Short Story Writers Workshop
This writers workshop series focuses on writing a particular mode and genre with students. See all the tutorials here: personal narrative, poetry, informational, personal arguments, research-based arguments, interviews, comic, and descriptive paragraph.
This post is about short story. A short story can take the form of a video, graphic novel, a poem, or a short story in verse. In this post, I focus on the short story, specifically in prose.
This is a 4-part tutorial.
Part 1 is a brief overview of a short story unit that begins, as all of these tutorials will, with gathering and exploring mentor texts. This means noticing the craft moves that authors make like sensory language, dialogue, first person point of view, zooming in, and backstory (among others). I love experiencing mentor texts because it gives me permission not to be one version of a “good writer.” What I mean is that when you have so many amazing published authors in books and in your classroom, you see there are many versions of “good” writing. “Good” is finding your own voice, style, way. So teachers don’t have to be or believe they are good writers, but they do have to be writers who try, and bringing mentor texts into the classroom will show a way of being a writer, a way of trying. This is what students must see.
Part 2 is gathering ideas from students’ notebooks and heartmaps for their short story but also offering specific story-starter topics that lend themselves to fiction. This is a really important tutorial because so many students (and teachers) struggle with plot when writing fiction, so we have to think about what the character wants more than anything, who or what is standing in the way, and then understand that how that turns out will have more to do with what the character really needs rather than what they want. The writer gets to decide how that all works out.
Part 3 is support for teachers in modeling their own writing process with and alongside students. I show you two pages from my notebook and talk through how I would revise each short story.
Part 4 offers ideas for pacing a short story unit that focuses on serving the writer in addition to talking about the word length of short stories. I recommend “sudden” or “flash” fiction as the genre for a short story unit to make the drafting-revising-conferring-publishing more impactful.
These four parts get you to the drafting/revising, so then you can turn to the broader workshop tutorials for the next processes such as peer revision, grammar mini-lessons in-context, grading with standards, and the publication party! Check out those videos when you are ready.
Here are the slides for short story to support your journey.
Here is a variation of short story with flash fiction and Ernest Hemingway, including student examples.
(Note: These tutorials are very short and not meant to be comprehensive. I hope you are inspired to do further inquiry and reach out if you’d like to learn about more resources and discuss how to implement writers workshop.)