High School Creative Writing

The sentence on the table

A student in a writing workshop hands in a story that begins like this:

It was a really nice day and I was very happy as I walked slowly to school.

Nothing in it is wrong. The grammar is fine, the spelling is fine, and you understood it the instant you read it. That is exactly the problem. You understood it instantly because it contains nothing you had to see. Try to picture it. What is the weather doing? What does the student pass on the way? What does "happy" look like from across the street, and how slow is "slowly"? Every word in the sentence is doing a job, and every job is a general one. "Nice" could describe weather, a teacher, a sandwich or a funeral that went smoothly.

Here is the repair most people reach for first. It is the plausible wrong answer, and this lesson is going to trace exactly where it goes wrong:

It was an absolutely beautiful, breathtakingly perfect day, and I was overjoyed and ecstatic as I walked leisurely and unhurriedly to school.

The sentence is now almost twice as long and has not gained one thing you can see. Count what changed. The subject is still "it". The verbs are still "was", "was" and "walked". The only nouns are still "day" and "school". Every new word is an adjective or an adverb, a word whose job is to describe another word, and every one of them is describing a word that was empty to begin with. You cannot make a sentence concrete by adding more of the thing that made it vague. The repair has to happen in the nouns and the verbs, because those are the parts of a sentence that point at the world.

Before you read on: four minutes of writing

Get a notebook or open a blank file, and keep it; everything you write in this course can live in the same place. Write one sentence, no longer than thirty words, about the last time you waited for something: a bus, a test result, a message, a person at a door. Do not polish it. Write it the way it arrives. You are going to rebuild it before this lesson ends, and the distance between the two versions is the lesson.

What Hemingway put where the adjectives usually go

In 1925 Ernest Hemingway published In Our Time, a book of stories that ends with a young man named Nick stepping off a train into burned-out country in northern Michigan. This is the first paragraph of the last story, Big Two-Hearted River:

The train went on up the track out of sight, around one of the hills of burnt timber. Nick sat down on the bundle of canvas and bedding the baggage man had pitched out of the door of the baggage car. There was no town, nothing but the rails and the burned-over country. The thirteen saloons that had lined the one street of Seney had not left a trace. The foundations of the Mansion House hotel stuck up above the ground. The stone was chipped and split by the fire. It was all that was left of the town of Seney. Even the surface had been burned off the ground.
(Ernest Hemingway, "Big Two-Hearted River: Part I," In Our Time, 1925)

Go through it and collect the nouns: train, track, hills, timber, bundle, canvas, bedding, baggage man, door, baggage car, town, rails, country, saloons, street, foundations, hotel, ground, stone, fire, surface. Nearly every one of them is something you could photograph. Now look for adjectives of feeling: lonely, bleak, desolate, eerie, sad. There are none. Nobody tells you the place is desolate. You are given "thirteen saloons" that "had not left a trace", and the desolation happens in you, which is where it does the most work.

That is the first craft point of the course, and now it can have its name. A concrete noun names something you could touch, see, smell or trip over: canvas, rails, stone. An abstract noun names an idea, a quality or a feeling: desolation, happiness, niceness. Both kinds are ordinary nouns, and you need both, but they do different jobs. Abstract nouns sum up. Concrete nouns let the reader do the summing up, and a reader who does the summing up believes the result.

Notice one more thing: the number. Not "the saloons" or "the many saloons" but "the thirteen saloons". A number is the most concrete adjective there is, because it cannot be vague. And notice that the paragraph uses "was" three times ("There was no town", "The stone was chipped", "It was all that was left"). Keep that in mind. It comes back when we debug the rules people like to draw from passages like this one.

Verbs that do the moving

In January 1897 the steamer Commodore sank off the coast of Florida, and Stephen Crane, a young newspaper correspondent on board, spent about thirty hours with three other men in a small boat trying to reach the shore. The story he made from it, The Open Boat, opens like this:

None of them knew the colour of the sky. Their eyes glanced level, and were fastened upon the waves that swept toward them. These waves were of the hue of slate, save for the tops, which were of foaming white, and all of the men knew the colours of the sea. [...] The cook squatted in the bottom and looked with both eyes at the six inches of gunwale which separated him from the ocean. His sleeves were rolled over his fat forearms, and the two flaps of his unbuttoned vest dangled as he bent to bail out the boat. [...] The oiler, steering with one of the two oars in the boat, sometimes raised himself suddenly to keep clear of water that swirled in over the stern. It was a thin little oar and it seemed often ready to snap.
(Stephen Crane, "The Open Boat," The Open Boat and Other Stories, 1898; the bracketed dots mark lines left out)

Read only the verbs: glanced, swept, squatted, dangled, bent, bail, swirled, snap. "The cook sat low in the boat" would give you the same fact. "Squatted" gives you the fact and the posture, the bent knees, the man making himself small and heavy in the bottom of a boat that is barely floating. "Dangled" tells you the vest is unbuttoned and loose and swinging with his movement. "Swirled" tells you what kind of water it is. Each verb carries its own manner inside it, so no adverb has to be bolted on.

