape.”
Concrete nouns are vital to “showing” rather than “telling” because they put an image into the reader’s mind.
Note that the nouns “Shape,” “Construction,” “Elmer’s,” and “toilet-paper” work as adjectives, too. These nouns – three of them concrete and one abstract -- describe nouns. They serve two parts of speech even though technically they are defined as nouns.” Another example of a noun describing a noun is in “Jack, July “a strip-mall jungle.”
Verbs
And not only is much of the exposition concrete, but some of the verbs also serve as concrete action. I emboldened the verbs in the same passage:
People going fast rearranged the furniture, or crawled around looking for carpet crumbs. Anything that used your hands, which, compelled by the imaginative fervor of your mind, became tools in a breathless campaign to change the shape of the world. It was art, essentially. Jack wondered why more people going fast didn’t do crafts. He suddenly wished for construction papers and Elmer’s glue; glitter, cotton, clay. Once, when he was little, he’d made a kick-ass giraffe from a walnut and some toilet-paper tubes. The legs, ingeniously, had been chopsticks ( Lodato 27).
This exposition/background information is mostly concrete: of the 89 words of the exposition, there are about 35 concrete nouns and verbs – and the rest of the words are adverbs, articles, prepositions, pronouns, and passive nouns ( “anything)” and verbs (“was,” had been,” such as  ).
This mix of controlled exposition works to further develop a darkly funny tone and voice in that it is the unseen narrator’s voice writing in third-person limited, reflecting what is in the protagonist’s head – the voice inside his mind. This one passage also develops plot (background info) via concrete exposition.
Making Lists (Seriation)
I always start creative writing classes with an exercise that is nothing more than listing fifty concrete nouns. I start the course by having writers think more about things rather than ideas, and let the stories develop from those things.
I am usually self-conscious about including my own writing in this lecture for purposes of teaching narrative techniques, but I am going to do it now because I think a certain passage in one of my stories shows that a list of concrete items – related items, in certain categories, not just random things -- can advance Setting and Character and Theme.
I wrote a story called “Storage” which is the last story in a collection of short stories about characters who live in a suburban-American cul-de-sac, titled Cul De Sac. The stories are about the suburban men and their domestic experience. “Storage” is about the principal character in the book, who is dealing with his father’s death and trying to figure out the big questions, what it all means, trying to process a lot of feelings that he’s never dealt with before, so he deals with his problems by doing project work, organizing things, like matching Tupperware lids to their vessels, or trying to figure his own father’s garage-storage methods.
Instead of putting pressure on myself to begin writing about "malaise," which is a "big idea," I made a list of things that are particularly "suburban" and the described them. Examples: deck stain, plastic storage bins, power washers, sport utility vehicles.
Sometimes this worked to build a story and sometimes it didn't. The "storage bin" description worked. I started by going to target with a notebook and went to the aisle where the plastic storage bins are. I started with physical description of the bins such as "the blue bin can hold twelve gallons of water" to freer simile-descriptions like "the bin looks like a transparent UFO that landed upside down." Then I took the material and kept free writing and some characters appeared and then some tension appeared and then a story. The exercise served its purpose. From the exercise, I built a story and the "big idea" of suburban malaise came through, without forcing it or even thinking about it while I was writing, but just sort of putting it in the back of my brain as a I wrote about things. And in the final published revision, most of the physical description of the bins was revised away as I work shopped the story.

Lists as Research
Sometimes, the descriptive lists a writer makes do not end up on their full form in the story or novel. Instead, making lists outside of the actual manuscript is what a writer considers field research, like when I went to Target and described the storage bin aisle. I also took photos – photos are great to write description from. Some descriptions ended up in the story, but not a ton.
Listing also works for nonfiction narratives. I am writing a book length narrative now about being evacuated from Grand Canyon and evacuating my family from Hurricane Irma. I wrote very little of the material during the trip because I didn’t have time, so when I returned home, the writing process began. To help me with the setting description, I had photos to write from, but also used the internet to compile a list of specific scientific terms relating to the geography of the canyon, the climate in Florida, names of plants and animals in both places, to make sure I was accurately describing the places I was no longer in.
When I write about a trip, I will use the library or the internet to create a list of key descriptive terms such as the specific names of plants and animals and geographic features, place-names -- and then whenever my writing feels too expositional, I go to the list and start describing, focusing on nouns and verbs, nouns and verbs, nouns and verbs. I do the research after the trip.

Specific Details: Lists as Field Research
Avoid general description in favor of specific descriptive detail. The aforementioned list-compiling can help with this.
Instead of saying that a character ate at a "restaurant," name the restaurant. This is important information for both the characters and setting. If a character goes into a McDonald's or an Olive Garden, the choice about going to those particular places says something about the character. The descriptive detail adds to the characterization and setting.
Instead of a character “listening to music,” have the character “sitting cross-legged on her bed, eyes closed, listening to Alanis Morissette. A character’s musical taste says something about the character. Once, a student wrote a story about a father/son car trip and wrote a sentence about the music on the radio, except the writer did not describe the music on the radio. And sometimes even specific lyrics can help bring out the theme of a story so long as it is subtle and real to the situation.
For field research, make a list if specific items in a specific area. Go out into the kind of community you want to be your setting and make lists of specific things: billboards (actual language and images), cars, bumper stickers, store names, restaurants, etc. And keep the lists at your side as you write, to draw concrete imagery from.
Avoid Characters “Thinking to Themselves” and Reveal Emotions Indirectly
To make a story “move,” characters should be actively doing and saying things to other people in the story to reveal themselves and their conflict to the readers, through active description and detail. Their inner lives should be revealed through their actions, the way they interact with the other characters and the setting. If you do need to have a character think to her or himself, make sure the thoughts are unique, weird, funny, something more than standard emotions or information spills).
Most important: always avoid “telling” directly a reader how a character feels, including yourself, if you are character in a creative nonfiction story. Write good description and dialogue to reveal characters and their stories. Avoid “telling” the reader than “John was nervous." Instead, show John chewing the edge of his awesome biker mustache.
Another rule of writing good stories is to avoid telling a reader directly how a character feels, such as “John was nervous.” Instead, go at it indirectly by showing John’s behavior. “He sat at his desk, his knees bouncing and his hands working two fidget-spinners hard, waiting for the professor to pass back his plagiarized story.” The actions reveal John’s nervousness and why he’s nervous.
Being able to write strong action and description and good dialogue (which is covered next) are the most important, and thus the baseline, basic skills of any story writer. To create and maintain believable characters – even in nonfiction narratives – writers reveal their characters best through action, dialogue, and description. These are the three skills should be most applied. (Wrobel, about three pages ago ).

