College Writing

Project 1

This is a multi-stage project that you’ll complete over several weeks, drafting different parts and finally pulling them together. 

Part I

Story selection due: 2/5 (See the story sign up)

Rough draft of story due: 2/19

Revised draft of story and image due: 3/17

Select a fairy tale from Children’s and Household Stories to adapt into a short story for a modern audience (see The Original Folk and Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm, translated by Jack Zipes, in Readings).

To adapt the fairy tale into a short story you can make any changes you want. Remember that someone will be reading and interpreting your work, so you want to adapt the story thoughtfully. You can change the setting, or not, but will probably need to explore inner motivations and psychology, add vivid description and dialogue, etc.

  • Stories should be 1000+ words;
  • Written in your class journal
  • Have an original title (to differentiate it from other versions)
  • Have enough interesting going on that someone can white a good Afterword for it (remember, you’ll be writing one for someone else, so this is also about good karma!).
  • Include a B&W illustration that is either original or out of copyright (no AI-generated images; this is partially about finding unexpected connections).

See tips for story writing in this slideshow.

Part II

Story selection due: 3/24

Draft Afterword due: 3/31 (See Class Collection)

Revised Afterword due: 4/7

Write an Afterword to one of the stories written by your classmates.

This afterword is an analytical essay that should have a creative and informative title, be well organized, make use of expository paragraph structure, and be ~ 1400+ words.

Style

Like Octavia Butler’s “Afterword” to “Bloodchild,” Afterwords occur after a main text and can be written by either the author(s) of the main text, or someone else. It’s different than a lot of academic writing you’ve done because you’re not writing for a “general audience”–you’re writing for someone who just read the story and has the details fresh in their minds. So you won’t need to summarize much at all and you’ll need to avoid making assumptions about how all readers interpret the story.

The most significant goal of an Afterword is to make people think more deeply about what they’ve just read, and particularly to help readers find ways to connect the story to their own lives.

A good afterword usually identifies a few important themes, symbols, or questions from the text, but in a way that makes them seem important and relevant. You want to push readers to go beyond their first impressions of the story.

It might be helpful to think of writing an Afterword as similar to hosting a discussion after seeing a movie, or making a YouTube video that analyzes some aspect of a movie or movie franchise.

In an Afterword you also have the opportunity to give the audience additional context about the writer or story that helps them understand the text, including the historical context of a text’s creation, its publication history, or the author’s biography, etc.

You won’t need to get into the biography of your author (unless you want to speak to them about how it affected their story), but you’ll have the original tale they based their story to write about as context.

Afterwords are generally positive (it would be strange to publish a really negative review of a story right after the story), but that doesn’t mean they can’t be critical. Criticism can usually be handled towards the end of an afterword and framed as something like an “I wish…” statement (“While I love the character of the wolf in the story, I wish his psychology was explored more. What’s his interest in Little Red Riding Hood in particular, just her relative weakness compared to a full grown adult, or something more sinister? I would have loved to find out.”).

Hints

  • By convention, authors are listed by their full name first, and then referred to by their surname only for the rest of the piece (this is true in all academic writing). Ex. “Paul Hebert’s story takes the the Grimm’s Fairy tale ‘The Seven Ravens,’ and changes it into a murder mystery story, full of campy gore and horror movie tropes. Hebert achieves this through ….”
  • The order of your Afterword matters. The most important or interesting ideas should come first.
  • Own your opinions. Use the first person “I” and don’t speak for other readers or the author. If you share the story with a friend and discuss it, you can cite their ideas, but that’s different than claiming “readers are lead to believe….”.
  • Consider the story “as is” AND in contrast to the original tale. Considering the story alone allows you to make any arguments about the text you can prove; whereas looking at the changes allows you to make guesses about what the author’s intent is. Certain themes may have been present in the original story and persist in the adapted version (such as orphans usurping kings or evil stepmothers), but some may not. Some themes or symbols will be totally unique to the adapted story.
  • Don’t send readers in a direction that won’t be rewarding. Your role as the author of an Afterword is a discussion starter. You don’t have to have answers for your questions, really, but you also don’t want to present theories that don’t really have much impact or relevance (ex. the main character has multiple personality disorder or the whole story is a dream).
  • You can do outside research, but it’s unnecessary for such a short piece. In a professional Afterword, particularly of a famous story, an author often cites what other famous people who’ve written about the story to show they’ve done their research and to show how they’re opinion in new and innovative. Professional Afterwords are often much longer than 1400, too. In such a short essay, about a brand new story, there’s no real research to do. You might find something about the original Grimm’s story, though, that you can use to contrast with the new story.