The name for this is a strong verb: an exact verb that contains how the action happened. Its opposite is the general verb propped up by an adverb, the "-ly" word that describes a verb:

The third column is the real payoff. "Walked slowly" let the writer avoid deciding what the slowness meant. "Trudged" and "strolled" are both slow and mean opposite things. The exact verb is not a fancier word. It is the record of a decision.

One warning. Strong does not mean loud. A student once rewrote "She got up" as "She exploded out of bed" for a character waking on an ordinary Tuesday. That verb is dramatic and it is wrong, because nothing exploded. Crane's "squatted" is not dramatic at all. The strongest verb is the most accurate one.

A handbook from 1918, and its own before-and-after pairs

William Strunk Jr., who taught English at Cornell, printed a small handbook for his students in 1918 and called it The Elements of Style. His twelfth rule is "Use definite, specific, concrete language," and he showed it with pairs, weak version first:

(William Strunk Jr., The Elements of Style, 1920 edition, rule 12)

Look at what each repair did. "A period of unfavorable weather" became a verb, "rained", plus a measurement, "every day for a week". "Showed satisfaction" became "grinned". "Took possession of his well-earned reward" became "pocketed the coin". In both pairs, a phrase built around an abstract noun (period, satisfaction, possession) turned into one verb and one concrete noun. The habit being cured has a name: nominalization, turning an action into a noun so that a weak verb has to carry it. "Decide" becomes "make a decision". "Discuss" becomes "have a discussion". "Possess" becomes "take possession of". The action is still in the sentence, but it is lying down.

Strunk's next rule, "Omit needless words," is the most quoted sentence in the book, and its second half is the most forgotten. He wrote that omitting needless words "requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subjects only in outline, but that he make every word tell." Every word tell. Not every sentence short.

Where the rulebook goes wrong

The plausible wrong conclusion from everything so far is a list of bans: never use "was", never use "very", never use an adverb, keep every sentence short. Now look at Hemingway again, four paragraphs further into the same story:

Nick looked down into the pool from the bridge. It was a hot day. A kingfisher flew up the stream. It was a long time since Nick had looked into a stream and seen trout. They were very satisfactory.
(Hemingway, "Big Two-Hearted River: Part I," 1925)

"It was a hot day." "They were very satisfactory." Here are "was", "were" and "very" in a single paragraph by the writer most famous for cutting. The sentences work because of what surrounds them: a bridge, a kingfisher, trout holding in the current. "Very satisfactory" is also doing something sly. It is the flat language of a man keeping his feelings at arm's length, and anyone who has read the rest of In Our Time knows why: in a short chapter earlier in the book, Nick sits against a church wall in the war, "hit in the spine." The plainness is a choice with a purpose.

So where exactly did the ban-list reasoning fail? It mistook a symptom for the cause. In the student's sentence, "was" and "very" were symptoms, signs that the writer had not yet decided what to show. The cause was the empty nouns. Fix the nouns and the "was" often stops mattering. Keep the empty nouns and you can delete every "was" in the language without improving anything. "The day shone nicely and happiness filled me as I proceeded to school" contains no "was" at all, and it is worse.

The same goes for the sentences that start "There was" or "It was", where the subject slot is filled by a dummy word that means nothing. They are weak when the rest of the sentence is also empty ("There were a lot of people at the game") and fine when it is full ("There was no town, nothing but the rails and the burned-over country").

Key idea: diagnose before you repair. Find the abstract nouns and the verb-plus-adverb pairs first. The extra adjectives and the empty "was" usually fall away once the nouns and verbs are exact.

Rhythm: a sentence of more than two hundred and fifty words, and one of eight

Here is the dawn on the Mississippi as Mark Twain let Huck describe it in chapter 19 of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. It is one sentence:

The first thing to see, looking away over the water, was a kind of dull line - that was the woods on t'other side; you couldn't make nothing else out; then a pale place in the sky; then more paleness spreading around; then the river softened up away off, and warn't black any more, but gray; you could see little dark spots drifting along ever so far away - trading scows, and such things; and long black streaks - rafts; sometimes you could hear a sweep screaking; or jumbled up voices, it was so still, and sounds come so far; and by-and-by you could see a streak on the water which you know by the look of the streak that there's a snag there in a swift current which breaks on it and makes that streak look that way; and you see the mist curl up off of the water, and the east reddens up, and the river, and you make out a log-cabin in the edge of the woods, away on the bank on t'other side of the river, being a woodyard, likely, and piled by them cheats so you can throw a dog through it anywheres; then the nice breeze springs up, and comes fanning you from over there, so cool and fresh and sweet to smell on account of the woods and the flowers; but sometimes not that way, because they've left dead fish laying around, gars and such, and they do get pretty rank; and next you've got the full day, and everything smiling in the sun, and the song-birds just going it!
(Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, 1885, chapter 19; Twain's long dashes are printed here as spaced hyphens, as they are throughout this course)

Now set beside it the first sentence of Crane's story: "None of them knew the colour of the sky." Eight words.