The Standards of Realistic Dialogue
•	A character’s dialogue should seem authentic, not contrived
•	Each character should speak uniquely.
•	All dialogue should serve at least two criteria, usually character and plot.
•	Avoid monologues in dialogue.
•	Accurately format dialogue for clarity.

Dialogue, as much as description and action, is equally important as a skill to reveal characters directly to the reader, so they can be heard rather than having the narrator, who is you in a Nonfiction Narrative, getting in the way by summarizing what a character says.
Good stories are held together by good scenes, and good scenes are held together by action, dialogue and description, not exposition. Scenes in writing are just like scenes in a movie: they are “seen” and heard rather than explained. Thus dialogue, being the sound in writing, is a critical element of scene writing. It is another form of description.
What is terrific about good dialogue to both the storyteller and reader is that is provides a direct link between the reader and a character without the writer getting in the way. Instead of, for example, a writer explaining that a particular character (we’ll call him Sparky) is funny, it’s usually more effective to “show” the characteristic of “funny” through description or dialogue.
     “Knock knock,” said Sparky.
     “Who’s there?” I said.
     “Orange.”
     “Orange who?” I said.
     “Orange you glad I didn't say 'orange' again?” Sparky said. And then he laughed until his eyes got wet.
Maybe that’s not the best example of the character being funny, but it does reveal something about the character, that he thinks he’s funny. And this is shown rather than explained. The reader understands perfectly.
Dialogue is critical. Here are four key points about making it effective:

Dialogue Should Seem Realistic rather than Forced
(Avoiding wooden speech)
Literary writers do not fluff up a character’s speech to make him or her seem more intelligent or articulate. Say, for example, if a writer re-creates the speech of a father who happens to be a wheat farmer with a fifth grade education, and the father speaks like a news anchorperson, with perfect grammar, who’s going to buy it? This is not in any way a comment on the farmer’s lack of education; instead, it’s about integrity to truth, to what “is”. Example: “You need to stay on the farm, Bill,” said my father as he pulled the bill of his John Deere cap down over his grease-smeared forehead. “I need to pass along what my father has passed on to me. This is the cycle of existence, Bill. Do not break it.”
That is an example of wooden speech. It is monotone, flat, without life.
My first reaction to this passage of dialogue would be, “I don’t buy it.” My advice to the writer would be: Trying to hide bad grammar in the speech of a character is not being true to that character. Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer had awkward grammar, but no one cared about that; it didn’t diminish their worth as intelligent humans beings; in fact, Tom Sawyer, though his grammar isn’t great, is one of the wisest characters ever presented in a story. Make the dialogue true to the character; though your writing needs to be grammatically sound, the speech of your characters does not. So, some technical things writers can do to make people’s speech authentic:
•	Have characters use contractions. Instead of a character saying, “I do not want to go to school today,” have the character say, “I don’t want to go to school today.” People rarely speak formally unless they’re giving a lecture or something.

•	Use occasional slang to reflect the culture or age of a particular character. Instead of a character saying, “I don’t want to go to school today,” have the character, if a little kid, say, “I don’t wanna to go to school today.”

•	Don’t overdo the use of slang. Too much becomes unbelievable and contrived.

•	To best learn how to write authentic dialogue, writers need to listen to the way people speak and be able to mimic them. More on this here:

Each character should speak uniquely
This is probably the hardest part of writing dialogue for even the most professional writers. In reality, many people who live in the same places and have the same backgrounds seem to speak the same way. If you’re writing about working class guys from Brainerd, for example, the fellow might stereotypically talk like characters from the movie Fargo, with constricted vowels (instead of saying “boat,” they say “boot”), and they also speak in Northern Minnesota cliches, “Well, that’s different,” or “that can really get a guy mad”).
Though stereotypes are often arise from reality – it is true that stereotypes are true – if they become over-exaggerated, just like anything in writing, they become unbelievable.
Also, by making these “similar characters from the same place and with the same backgrounds” talk exactly alike, we’re saying that they are alike, and that really hurts the character development, where the task is to bring out the individual character of the individual character.
With all this said, these characters “do” talk the same, unless one listens more closely. When listening closely, one will begin to hear differences, and these differences need to be in the writing.
To make each character seem unique, writers need to train their ears in real-life to not only listen carefully to the way people speak, but to analyze and even mimic them. For this reason, the “Overheard Speech” exercise from “Trigger Exercises” is my favorite exercise. It is useful and needs to be practiced informally all the time.
Example: Listen to a good comedian who does good impersonations. Chances are, that comic developed those impressions over time by studying real people. Jonathan Winters, one of the greatest voice and character impersonators, used to hide behind the living room couch when he was little and just listen to his family members talk. Then he mimicked them and they were amazed. He literally absorbed their speech and cadences.
Writers can do the same thing, and do. They can literally mimic, in writing, the speech patterns of others by analyzing and studying real people. They train their ears to “listen,” and this way, dialogue becomes natural to the characters rather than the writers trying to forcefully craft the speech in their own image. This is a real mistake; you will know you are forcing uniqueness on characters when all the characters start sounding more like you, the writer, than who they are.
Example: When Jonathan Winters impersonated his characters, he almost literally become those characters. There was no more Jonathan Winters. I do not mean to get mystical, but a writer should be able to lose him or herself in characters. It is the characters who should speak, not the writer. The writer is just a channel, in a way, for the voices of the characters, because with enough study and training, all those voices are within the writer.

