How To Write A Creative Short Story

For example, expansions may synopsize a cataclysmic climate change, the long years of a religious war, a king’s rule, a civilization’s demise and regeneration, or a terrible pattern resounding through family generations. The first is conventional: Jason’s father was always hard on him.From earliest childhood, Jason knew this was what to expect. The second is an expansion: Patriarchal discipline was ingrained into the very fabric of the family.In “The Lottery,” Jackson positions the sweep artfully, setting the scene with the day’s action and with carefully planted descriptions segues into the expansion. Just as skillfully, in a kind of sandwich with the same characters, after the box’s history Jackson picks up the story’s action.

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In “The Lottery,” Shirley Jackson starts her classic and bone-chilling story with a conventional opening, in this case immediate action.

On a balmy summer day, the citizens of a typically pleasant small town gather as if at a county fair. By now it was no longer completely black but splintered badly along one side to show the original wood color, and in some places faded or stained.

In Noelle`s previous book, Trust Your Life: Forgive Yourself and Go After Your Dreams (Unity Books, 2011), she draws examples from her academic consulting and other aspects of life to help readers release regrets, relabel their past, and reach their lifelong yearnings.

Her webinar about the book can be seen on You Tube. Expansion in short stories is rarely, if ever, discussed in texts or fiction seminars and may sound a lot like background, setting, exposition, or backstory.

The townsfolk aren’t preparing for a county fair after all but instead for a macabre ritual—involving those apparently innocent stones—as old as the village. We watch the citizens take their turns drawing slips of paper from the box, to the story’s final horrific end.

Sports Gambling Essays - How To Write A Creative Short Story

Now Jackson expands with the history of the lottery’s focal point, the “black box”: The original paraphernalia for the lottery had been lost long ago . Your expansion requires a smooth introduction and will later need a graceful exit.When your story starts with a sweep, obviously a transition obviously isn’t needed.But, as in Jackson, when the expansion takes place a few paragraphs into the story, we must watch its entry and departure.When you expand the scope of your story, you can encompass grand events—physical, historical, generational, psychological, emotional.You may evoke a sense of time and distance, stretching the reader’s mind beyond the expected confines of the short story.None of the children could escape, and this oppressive mantle was now being passed to Jason.Can you see from these examples how expansion differs from typical exposition?But some stories maintain the character of the short story and introduce a broader outlook than we’ve been taught to expect.These stories carry a greater perspective and elicit more powerful responses than the more typical narrower story.I wanted to show that Jason was not only up against his father’s habitual actions but also had to struggle with the strength of successive generations of disciplinarians.As Jason begins to question his father’s authority and power, the opening expansion shows us that Jason’s victory is that much more profound.