Neither sentence is better. They do opposite jobs. Twain's sentence arrives the way daylight arrives, a piece at a time, joined by semicolons and "then" and "and", so that you cannot stop reading until the sun is fully up, exactly as Huck could not stop watching. The length is the experience. Crane's sentence is short because the men in the boat have no attention to spare: they are not looking at the sky, and the sentence does not look around either. It lands like a hand on your shoulder.

This is rhythm in prose: the pattern made by long and short sentences and by where each sentence puts its weight. Strunk had a rule for the second part too: "Place the emphatic words of a sentence at the end." Crane obeys it in the line "It was a thin little oar and it seemed often ready to snap." The sentence ends on "snap", and so does your nerve. A sentence that saves its most important word for the end, making you wait for it, is called a periodic sentence, and it is the simplest tool of emphasis you own.

Here is a paragraph in which every sentence is the same length and the same shape, followed by a revision:

The first sentence stayed as it was: short and flat, a fact. The middle is now one long sentence built on three "while" clauses, so that the reader has to wait through it the way the narrator waited. The last sentence is short again, ends on an image of warmth after cold rain, and puts that image in the emphatic final position. The nouns got sharper too: "shelter", "plastic roof", "the 42". Six sentences of equal length had become a drone. Three sentences of different lengths have a shape.

Six weak sentences, rebuilt on the page

Back to the sentence on the table

Now return to "It was a really nice day and I was very happy as I walked slowly to school," and rebuild it properly, one decision at a time.

1. Decide what the sentence is for. You cannot fix a sentence until you know its job. Say it opens a story about the first day at a new school.
2. Replace the empty nouns. "Day" and "school" can become the things the narrator actually sees: frost on a practice field, the glass doors of a building called Kennedy High.
3. Decide what "slowly" means, and choose the verb that holds it. Is the narrator savouring the walk, or dreading the destination? The decision changes the verb.
4. Decide whether "happy" stays. If the nouns and verbs now carry the feeling, the label can go.
5. Read it aloud and check where it ends. Put the weight at the end.

Here are two rebuilt versions, one for each answer to step 3:

Frost had turned the practice field white, and I crossed it the long way, dragging my sneakers to draw two green lines behind me.

I missed the 7:10 bus on purpose and walked the two miles to Kennedy High, stopping to read every flyer on every telephone pole.

The first is a person enjoying the morning; the green lines are play. The second is a person stalling, and it keeps the plain verb "walked", because the missed bus, the two miles and the flyers carry the slowness on their own. Neither version needs "happy", "nice" or "very". Neither was produced by a rule. Both were produced by deciding what the writer saw.

Now rebuild yours

Go back to the sentence you wrote in the first four minutes. Circle every abstract noun. Box every verb that has an adverb attached. Write one line, for yourself, saying what the sentence is for. Then rebuild it, and read the two versions aloud, one after the other. If the rebuilt version is longer, check that the new words are nouns and verbs rather than adjectives. If it is shorter, check that you did not cut the one detail that made it yours.

Common misconceptions

• "Better writing uses bigger words." Strunk's own revisions go the other way: "took possession of his well-earned reward" became "pocketed the coin". Specific is not the same as fancy, and a thesaurus usually makes a sentence less specific, because it offers words that sound impressive rather than words that fit.
• "Hemingway only wrote short sentences." The same story has a sentence about a trout rising under the bridge that runs to seventy-nine words. His reputation for short sentences comes from how plain his words are, not from a rule about length.
• "Never use 'was' or 'very'." "They were very satisfactory" is Hemingway. The ban confuses a symptom with its cause: "was" and "very" are weak when they are propping up empty nouns, and fine when the sentence around them is full.
• "A strong verb is a dramatic verb." "Squatted" and "dangled" are quiet words. A verb is strong when it is exact, and a loud verb that is not accurate ("exploded out of bed") is a weak one in a costume.

What to carry forward

A sentence says nothing when its nouns are abstract and its verbs are general, and no quantity of adjectives can fix that, because adjectives only describe the emptiness in more detail. Hemingway's burned town shows what concrete nouns do; Crane's boat shows what exact verbs do; Strunk's pairs from 1918 show the repair being made; and Twain's river beside Crane's sky shows that length is a tool, not a virtue or a vice.

Key idea: when a sentence is flat, look first at its nouns and verbs, decide what the sentence is for, and let the rebuilt nouns and verbs carry the feeling that the adjectives were only announcing.