All Dialogue should do at Least Two Things

Dialogue should never exist in a story simply to deliver information; it must have a purpose to the story’s development. Janet Burroway quotes William Sloane, in The Craft of Writing, “There is a tentative rule that pertains to all fiction dialogue. It must do more than one thing at a time or it is too inert for the purposes of fiction [or nonfiction narratives] (Qtd. in Writing Fiction 69). ”
Dialogue should be brief, too and Monologues avoided.  Smaller bits of dialogue can make a scene move faster, heighten tension in the plot, and realistically develop characters.  Sometimes, the less said, the better, so long as at least one of the main narrative purposes is delivered: developing character or advancing plot.
I will give you an example of a short exchange of dialogue that reveals character. It is from one of my own stories called “Storage,” I am not using it as an example to boast, but because it illustrates my point. This small bit of dialogue takes place at the end of the first scene in the story, which shows a middle-aged suburban guy in his kitchen trying to match lids to plastic storage containers and getting frustrated. He is home because he took time off work to bury his father. The story is told from his POV. Here is the exchange:
“Hey, Dad,” says my other son Alan, walking into the kitchen. “I’m going over to Kimmy’s to play XBox.”
“Who’s Kimmy?” I say.
“Jimmy,” he says.
“I swear to God you said Kimmy.”
That’s all there is. I had a comment from one reader that this was funny because it was “so random,” but the sequence is not random. The four lines of dialogue are there for a purpose, to show his distraction. His mind is somewhere else. The dialogue serves the purpose of developing the character by revealing his distraction (a character-quality) due to an event (a key plot point, called the “inciting event.” This, the brief exchange does two things.
However, using dialogue to simply reveal plot information via exposition is bad because it sounds unnatural and wooden. Avoid this by just writing exposition using concrete nouns and verbs.
Formatting Dialogue Correctly for Stories

Itis not only important to be artistically sound in writing dialogue, but it is equally important to be technically correct. Great dialogue can be ruined by sloppy formatting.
The following basic rules of formatting dialogue for stories (short fiction and novels) are for the purposes of clarity, to make it easy for the reader to follow the stream of a conversation. When characters speak, their exact language should be in quotes, and the reader should know who is speaking, thus these rules:
1.  Each speaker gets his or her own paragraph; a return and indent. This mimics real conversation, indicating pauses and so forth. You do not want to run multiple speakers’ speech together in one paragraph. It is hard to read.
2.  Attributions (“He said, “She said” and variations) should be used, but not too much; they can be used at the start of quotes, in the middle, or at the end. When attributions are overused, they get in the way; the key is that the reader should always know who is speaking. Sometimes when two characters are speaking, once you establish who is speaking, you can omit tags entirely in some cases (see example below).
3.   Always use a comma after attribution (She said,) when introducing a quote.
4.   Write concise, accurate attributions (“he said,” “she said”) and punctuate them correctly.
Example of a correctly formatted passage:
              When I was eight, my father dragged me into my bedroom after I lit a folded pile of his shirts on fire. I sat on the edge of the bed, not looking up, my hands folded mannerly in my lap.

            “What’s wrong with you?” he asked.

            “Nothing,” I said.

            “You lit my shirts on fire, boy? Where’d you learn that?”

            “Daycare.”

            “What? Daycare?” He said. “You learned how to light shirts on fire at daycare?”

            I froze and looked up the ceiling, trying to backtrack. I actually learned how to light matches by watching him light his pipe, but I couldn’t tell him that.

            “A kid brought matches one day. I told him matches were bad.”

            “I’m calling your daycare.”

            “No,” I said. Okay, I screamed it, and he scowled at me.

            “Tell me the truth, lad.”

            I took a deep breath and let it out: “I hate your shirts, Dad. They remind me of those guys on TV who golf.”

Dialogue Tags
Attributions are what I called “dialogue tags,” the little markers than tell the reader who is speaking: He said, She said, Bob said.
It is important to keep dialogue tags clear and simple. Do not overwrite them by adding unneeded adverbs (words that usually end in –ly) or verbs. This is a common error of beginning writers. Example:
“I hate cats,” Mary said angrily.
There’s no need to use the adverb “angrily” is the speech itself show anger. You always want to the words themselves to deliver the particular emotion, so choose the dialogue carefully. In this case, the writer is not trusting him or herself that the dialogue effectively reveals the character’s anger, and so adds the adverb “just to make sure.” No need, though, in this case, however: the word “hate” effectively shows anger.
Or instead of writing the verb “said,” some writers will instead throw in a verb that explains emotion rather than the fact that the person spoke. Example:
“I hate cats,” Mary raged.
The word "raged" is not only unnecessary, but it’s inaccurate. Mary did not “rage.” She “spoke.” With the dialogue tag, just say she “said.” And then in the next line, write the “description” of the rage.
“I hate cats,” Mary said. Then she pounded her fist on the table and made the forks flip onto their backs.
If you use too many different kinds of dialogue tags and try to cram too much information into them, they become distracting to the readers. They interrupt the progress of the narrative. Make the dialogue and description do the work of scene-building and then you won’t have to load up the dialogue tags with heavy adverbs and verbs.














 #3: Point of View
Point of view is easy to identify in a story as a reader, but as a writer, it is one of the hardest decisions to make. Deciding from which POV to tell a particular story is tough, maybe the toughest, most critical decision a writer can make.
The best way to go about choosing a POV is to write the story draft, in brief, from different POV's. If you start telling the story from one character's POV, take a break and tell the same story from another character's voice. Then take a break and tell the story from an omniscient POV and see what happens. In general, the POV that feels most natural is probably the correct choice.
Another method, and the one I prefer, is to tell the story in the manner I find most fluid, and then offer up the draft for inspection by a group of readers, and if they have concerns about POV, I will address them in the revision. If they do not have any concerns as reader, then I probably can move forward with other matters in my revision.
In a workshop, point of view should usually be the first topic of discussion.

Point of View Standards
•	Story should be told from the best possible angle (often through a character or various 3rd person perspectives such as omniscient or limited) in order to achieve its full effect. See Choosing the Right Point of View.
•	If a first-person narrator as in a Narrative Essay, he or she should my reliable or unreliable, and reliability doesn't necessarily mean intelligent or even honest. It means instead that the narrator should be authentic and have a unique voice that adds a level of sophistication to the way the story is told.
•	Types of narrative [Point of View]: The narrator is the voice telling the story or speaking to the audience. However, this voice can come from a variety of different perspectives, including:
o	First person: A story told from the perspective of one or several characters, each of whom typically uses the word “I.” This means that readers “see” or experience events in the story through the narrator’s eyes.
o	Second person: A narrative perspective that typically addresses that audience using “you.” This mode can help authors address readers and invest them in the story.
o	Third person: Describes a narrative told from the perspective of an outside figure who does not participate directly in the events of a story. This mode uses “he,” “she,” and “it” to describe events and characters.

