Short Story Requirements

DUE April 30 or May 1


You have a creative writing assignment. This assignment will be due on May 1, 2008. Your creative writing short must be in MLA format and must be at least two pages (double spaced) in length. Choose one of the topics below.

1.[Embellish An Ad] Choose an advertisement from the Classifieds section of a recent newspaper. Use the advertisement as the starting point for a short story that explores the people and situations behind the ad. Who wrote the ad? What was the writer's motivation (beyond buying or selling an item)? What kind of life does the writer have? What is the social setting behind the ad? What kind of family or community is involved? Using the advertisement as your starting point, create the story behind the ad that you've chosen. Here are a couple of example ads in case you have trouble finding one on your own:


For SaleCLOTHING, UT apparel. Worn only a few times by former UT athlete.

Wanted:BICYCLE, free. Working poor. I'm married with 2 small children. Need bike and helmet to work nights. I use Capital Metro for day job-school.


[NOTE: You could create a similar assignment where you take the facts in a newspaper story and write a fictionalized account of the people and situations referred to in the story.]



2.[Historical Fiction] Choose a historical figure whom you know something about. Choose one of the following sentence beginnings below, and complete the sentence for your figure. Compose a short story in first-person, speaking as the historical figure where you explain the figure's wish, dream, or fear.

The thing that I regret most about my life is _____________________.
If I could accomplish one more thing, I would ___________________.
The accomplishment that I am proudest of is ___________________.
If I could live anywhere in the world, I would choose ______________.
The saddest moment in life was when ________________________.
My favorite childhood memory is _____________________________.
The thing that scares me the most is _________________________.


3.[Confess a Secret] Create a character who has a secret to confess, but who is afraid to confess it. Write the diary or journal entries that your character would write as she or he considers the secret, explores why it needs to be confessed, thinks about who will be affected if the secret is known, and considers why she or he is afraid. Write a series of diary or journal entries, as if they were written over a period of several days or a week. In the entries, you can incorporate the main character's interactions with others and explore the ways that the day-to-day events that the character experiences influence the way that she or he thinks about the secret and confession. Your character's decision to tell (or not) should be revealed in the final diary or journal entry. All the entries need to work together as a whole -- they should sound like the writings of a single person, and should show consistency from one entry to the next (for example, if the person writes in the diary that she is afraid of water in one journal entry, it would be inconsistent to have her mention that she had been water skiing in the entry written two days later).