Sources

1. Hemingway, E. (1925). Big Two-Hearted River: Part I. In In Our Time. Boni and Liveright. Wikisource. en.wikisource.org
2. Crane, S. (1898). The open boat. In The Open Boat and Other Stories. William Heinemann. Project Gutenberg. gutenberg.org
3. Twain, M. (1885). Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Chapter 19). Charles L. Webster. Project Gutenberg. gutenberg.org
4. Strunk, W., Jr. (1920). The Elements of Style (Rules 12, 13 and 18). Harcourt, Brace and Howe. Project Gutenberg. gutenberg.org

A motto above a playwright's desk

Some time in the 1910s, a writer of stage comedies named Mark Swan stopped a friend in the street and could talk about nothing except a motto he had pinned to the wall above his desk. The friend, the playwright Arthur Edwin Krows, told the story in a 1928 handbook for playwrights:

The magic line was "Show - not tell." "I've written a number of scenes in which characters come in and tell about what happened outside," he said; "but it's wrong. The audience wants to see what's going on. It shouldn't have happened outside but right on the stage where everybody could see it."
(Arthur Edwin Krows, Playwriting for Profit, 1928, page 28)

You have almost certainly been told "show, don't tell" by a teacher, and you may have told it to someone else. Notice where it started, as far as anyone has traced it: in the theatre, as a cure for a specific disease. A character walks on stage and reports that the house burned down, and the audience, who paid to watch a house burn, sits and listens to a report. Swan's motto is exactly right for that problem. The question for this lesson is what happens when a playwright's rule is carried over to stories, poems and essays, where a narrator is allowed to speak, and where telling is sometimes the only tool that will do the job.

This is a real argument among writers, not a settled rule. You will see the strongest case for each side, the evidence each one rests on, and then a way to decide in your own work.

Write first: one sentence each way

Before reading further, think of someone you know well waiting for news: a test score, a phone call, a decision. Take two minutes and write one sentence that tells the reader how that person feels. Then take two more minutes and write one sentence that lets the reader work out the feeling from something the person does, says, or has in front of them. Keep both. You will judge them at the end of the lesson with better tools than you have right now.

The case for showing: the last paragraph of Eveline

James Joyce first published Eveline in 1904 and collected it in Dubliners in 1914. Eveline is nineteen. She keeps house for a father who threatens her, and she has agreed to sail that night to Buenos Aires with a sailor named Frank, who has promised to marry her. Here is the ending, at the dock:

A bell clanged upon her heart. She felt him seize her hand:
"Come!"
All the seas of the world tumbled about her heart. He was drawing her into them: he would drown her. She gripped with both hands at the iron railing.
"Come!"
No! No! No! It was impossible. Her hands clutched the iron in frenzy. Amid the seas she sent a cry of anguish!
"Eveline! Evvy!"
He rushed beyond the barrier and called to her to follow. He was shouted at to go on but he still called to her. She set her white face to him, passive, like a helpless animal. Her eyes gave him no sign of love or farewell or recognition.
(James Joyce, "Eveline," Dubliners, 1914)

Ask yourself what Eveline feels in the last two sentences. Terror, certainly. Something beyond terror, a shutting down, as if she has stopped being able to feel at all. Now look for the word that says so. It is not there. Joyce never writes "she was too frightened to go" or "she felt paralysed". He gives you her hands gripping iron, a white face, a comparison to a trapped animal, and eyes that show nothing, and you assemble the verdict yourself. Because you assembled it, it arrives with a force no stated verdict could have. A reader told "she was paralysed by fear" receives information. A reader who watches her hands on the railing has an experience.

That is showing: rendering actions, speech, sensations and objects from which the reader infers what the story never states. Its basic unit is the image, a concrete detail offered to one of the senses: the iron railing under the hands, the white face. The English critic Percy Lubbock gave the case its most famous statement in 1921:

the art of fiction does not begin until the novelist thinks of his story as a matter to be shown, to be so exhibited that it will tell itself.
(Percy Lubbock, The Craft of Fiction, 1921, chapter V)

The argument for showing, put at its strongest, has three parts. Readers believe what they work out more than what they are told. Showing trusts the reader, and a reader who is trusted pays closer attention. And showing leaves room for more than one feeling at once: Eveline's frozen face can hold fear, loyalty, guilt and relief together, where any single stated word would have picked one.

The case for telling: the first page of the same story

Now go back to the start of "Eveline". Here is how Joyce opens it:

She sat at the window watching the evening invade the avenue. Her head was leaned against the window curtains and in her nostrils was the odour of dusty cretonne. She was tired.
(Joyce, "Eveline," 1914)

"She was tired." Three words of pure telling, in a story whose ending is a monument to showing. A little further down the same page Joyce covers ten years of a neighbourhood in a few lines:

That was a long time ago; she and her brothers and sisters were all grown up; her mother was dead. Tizzie Dunn was dead, too, and the Waters had gone back to England. Everything changes.
(Joyce, "Eveline," 1914)

"Everything changes" is a generalisation, the kind of sentence a workshop following the motto would circle in red. It is also exactly right, because it is what Eveline would think, in her words, at that window, and because the story is about whether she can let everything change. That is telling: the narrator stating directly what is true, how someone feels, or what happened over a stretch of time. Its most common form in fiction is summary, which compresses time: a decade in two sentences.