First-Person POV in Fiction Stories
If the story is told – in fictional stories -- from one of the character's points of view, then the story is told in 1st Person. This may be the most commonly-used POV in contemporary short fiction because it can have a nice immediacy and the "voice" of a character-as-storyteller can really be developed with some freedom that one does not have with other points of view (though there are also restrictions). Examples abound in this form in various modern lit mags.
In first-person point of view in fiction, since it is usually the protagonist of a story (in fiction) who is telling the story, we often hear the character’s thoughts directly reported, even though those thoughts may not be fully accurate or reliable. This is called an unreliable narrator, a narrator whose presentation of story events cannot be taken as truth.
And this is what makes first-person narration so wonderful.
An unreliable narrator is a great fictional device, but not so much in creative nonfiction, where the narrator is the writer and needs to ensure trust, is defined by Ann Charters: “The first-person narrator, whether a major or minor characters, can be reliable or unreliable, making us aware as we read his or her story that the account is skewed and that we can’t quite trust the point of view . . .” (The Story and its Writer 1091). However, it is important to know that writers do this on purpose. It is not an accident. Continues Charters, “The biased report of the first-person narrator must have dramatic significance in the story since there is often a discrepancy between the way he or she sees the characters and events and the reader’s sense of what really happened” (1091).
As mentioned in the Plot section above, the protagonist of “Jack, July,” is a terrific unreliable narrator. We get to know him through his bad logic, rationalizing, over-intellectualizing, deflection of blame, etc. And here is another example: My Beard

First-Person in Nonfiction Stories
(For 1121 and 2261 classes)
In nonfiction stories – the like ones we written in College Writing and Critical Reading and Writing Creative Nonfiction, the writer him or herself is the narrator.
For creative nonfiction storytellers, it is important to present oneself as a reliable narrator (which has nothing to do with hiding character flaws, which should exist), but there are some character traits creative nonfiction writers/narrators should avoid. I like to think of a creative nonfiction narrator as a traveling companion, at the driver on a short road trip, and the reader is the passenger. And it's the driver's job to entertain and inform the passenger, and thus not be irritating, self-congratulatory, or preachy.
•	Narrator should be self-critical rather than self-congratulatory. Never brag, and don’t be afraid to be self-deprecating.

•	The narrator must be some sort of struggle or conflict or desire. Something important must be at stake. Writing about struggles is way more interesting than writing about winning.

•	There should be an emphasis on scenes (showing) rather than exposition (telling).

•	Don’t play the victim. Accept responsibility for bad things happenings.

•	Related to this, avoid be overly judgmental or coming across as morally superior to other characters in the story.

•	And don't preach at the reader. Allow scene-writing (action, dialogue, and description) to do the work.
Think of yourself in a cross-country car trip. You are driving and in the passenger’s seat is a complete stranger and it is your job to make his/her trip pleasant.
“Who Wants to Shoot an Elephant?” in Best American Nonrequired Reading 2015 is a great example of an unreliable yet trustworthy narrator. Tower is reliable as a reporter, but also unreliable in that he calls attention to his biases and weaknesses, but does so in the form of self-deprecation, which endears him to the reader. After having a discussion with Rann about poaching, Tower’s ends with a parenthetical observation: [“Patient silence during which Rann seems to be restraining self from uttering the word ‘pussy’ in conjunction with visiting journalist”] (“Who Wants . . .” 7).
He is also direct with his biases and feelings about killing elephants, and this sort of candor is endearing to the reader, whether the reader agrees with the sentiment or not. A section title: “”Chapter 4: How it felt to Watch an Elephant Die.”
You don’t even need to read the section to know how it felt for him.
In this example of first-person POV, the author’s voice rings clear. We have the sense of a unique person driving the car, one who is complicated, interesting, and earnest in his journey.
(More on Voice in the Style Section. There is major cross-pollination between point of view and voice).
Second-Person
A less common POV is 2nd person, in which you, the reader, are a character in the story itself and the "invisible" writer addresses you directly as "you," as I am doing in this lecture. This is probably the hardest POV to write in fiction since it is not a natural storytelling mode (but rather the mode used in instruction manuals like this one, or post-game interviews with athletes) in that it draws attention to itself as a stylistic flourish, often to the detriment of the story itself. Often, it's just too clever for its own good, but if done well, can be great. Here is a modern second-person point of view story: "Weather Girls" by Marylou Fusco. We are not going to deal with this much in 1121, and just a bit in 2263.

Third-Person
If the story is told from a voice outside of the story, an anonymous presence, that has equal access to the brains of all characters, and dips in an out freely, reporting on what is going on in every character's brain, this is called 3rd Person Omniscient, and might be the most common POV in most stories.
In contemporary short fiction, however, and novels, 3rd Person Limited POV has become more common. If the story is told from an anonymous voice outside the story but with a focus on only the consciousness of a particular character or two, this is 3rd person limited rather than omniscient because the outside narrator has limited access. “Jack, July” is a perfect example.
3rd Person Objective is when the invisible narrator has access to all character’s actions and behavior, but with no access into the characters’ minds. Instead, the story is told via action, dialogue, and description, with little to no exposition. This might be the toughest point of view to write in because it literally forces writers to only show, and never tell. The result of this point of view is a more distant and balanced presentation of characters. Readers are only given action, dialogue, and description to be able to fully understanding characters and their motivations.

Multiple and Shifting Points of View
In much contemporary fiction, especially Post-Modernism – a subgenre of literary writing where writers are more free to experiment and manipulate traditional points of view -- many stories are told from multiple and shifting points of view.
Point of View Story Examples
First-Person: “My Beard,” “Boiled Peanuts with the Undead,” “Bee Man,” “The Birthday Place.” “Who Wants to Shoot and Elephant?” and “The High Road” from BANR 2015.
Third-Person Omniscient: "Hills Like White Elephants,” "A Small, Good Thing."
Third-Person Limited: “Jack, July,” BANR 2015; "Where are You Going, Where Have you Been?"
Second-Person POV: “You are in the Dark, in the Car, BANR 2015; "Weather Girls."
Mixed and Multiple Points of View: “The Christmas Miracle” (mixes 1st-person and 2nd person); “780 Days of Solitude” (multiple points of view), BANR 2015.