The case for telling, put at its strongest, also has three parts. First, telling is fast. A story that showed every year of Eveline's life would be a long novel. Lubbock himself, the critic of showing, conceded this in the same book, writing of long novels that "The expanse of life which the story covers is far too great to be shown to the reader in a series of purely dramatic scenes." His conclusion was not "always show" but "The subject dictates the method."

Second, telling can carry a voice. "Everything changes" and "She was tired" are not neutral reports. They sound like a tired young woman thinking. Take them out and replace them with shown details and the story loses her plainness, which is part of who she is.

Third, the motto has a history, and a history means it is a choice rather than a law. In 2017 the novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen, who won the Pulitzer Prize for his first novel, wrote in The New York Times that writing workshops treat "show, don't tell" as universal when it reflects the tastes of one tradition, and that writers who carry history and politics into their work may come with "the desire not just to show, but to tell." A story about a war your reader has never heard of may need a sentence that simply says what happened.

The point: both tools are in the same story. Joyce tells on the first page and shows on the last, and the ending works partly because the beginning was allowed to be plain.

What the motto does to a paragraph: before, overcorrected, and balanced

Here is a paragraph in three versions. The first tells everything:

Theo was angry at his father for missing the spring concert. His father had promised to come, but he had to work late again. Theo felt hurt and disappointed, and he did not want to talk to him.

A student who has just been taught "show, don't tell" often produces the second version:

Theo's fists clenched at his sides. His jaw tightened. Hot tears stung his eyes as a wave of anger crashed over him. His heart pounded like a drum. When his father walked in, Theo's eyes narrowed and he ground his teeth.

This version obeys the motto and is worse than the first. Every gesture in it is stock: clenched fists, a tight jaw, stinging tears, a heart like a drum, narrowed eyes. Each one is a label for "angry" wearing a body, and the reader decodes them as quickly as reading the word itself. That is telling in disguise, with the added cost of cliché. The motto, applied as a rule, produced a catalogue of bodies instead of a person.

Here is the third version:

His father had promised, twice, and then had to cover the late shift at the warehouse, which happened about once a week. When he came in at eleven, still in his reflective vest, Theo was at the kitchen table eating cereal. "How'd it go?" his father said. Theo said it went fine. He rinsed his bowl, dried it, put it away in the cupboard, and went upstairs, and his father stood in the kitchen with the vest on for a long time.

Go through it sentence by sentence. The first sentence tells, and should: "about once a week" compresses months of disappointments into four words, and the reader needs that history to understand the scene. The anger is then shown, but not with a single clenched muscle. Theo says it "went fine", which is a lie, and then he washes and dries one cereal bowl and puts it away, a boy doing something careful and polite so that he does not have to do something else. His father's regret is shown by one object: he is still wearing the vest. Nobody in the paragraph feels hurt, disappointed or angry in so many words, and the reader knows exactly what everyone feels.

The image, up close

Go back to Joyce's second sentence: "in her nostrils was the odour of dusty cretonne." Cretonne is a heavy printed cotton cloth used for curtains. The image is specific in three separate ways. It names a sense (smell, not sight, which is the sense writers forget first). It names a material (not "the curtains" but the cloth they are made of). And it names a condition (dusty, which tells you how long the curtains have hung there and who is supposed to clean them). Compare "she could smell the curtains". Same fact, none of the three specifics, and none of the life.

A useful test for any image: could it appear in anyone's story, or only in this one? "The smell of fresh-cut grass" belongs to every summer story ever written. "The odour of dusty cretonne" belongs to one tired woman in one Dublin front room in 1904. Specificity is not a matter of adding adjectives. It is a matter of choosing the detail that could only be here.

What would settle it: a decision you make sentence by sentence

The two cases do not cancel out. They point to different jobs, and the job decides. Here is a working guide:

Two questions do most of the work. First: would the reader gain something by working this out? If yes, show it. If the inference would be trivial ("she opened the door; she was going outside"), tell it or cut it. Second: is my "showing" just a label wearing a body? If the gesture could belong to any angry person in any story, it is telling in disguise, and you are better off either finding the specific act or saying the plain word.

The point: the motto is right about climaxes and wrong about everything else if you apply it everywhere. Show the moments you want the reader to live through; tell the facts they need to get there.

Common misconceptions

• "Showing means describing physical reactions." Pounding hearts, clenched fists and stinging tears are labels in disguise. Showing means choosing the act, object or line of speech that only this character, in this situation, would produce.
• "Telling is lazy writing." "She was tired" and "Everything changes" are Joyce, in the same story as one of the most admired endings in English. Lubbock, the critic of showing, wrote that "The subject dictates the method."
• "Show, don't tell is a law of literature." It began, as far as anyone has traced it, as a playwright's motto in the 1910s aimed at characters who report offstage events. Writers such as Viet Thanh Nguyen have argued that treating it as universal narrows what stories can do.
• "Showing takes more words." Joyce's ending turns on two short sentences. Showing is a matter of choosing the right detail, not of adding description; the overcorrected Theo paragraph was longer and said less.

Where this leaves us

"Show, don't tell" began as a playwright's cure for characters reporting offstage events, and it describes something real: readers feel most what they work out for themselves, as Eveline's white face and gripping hands prove. But the same story tells, plainly and well, on its first page, and the critic who stated the case for showing admitted that the subject decides the method. A writer who obeys the motto everywhere produces the catalogue of clenched jaws; a writer who ignores it produces a report. You now have a better question than the motto: what job is this sentence doing?

Go back to your two sentences from the start. Is your "showing" sentence an act only that person would do, or a stock gesture? Is your "telling" sentence plain and true in a way worth keeping? Either answer is useful.

Sources

1. Joyce, J. (1914). Eveline. In Dubliners. Grant Richards. Project Gutenberg. gutenberg.org
2. Lubbock, P. (1921). The Craft of Fiction. Jonathan Cape. Project Gutenberg. gutenberg.org
3. Krows, A. E. (1928). Playwriting for Profit (p. 28). Longmans, Green. Internet Archive. archive.org
4. Nguyen, V. T. (2017, April 26). Viet Thanh Nguyen reveals how writers' workshops can be hostile. The New York Times (print headline: Your writing tools aren't mine, Sunday Book Review, April 30, 2017).
5. Wikipedia contributors. (2026). Show, don't tell. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org

Six first sentences, 1846 to 1925

Here are the opening sentences of six short stories, printed in the order they were published. Read them once straight through, quickly, the way you would read the first line of a story you had not yet decided to read.

The thousand injuries of Fortunato I had borne as I best could, but when he ventured upon insult, I vowed revenge.
(Edgar Allan Poe, "The Cask of Amontillado," 1846)

The woods were already filled with shadows one June evening, just before eight o'clock, though a bright sunset still glimmered faintly among the trunks of the trees.
(Sarah Orne Jewett, "A White Heron," 1886; text from The Best Stories of Sarah Orne Jewett, volume 2, 1925)

Little Mrs. Sommers one day found herself the unexpected possessor of fifteen dollars.
(Kate Chopin, "A Pair of Silk Stockings," 1897)

It was said that a new person had appeared on the sea-front: a lady with a little dog.
(Anton Chekhov, "The Lady with the Dog," 1899, translated by Constance Garnett, 1917)

And after all the weather was ideal.
(Katherine Mansfield, "The Garden Party," 1922)

Krebs went to the war from a Methodist college in Kansas.
(Ernest Hemingway, "Soldier's Home," In Our Time, 1925)

Before you look at them any more closely, notice which one you would most want to keep reading, and which one least. Hold on to that reaction. The rest of this lesson is about explaining it.

Ninety seconds: yours

Now write your own, before anyone else's analysis gets into your head. The first sentence of a story about someone who finds something they were not supposed to find. Ninety seconds, one sentence, no revising. Put it at the top of a fresh page; you will come back to it at the end of the lesson.

What each line gives, and what it keeps back

Every one of these sentences does two things at once. It gives the reader something solid, and it keeps one thing back. The thing kept back is what makes you read the second sentence. Here is the comparison:

Reading the table

Look down the "what it gives" column first. Not one of these lines is vague. Poe names Fortunato. Jewett gives the month and the minute ("just before eight o'clock"). Chopin gives an exact sum. Hemingway gives five facts in eleven words. Even Mansfield's six-word line, the vaguest-looking of the six, gives something definite: a verdict ("ideal") delivered in a particular tone of relief. A first line that gives nothing concrete gives the reader nothing to stand on.

Now look down the "keeps back" column. Each line withholds exactly one important thing, and it is always the thing the story is about. Poe withholds the revenge, and the story is the revenge. Chopin withholds the spending, and the story is the spending. Chekhov withholds who is listening to the gossip, and the story is about the listener, a bored married man named Gurov, whom the rumour is about to change. This is the working principle, and now it can have a name. Call it the promise of a first line: by what it gives and what it withholds, a first sentence tells the reader what kind of story this is, whose voice it will be told in, and what question the story will answer. Writers and editors sometimes call a first line that pulls hard a hook, but the fishing image hides the important part. A hook only has to catch. A promise has to be kept.

The table also shows that the six lines use different materials. Two are built from voice: Poe's cold, formal confession ("as I best could", "ventured upon insult") and Mansfield's breathless relief ("And after all") are both sounds of a particular mind before they are statements of fact. Two are built from situation with a disturbance: money arrives for Mrs. Sommers, a stranger arrives in Chekhov's Yalta. One is built from place and hour: Jewett's woods. One is built from compressed biography: Hemingway's Krebs. None of these is the right way. They are six different tools, and the one you choose tells the reader what to expect.

What matters here: a strong first line gives something concrete and withholds one thing the reader wants, and the thing it withholds should be the thing the story is actually about.

Promises kept: how the six stories end

A promise is only as good as its keeping, so it is worth seeing where each of these stories goes.