#4: Setting
Setting is defined as “The place and time in which a story takes place; also, in a broader sense, the culture and ways of life of the characters and the shared beliefs and assumptions that guide their lives (Charters 1743).
Well-placed setting description makes a story, including its main characters, more realistic. “When the writer locates the narrative in a physical setting, the reader is moved step by step toward acceptance of the fiction” (Charters 1683). It achieves what John Gardner calls verisimilitude.
For a literary writer,
•	Setting should enhance at least two criteria of narratives, such as plot, character, and theme. And thus:
•	The setting should be the right and realistic place for the characters act out their conflicts, and thus should be presented mainly – especially for fiction writers -- through description and action (and sometimes dialogue).
•	Setting should also – especially in nonfiction stories that include research – through exposition, explain the geographical, social/historical, and/or cultural elements – if relevant to the story.
Sometimes, setting is just backdrop. Every story has to take place somewhere, and that somewhere has varied importance depending on what the writer is trying to do. For example, in “Who Wants to Shoot an Elephant?” the setting has a huge part in the story since the setting is the place where the hunt occurs, but also the larger social conflict of wildlife poaching. In “Jack, July,” the story about a couple days in the life of a crystal meth addict, it would seem the setting would be less important, but for Jack, the setting – Tucson, Arizona -- is his home, and it is hostile towards him, another of his antagonists:
Traffic, a lot of it. On Speedway now, a strip-mall jungle, which, according to his mother, used to be lined with palm trees and old adobes, tamale peddlers and mom-and-pop shops. Not that Jack’s mother was nostalgic. She loved her Marts – the Dollar and the Quik and the Wal. “Cheaper, too,’ she said. She liked to buy in bulk, always had some extra. Maybe he should go to her place, instead of Rhonda’s, grab some granola bars, a few bottles of water for his pack. Sit on the old yellow couch under the swamp cooler, chew the fat. He hadn’t seen her in weeks. (Lodato 23)
The setting is especially important to the protagonist because it is where he lives. His home is the streets of Tucson (my guess based on the details of Sentinel Peak and the recurrent heat imagery). The setting description above not only shows where Jack is physically located, but also gives information about his mother, how she interacts with the setting; thus, we have setting detail that adds to both lot and character development.
The setting details also dramatize Jack’s plight, the fact that he lives in danger. “Buses roared past, their burning flanks throwing cannonballs of heat at the sidewalks” (22), “The sun drilled the boy’s head, looking for something” (23). And when he was fleeing his mother’s place, he paused to vomit and regain his composure: “Dirt, weeds, a huge prickly pear like a coral reef [and note the simile]. Jack covered his burning head with his t-shirt, exposing his belly. Why hadn’t the Founding Fathers planted more shade trees out here” (Lodato 32)?
In “Who Wants to Shoot an Elephant?” the setting is not only important as the environmental backdrop of the hunt that Tower is chronicling, as a journalist, but also for its socio-political context. So here, as previously reported, is great setting description for the merely physical:
Through the brightening dawn, the Land Cruiser bucks and rockets along miles of narrow trails socked in by spindly acacia trees, camellia-like mopani shrubs, and a malign species of thornbush abristle with nature’s answer to the ice pick. No elephants are on view just yet, though a few other locals have come out to note our disturbance of the peace. Here is a wild dog, a demonic-looking animal whose coat is done up in a hectic slime-mold pattern. Wild dogs, among the world’s most effective predators, are the biker gangs of America. They chase the gentle kudu to exhaustion in a merciless relay team (Tower 3)
Now, here is setting description that moves from the local space to the larger environment, into the political and social.
There’s been a regulated hunting industry in Botswana since the 1960s. Before the ban took effect, the government was issuing roughly 400 elephant-bull tags per year, of which Jeff Rann was allowed to buy about forty (Tower 7).
And it goes on from there. My point is that setting can also be exposition, so long as what it is explaining about the story’s environment is critical to the story, and in this case, that test is easily passed. The setting is much more than mere background.







# 5: Style
Trying to define style in writing is impossible, so I’m going to go ahead and define it as follows: style in writing is more or less the personality of the storyteller, and therefore “voice” plays a huge role in determining or defining “style.” Style is what makes a narrative voice unique, or if not different, at least interesting – something more than the ordinary.

The Standards of Style
•	The narrative structure of the story fits the story’s content and/or narrative voice.

•	No matter the point of view of the story, there should be a clear narrative voice/tone toward the story and its characters (unless 3rd person Objective).

•	The narrator employs carefully controlled figurative language and imagery to heighten and add focus to the story’s themes.

•	The narrator uses careful word choice that fits the story’s content and heightens and adds focus to the story’s theme.

Voice = Personality
Voice, to Margaret Atwood, is “a speaking voice, like the singing voice in music” (Qtd in Charters 1688). I agree. Voice, I also believe, is a sound the narrator conveys in everything he or she does with every criteria and standard of literary storytelling.
Writers/scholars get into heated debates trying to define style. I will not bore you with the debate, but I am on the side of those who believe that voice is style, based on the attitudes and habits in handling the standards of storytelling. For the purposes of my classes, however, instead of repeating every criteria and standard covered so far, I will define style/voice as a personality (even if an anonymous third-person narrator), and is revealed in these standards: organization, tone, sentence style, word-choice/vocabulary, and figurative language and imagery use.
Often, writers cultivate their own voice by taking traditional narrative expectations and breaking or manipulating them.

Breaking Traditional Narrative Structure
A story’s structure reveals a lot about the content and narrator. Writers craft the right organizational method for the purpose of the story. As mentioned in the Plotting section, literary story writers who use the traditional structural methods such as Freytag’s Triangle or the Heroic Quest Cycle try hard to hide those patterns from the reader so that the story becomes more about the plot than the characters.
In Wells Tower’s “Who Want to Shoot an Elephant?” the form follows a traditional pattern found nature/adventure essays, but because it is literature, he purposefully ignores some standard narrative conventions while still telling the scenes chronologically
Let’s examine “Who Wants to Shoot an Elephant?” by the Traditional Three-Act Story Model:
Instead of the first paragraph being merely exposition, the story begins with a scene in which Tower introduces the setting, protagonist, and the quest. He has also identified the quest in the chapter title. The second paragraph describes the principal characters, and one of them, Robyn, is established as the protagonist.
Or is she?
Towers then redefines the quest on page three by making the main quest his own, with narrator-as-main-character, while also showing doubt about his own part in the quest, via exposition:
I’ve truthfully promised Jeff Rann [the guide] that I’m not here to write an anti-hunting screed, merely to chronicle the hunt cooley and transparently. But the thing is, I’m worried that’ some unprofessional, bleeding-heart sympathy might fog my lens when the elephant gets his bullet. (“Who Wants to Shoot . . .”, 3)
So here, toward the end of the introduction, we are introduced to the primary protagonist, with his conflict clearly spelled out: he needs to remain objective and not take a side on the wild game hunting issue. He needs to fight his bias. This is an example of an internal conflict as the basis of a narrative, and that is fueled by the external drama.
Some traditional rules are broken here -- traditionally structured essays rarely have section/chapter titles, but the main break in tradition is introducing a secondary character before the primary character. But for the most part, Act One does what it is expected to do.

At the start of “Chapter Three,” which is set up to the reader to begin Act II, the actual hunt, before technically launching on the rising action of the quest, Tower begins with “there will be an elephant killed in this story.” This shifts the focus of the story being focused on the question of whether the hunt results in a killing or not, but instead shifts the focus to Tower’s own ruminations and shifting thoughts and feelings about the systematic killings.
II, the middle of the story, consists of scenes about the hunt itself, along with exposition of the subject-larger of institutional hunting of elephants, playing out Wells Tower’s inner conflicts. This is a fairly traditional Act II purpose.
After the hunt is done and the elephant bagged, Tower explains what he has learned from the hunt, how his thoughts have been transformed, if at all, through a numbered list in the form of a conversation with himself.
This itself is a variation on the traditional presentation of the knowledge gained/lessons-learned from the story, which is usually in traditional paragraph form.
Another test of structure is to see whether he, as protagonist, has transformed. Has the hero changed as a result of the experience. Based on the list, there is no clear, easy conclusion regarding his complicated thoughts except:
The conclusion of the narrative is a scene rather than exposition, which is also a departure from traditional structure. Instead of stating an overriding idea, Towers instead implies the idea through an image. The buzzard’s puking on the tourists implies, rather than states, that justice has been somewhat served, that nature and wilderness is taking a literal puke on the tourists who pay a lot of money to “bag” nature. The image is a metaphor in itself, the buzzard representing nature, and the tourists representing trophy hunters like the Waldrips. In a way, this subtle metaphor, which is carefully executed, is like passive-aggressive behavior. Towers makes his final point with a micro-aggression.

Literary Stories Subvert Traditional Narrative Expectations
That is a complicated way of saying that literary stories often intentionally break rules.
Another quality of literature is that it often subverts traditional expectations not only in plot, but also character. For instance, in “Jack, July,” a story about a person in the throes of a drug addiction, the usual expectation in a narrative is to show the character in great pain, but often in the story, Jack is presented as happy while drugged-up, and the happiness is revealed by the play happening in his mind. We are allowed to view his exacts thoughts and feelings: “He closed his eyes and let the bit work its way into his belly, where the good stuff lived, were the miracle often happened: the black smoke reverting to pure white crystal. A snowflake, an angel.” (Lodato 23).
In the image itself, which is concrete, the word choice – the literary term for this is called diction -- is very careful, for a purpose. The simple use of the word “miracle” implies all sorts of things, but most of all, religion. And we could think that this is an accident, but the added use of “angel” reveals that the author is intentionally using religious imagery. It is not an accident.
The image itself shows that Jack’s entry into his high is like a religious experience. Instead of the narrator stating it, though, as in “To Jack, being on meth was like a religious experience,” Towers instead implies the thought via specific imagery.
Speaking of diction, let’s talk about diction:

Tone
The tone of a story or essay is defined as the narrator’s attitude toward his or her subject (characters, situations). Simply, it is the prevailing emotional state of the narrator (even if third-person). The tone many be angry, compassionate, humorous. Tone can be heard as the emotional mood of a story; for example, the mood might be dark, serious, humorous, sarcastic, contemptuous, comic, satirical, or any combination of moods. And tone can be heard in the writer’s sentence-style, word-choice, and figurative language, so I’ll cover all three here, together.
How would you describe Wells Tower’s tone as a narrator based on the following passages?

1.	“Now here is a pair of water buffalo. Charming they are not. They scowl sullenly from beneath scabrous plates of unmajestic, drooping horn. ‘Hostile, illiterate” are the descriptors I jot on my notepad (“Who Wants . . .” 3).”

2.	In describing Robyn and Will Waldrip:
“They look like models from a Cabella’s catalog. They are companionable and jolly, and part of the pleasure of their company is the feeling that you’ve been welcomed into a kind of America where no one is ever fat or weak or ugly or gets sad about things (“Who Wants . . .” 2).”
3.	Observing the elephant just before killing it:
“It seizes my lungs with a breathless frustration to watch the elephant foolishly grubbing salad while we stand within a stone’s throw, plotting the proper method to put a bullet in its brain” (“Who Wants . . .” 10).

Diction/Word Choice
Another major factor in developing a narrator’s voice is the specific choice of words in all contexts. Diction is “the choice and arrangement of specific words and types of words to tell a story. A writer’s diction is an important element of style, and has a significant effect on the meaning of a story.” (Charters 1738).
To illustrate this premise, that every word counts toward heightening the effect of a story, let’s look at some key word choices in “Jack, July” (which I have emboldened).2
•	The sun drilled the boy’s head (23).
•	In school, when he was in miniature, he’d got nothing but A’s. Again, he sensed the expansiveness of his brain (24).
•	 ‘Welcome,’ he replied. Attempting a flawless imitation of her bird-like language. Jack was good with foreigners. Most of his school buds had been Chalupas” (23).
•	As soon as he knocked at the trailer door, he was aware of the emptiness in his hands. He should have brought flowers. Or a burrito” (Lodato 24).
The verb “drilled” is a careful choice. Like the hostile similes, this simple verb achieves the same effect, to show the environment’s relentless attack in Jack. The word “miniature” takes place of common terms like “little” or “younger.” The reason for it, I speculate, is that it shows the way Jack’s brain-on-drugs is working, sort of like out-of-control synonym replacement.
The next two words highlighted, Chalupas” and “burrito” are important to understanding the protagonist. On their own, both could argued to be racist, connotatively.
A denotative definition is the dictionary definition of a word. A connotative definition is drawn from outside the dictionary and based more on people’s feelings towards words. For example, a chalupa, according to a dictionary, is a “fried tortilla in the shape of a boat, with a spicy filling (Oxford . . .).” Connotatively, the word is Mexican slang for an overweight girl. Thinking of bringing a burrito to his alleged girlfriend is no less offensive, but is also in keeping with Jack’s character. In sum, the offensive language is a part of the setting the characters inhabit.
And you can see how these elements all swirl together.