• Poe keeps his exactly. The narrator, Montresor, lures Fortunato into the family vaults and walls him up alive. The last words are "In pace requiescat!", rest in peace, spoken by the man who laid the last stone. The calm voice of the first line turns out to be the most frightening thing in the story, because it never changes.
• Mansfield keeps hers by turning it. The ideal day is for a garden party, and in the middle of the preparations the news comes that a young carter named Scott, who lived in the cottages just below the house, has been thrown from his cart and killed. The daughter, Laura, wants to stop the party. It goes ahead. That evening she carries a basket of leftovers down to the dead man's house and sees him. The story ends with her trying to explain it to her brother: "Isn't life," she stammered, "isn't life - " But what life was she couldn't explain. The weather was ideal. Life was not.
• Chekhov keeps his by enlarging it. The "new person" changes Gurov, who has had many affairs and felt nothing, into a man who finds, to his own surprise, that he loves someone for the first time. The final sentence says that "the most complicated and difficult part of it was only just beginning." The rumour has become a life.
• Jewett keeps hers by letting the woods win. A young hunter offers ten dollars to anyone who will show him the nest of a white heron. The girl, Sylvia, climbs a great pine at dawn and finds it, and then will not tell him.
• Hemingway keeps his within two paragraphs. "By the time Krebs returned to his home town in Oklahoma the greeting of heroes was over. He came back much too late." The rest of the story is a young man who cannot make himself feel what his town and his mother want him to feel.
• Chopin keeps hers in a way that is the subject of the next lesson, so it will wait there.

Three openings that break the promise

Here are three first lines of the kind that fill the first drafts of every writing class, including very good ones.

My alarm went off at 6:45 and I rolled out of bed.

This line gives concrete things (an alarm, a time, a bed) and withholds nothing. The only promise it makes is that the story will go through the day in order, starting with the least interesting part. Most drafts that open like this find their real first line two or three paragraphs down, at the moment something unusual happens.

It happened on a Tuesday, and nothing would ever be the same.

This is the opposite failure. It withholds everything and gives nothing: "it" is unnamed, the Tuesday is any Tuesday, and "nothing would ever be the same" could head any story ever written. It looks like a promise and is really a request for patience. Compare Chopin, who withholds only what Mrs. Sommers will buy and gives you everything else.

It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents, except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the house-tops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness.
(Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Paul Clifford, 1830; text from Project Gutenberg)

This is the most mocked first line in English; its first seven words have become shorthand for a bad opening. Read honestly, the full sentence is better than its reputation: it has London, rooftops and lamps struggling against the dark. Its real problem is that the weather belongs to nobody. No one is waiting for the rain to stop or worrying about it. Mansfield's line is also about weather, and it works because the weather is someone's worry that has just been lifted. The difference is not the subject. It is whether the subject matters to a person.

Drafting five first lines

Here is a procedure for generating first lines that make real promises. Pick five of the six models and write one first line in the manner of each, for five different stories. Then, beside each, write two short notes: what the line gives, and what it keeps back. If you cannot fill in the second note, the line is an alarm clock. If you cannot fill in the first, it is a Tuesday.

Here is a set written for this course, one for each model:

Notice that none of these announces its theme, and none tries to shock. Each is built from concrete material with one piece held back.

Common misconceptions

• "A first line needs a shock." Only one of the six (Poe's) is shocking, and even that one works by calm rather than violence. Jewett's woods and Hemingway's college promise quiet stories and deliver them. The job is to make a promise the story can keep, not to be loud.
• "Never open with the weather." Mansfield opens with the weather. The rule describes a real failure, weather that belongs to no one, and mistakes it for a ban on a subject.
• "The first line has to name the main character." Jewett's first line contains no person, and Chekhov's woman is "a lady with a little dog" for pages. What a first line must do is make you want the second one.
• "The more you withhold, the more suspense you create." "It happened on a Tuesday" withholds everything and creates none. Suspense needs something concrete to attach to: fifteen real dollars, one named enemy.

The short version

Six writers across eighty years opened their stories with gossip, money, a confession, relief, woods at dusk and a compressed biography. What the six lines share is structure, not material: each gives something concrete, withholds one thing the reader wants, and withholds precisely the thing the story will turn out to be about. Then each story keeps its promise, sometimes exactly (Poe), sometimes by turning it (Mansfield).

What matters here: test any first line by filling in two blanks, what it gives and what it keeps back. Now do that for the line you wrote in ninety seconds at the start of this lesson, and decide whether it is an alarm clock, a Tuesday, or a promise.