Figurative Imagery: Metaphor and Simile
A Metaphor is a word, image or symbol that makes a comparison between two things or ideas, without using the words "like" or "as", as in a simile. Metaphors literally claim that one thing is another, which greatly affects meaning, such as "Life is a River" rather than "Life is like a river.”
Simile: A comparison between two usually dissimilar things using "like" or "as", such as, "Keith Richards plays the guitar like an angel who's had a bad day at the office," which means, "He's a good guitar player who plays with a lot of pent-up emotion."
Metaphors and similes are the big two elements of figurative language in literature. The writers take physical objects in the landscape of the stories, connect them to other objects, or even ideas, abstract things, to help develop character theme, etc. And they are not random or by chance. All similes and metaphors – mostly – are created carefully to heighten the overall effect of the story. Writes Burroway:
A simile makes a comparison with the use of like or as, a metaphor without. Though this distinction is technical, it is not entirely trivial, for a metaphor demands a more literal acceptance. If you say ‘A woman is a rose,’ you ask for an extreme suspension of disbelief, whereas ‘A woman is like a rose’ acknowledges the artifice in the statement” (Writing Fiction . . . 32).
Note how a lot of the figurative language, starting with similes, adds to Jack’s voice in “Jack, July.” Part of Jack’s voice in “Jack, July,” even though the story is written in 3rd Person Limited POV, is clearly Jack’s. The anonymous narrator is writing “in” Jack’s voice, in the voice of his drug-addled, racing brain. This is evidenced in many of the similes.

Simile Examples
•	“Bertie had a thing, though, about self-improvement and positive thinking, which often made her children shrink from her as if she were a terrorist” (35).
•	“She came back to him like sheet lightning” (27).
•	“Lost saguaros, catatonic, above which birds rifted in slow circles, like pieces of ash” (39).
•	“. . . his sadness was like a river, carrying him home (39).
•	“Sometimes he could hear her [Lisa] breathing; sometimes, a sound in her throat like twigs snapping” (Lodato 36).
The images contained in these similes alone convey the themes of death, dread, and depression, the major theme being Jack’s repressed guilt over being responsible for his sister’s trauma, and thus the added violent imagery, The careful similes heighten the effect of the story’s major abstract themes. The similes also connect to Jack’s character, to his brain, the kind of connections that he makes verbally; the figurative language is in keeping with his character.
And sometimes the similes are just plain hilarious: Jack, July:  (34) “ice clinking like money inside a bank” (Lodato 34) ad seriously reflect the playfulness of Jack’s thoughts when the high is going well for him, when he wants to write that documentary.

Metaphors
Here are some descriptive metaphors from “Jack, July:” “a strip-mall jungle (21),” a “bearded Mexican with a voice like a balloon losing air” (22).  He describes buses as “cannonballs of heat.” And note how some of his descriptive similes also contribute to Jack’s character development, to describe his wild, racing mind: “The word sounded funny, like a flute (25), and describing  a sensation “under his cheek bones, near his eyes” as “like a tuning for an organ at the back of a church (Lodato 26).” Similes can be long, too, like that one, which works to add humorous effect to the tone of the story.
Tower uses three metaphors in one passage. First, the full passage:
Through the brightening dawn, the Land Cruiser bucks and rockets along miles of narrow trails socked in by spindly acacia trees, camellia-like mopani shrubs, and a malign species of thornbush abristle with nature’s answer to the ice pick. No elephants are on view just yet, though a few other locals have come out to note our disturbance of the peace. Here is a wild dog, a demonic-looking animal whose coat is done up in a hectic slime-mold pattern. Wild dogs, among the world’s most effective predators, are the biker gangs of America. They chase the gentle kudu to exhaustion in a merciless relay team (“Who Wants . . .” 3)
The Metaphorical Breakdown
1.  “. . . species of thornbush abristle with nature’s answer to the ice pick.” This metaphor compares the plant to an ice pick – creating an image to help describe the plant -- thus making the description visceral and powerful instead of just saying the plant “has sharp leaves.”
2, 3. And then he uses two consecutive metaphors: “Wild dogs, among the world’s most effective predators, are the biker gangs of America. They chase the gentle kudu to exhaustion in a merciless relay team.” The wild dogs are both “biker gangs” and “relay teams.” Thought one usually associate relay teams with competitive bicyclists and not motorcycle biker gangs, there is just enough connection between both metaphors – two-wheeled vehicles -- to avoid being a mixed-metaphor, which compares two or more unconnected images.
Here are some descriptive metaphors from “Jack, July:” “a strip-mall jungle (21),” a “bearded Mexican with a voice like a balloon losing air” (22).  He describes buses as throwing “cannonballs of heat.” The imagery is violent and hostile, like the setting itself.
And note how some of his descriptive similes also contribute to Jack’s character development, to describe his wild, racing mind: “The word sounded funny, like a flute (25), and describing  a sensation “under his cheek bones, near his eyes” as “like a tuning for an organ at the back of a church (26).” Similes can be long, too, like that one, which works to add humorous effect to the tone of the story.






#6: Theme
When I think of “theme,” I think of a “big idea” that comes across in a work of literature. For readers, the big ideas are extracted from stories through their interpretive skills. Interpretation, defined. is the act of identifying – both as writer and reader – the abstract meanings in a work of art.
Some argue that a story can “mean anything you want it to,” but that is not true. A writer is in control of the story and therefore should know the deeper meanings in the work, and present them accordingly, so that readers will identify the same or similar meanings – or should at least be in the ballpark if they are reading carefully.
Generally, the “big ideas” are not forced, but arise naturally from stories, from the successful development of all of the other five standards.

The Standards of Theme
•	The “big ideas” – in fiction -- should be organic, not delivered heavy-handedly or Sentimentality or though exposition in the form of explanations or sermons, but rather through the characters’  Behavior, Speech, and Descriptions.
•	The “big ideas” in both fiction and nonfiction narratives should be presented with control and clarity in order that the careful reader will “get it” without a great deal of head-scratching interpretation.
•	The big ideas in fiction stories should not be presented with cliché statements of “lessons” learned” but instead be developed through careful, controlled figurative language – metaphor, simile, accrued imagery and symbolism.
•	The big ideas that arise from nonfiction narratives should arrive from both carefully controlled figurative language, but also through careful, clear and concise exposition and research. Narrative essays have that luxury while fiction does not. (One shows, the other tells).

Theme vs. Subject
Be careful not to confuse a story’s subject-matter with its theme. Subject matter is the central topic of the story whereas theme is the collection of abstract ideas that arise from the story. For example, “Jack, July’s” subject-matter is a character’s struggle with addiction, whereas the themes are more abstract: denial, belonging, alienation, rejection. These are just some of the themes of the story, identified directly in the text.

Though the subject of “Who Wants to Shoot at Elephant?” is “elephant trophy hunting” and its external plot is an actual hunting trip for a trophy elephant, the themes are more abstract and deal with Wells Tower’s own internal struggles. Some of the themes that arise from the internal struggle are fear, grief, sadness, anger, and more deeply, shifting personal beliefs, the complications of conflicting ideologies.
Themes are the bigger, more generalized abstractions that arise from the story. Whereas the story’s subject matter and external plot are factual and surface, a theme is more abstract and beneath-the-surface, and therefore open to interpretation. A subject of a story, “elephant hunting in Africa,” is not open for interpretation. Themes, however, are open to interpretation.

Figurative Imagery and Theme
Instead of stating plainly the meaning in a story, literary writers will often use imagery instead, actual objects in a story taking on more than literal significance. Some of this has been covered thus far in Show, Don’t Tell and Figurative Language.
A perfect example of figurative language teasing out a theme is the buzzard image at the end of “Who Wants to shoot an Elephant?” Let’s look at it more deeply in terms of theme.
First, though, since this is nonfiction, there is room for both expositional theme and metaphorical theme both:
Though the harrowing intensity of the elephant’s death will, in time, denature into a fun story to tell at cocktail parties, right now I would trade all of it – the morbid high, the anecdotes for my memoirs – to bring this particular elephant back to life. (18)
Then, more abstractly, he ends the essay with a scene of a buzzard gorging too heavily on the viscera of the dead elephant that in order to be able to fly off, it has to puke. “Fran, the Waldrip’s nanny, got the heftiest portion of Robyn’s elephant, on her shoulders and hair, and Jeff Rann got speckled a bit. The elephant huntress herself dodged the vomit entirely as the bird set a course for the sun” (Tower 19).
The image, he recognized, perfectly reflects the author’s “takeaway” from the adventure. There is some natural justice in the yacking buzzard, but ultimately, the huntress remains victorious.
So, the buzzard becomes a metaphor.






Reading Reaction Questions
Critical Evaluation Essay
Story One: “Things you’re Not Proud of” from The Best American Nonrequired Reading, 2015.
The numbers refer to peer group numbers. For example, group one is to answer question #1. You will not, however, be writing collaborative answers. Each person in the group should write their reactions individually. The peer group list will be in Announcements. Be sure to provide direct quotations from the readings and format them as follows: MLA Formatting Quotations.

6.	Give some specific examples of dialogue and explain how it contributes to the development of a) the main conflict (see plot), as well as the b) theme(s) of the story.

7.	List specific figurative images from the story – similes and metaphors -- and explain how they develop the themes/lessons of the story.

8.	Of the plot models described in The Standards of Storytelling/ Plotting, in which model (if any) is this story most clearly written?

9.	How would you describe the narrator’s tone? Support you answer with examples from the story.

10.	List some exact passages where concrete language is used (action, dialogue and description) effectively – as opposed to exposition -- to develop character, setting, and theme.

Story Two: “Fear Itself” from The Best American Nonrequired Reading, 2015.
The numbers below refer to peer group numbers. For example, group one is to answer question #1. You will not, however, be writing collaborative answers. Each person in the group should write their reaction individually. The peer group list will be in Announcements. Be sure to provide direct quotations from the readings and format them as follows: MLA Formatting Quotations.

1.	List some exact passages where concrete language is used (action, dialogue and description) effectively – as opposed to exposition -- to develop character, setting, and theme.

2.	List specific figurative images from the story – similes and metaphors -- and explain how they develop the themes/lessons of the story.

3.	In what point of view is the story told, and how would you describe the narrator’s tone? Support your answer with examples from the story.

4.	Of the plot models described in The Standards of Storytelling/ Plotting, in which model (if any) is this story most clearly written?

5.	Give some specific examples of dialogue and explain how it contributes to the development of a) the main conflict (see plot), as well as the b) theme(s) of the story.




















Prewriting/Topic Selection
Critical Evaluation Essay
Copy and paste the questions from the sections below into a Microsoft Word document and answer the questions. Once you are finished with the questions, copy and paste both the questions and your answers into a posting in Discussions/Prewriting-Invention in D2L – right into the message screen.

1.	Which is your favorite story from The Best American Nonrequired Reading, 2015? Conversely, which is your least favorite story among these, and why? [Remember that your choices are limited to the stories on the list in the essay specifications.] State your reasons for why your favorite story is your favorite story.

2.	Which story from the list is your second favorite story, and why? What do you like about it?

3.	What is your least favorite story, and why?

4.	For your favorite story, indicate which standards of narrative are best accomplished, whether plot, characterization, etc.

5.	Indicate the two best stories from The Best American Nonrequired Reading, 2015. These will be the stories you compare/contrast in your Critical Evaluation Essay.













Peer Critique Form
Critical Evaluation Essay

“Reply” to each writer’s (group mates only) Critical Evaluation Essay Draft submission. Copy and paste the questions and your answers below into a Microsoft Word document. When done, attach your file to your reply (as a doc. or pdf) and also copy and paste your questions and answers into your message screen.


1.	Is the writer’s thesis clear? The thesis should indicate the best story on each list of eligible stories (see assignment specifications), and then the best of those two stories.

2.	Does the writer examine the right amount of narrative standards? Too many? Not enough? Please let the writer know what standards he/she needs to expand on, or what standards could be reduced or removed.

3.	Is there enough support in the essay in the form of direct quotations from the stories, and plenty of writer’s commentary/interpretations on the quotations?

4.	Is there a good deal of compare/contrast in the essay?

5.	Is Narrative (Storytelling) Terminology well-used throughout the essay?

6.	What do you like in the essay?

7.	What recommendations do you have to improve the essay?