Sources

1. Poe, E. A. (1846). The cask of Amontillado. Godey's Lady's Book. Project Gutenberg. gutenberg.org
2. Chopin, K. (1897). A pair of silk stockings. In The Awakening, and Selected Short Stories. Project Gutenberg. gutenberg.org
3. Chekhov, A. (1917). The lady with the dog. In The Lady with the Dog and Other Stories (C. Garnett, Trans.; The Tales of Chekhov, Vol. 3). Project Gutenberg. gutenberg.org
4. Mansfield, K. (1922). The garden-party. In The Garden Party, and Other Stories. Constable. Project Gutenberg. gutenberg.org
5. Hemingway, E. (1925). Soldier's home. In In Our Time. Boni and Liveright. Wikisource. en.wikisource.org

A weekend at the lake, in which nothing happens

Here is the first draft of a short story, written for this lesson but typical of hundreds of real ones:

Jordan went to the lake with his family for the weekend. The cabin was small and smelled like pine. On Saturday they went swimming and had hot dogs. His little sister caught a fish. That night they sat around the fire and his dad told a story about when he was a kid. Jordan looked at the stars and thought about how big the universe is. On Sunday they packed up and drove home. It was a good weekend.

Be fair to it first. It has concrete nouns: pine, hot dogs, a fish, a fire, stars. Its sentences are clear. Nobody could say it is badly written, sentence by sentence. And yet you could stop reading after any line and lose nothing, because nothing happens. The weekend begins, continues and ends. Jordan is present at it the way a camera is present at a wedding.

This is the most common problem in first drafts of fiction, and it is worth diagnosing carefully, because the obvious fixes are wrong.

Three guesses at what is wrong

Guess one: it needs more description. Add the colour of the lake, the texture of the bark, the sound of the loons. The draft would be longer and prettier, and still nothing would happen. Lesson 1's rebuilt sentences improve a story that moves; they cannot make a story move.

Guess two: it needs drama. Add a thunderstorm, a capsized canoe, a bear at the cooler. This is closer, because it adds an event. But a storm that arrives and leaves is just more weather. If Jordan does not want anything, the storm happens to him the way Saturday happened to him, and the reader watches it the same way.

Guess three: nobody in it wants anything. This is the real diagnosis. Jordan has no aim that the weekend could help or hinder. Without a want, nothing can stand in the way, and without something in the way, nothing can change. The draft is not missing excitement. It is missing an engine.

Write it down: one want, one obstacle

Before looking at how a published story builds its engine, spend five minutes on your own material. Write two sentences about something you wanted badly in the last month (not in general; something specific, with a date or a place attached). Then write two sentences about what stood in the way of it. Be honest about whether the thing in the way was outside you, inside you, or both. You will use this in the activity.

Fifteen dollars: the want

In the last lesson you met the first line of Kate Chopin's "A Pair of Silk Stockings" (1897): "Little Mrs. Sommers one day found herself the unexpected possessor of fifteen dollars." Here is what she plans to do with it:

A dollar or two should be added to the price usually paid for Janie's shoes, which would insure their lasting an appreciable time longer than they usually did. She would buy so and so many yards of percale for new shirt waists for the boys and Janie and Mag. She had intended to make the old ones do by skilful patching. Mag should have another gown. [...] And still there would be left enough for new stockings - two pairs apiece - and what darning that would save for a while! She would get caps for the boys and sailor-hats for the girls.
(Kate Chopin, "A Pair of Silk Stockings," 1897)

Notice how concrete the plan is: a dollar or two on Janie's shoes, percale for shirt waists, two pairs of stockings apiece. Notice also whose names are on the list. Janie, the boys, Mag. There is not one thing on it for Mrs. Sommers. This is the first of the three parts of a story's engine, and now it can be named: the want, a specific thing a character is trying to get, keep, do or avoid. A strong want is concrete enough that you would know whether it had been achieved. "To be happy" is not a want in this sense. "To spend fifteen dollars on her children's clothes" is.

A stool at an empty counter: the obstacle

Chopin tells you that Mrs. Sommers is expert at bargain counters. She "could elbow her way if need be". Then comes the day of the shopping:

But that day she was a little faint and tired. She had swallowed a light luncheon - no! when she came to think of it, between getting the children fed and the place righted, and preparing herself for the shopping bout, she had actually forgotten to eat any luncheon at all! She sat herself upon a revolving stool before a counter that was comparatively deserted, trying to gather strength and courage to charge through an eager multitude that was besieging breastworks of shirting and figured lawn.
(Chopin, "A Pair of Silk Stockings," 1897)

What stands between Mrs. Sommers and the shirting? There is a crowd, and Chopin describes it in the language of a battle ("besieging breastworks"). But the crowd is not what stops her; she has beaten crowds like it for years. What stops her is inside her: hunger, exhaustion, and, beneath both, a life so given over to other people that she forgot to eat. That is the second part: the obstacle, whatever stands between the character and the want. It can be another person, a thing, a place, or a part of the character herself, and the most interesting obstacles usually include that last kind.

A bare hand on silk: the turn

An all-gone limp feeling had come over her and she rested her hand aimlessly upon the counter. She wore no gloves. By degrees she grew aware that her hand had encountered something very soothing, very pleasant to touch. She looked down to see that her hand lay upon a pile of silk stockings. [...] Two hectic blotches came suddenly into her pale cheeks. She looked up at the girl.
"Do you think there are any eights-and-a-half among these?"
(Chopin, "A Pair of Silk Stockings," 1897)

Look at how small it is. A tired woman rests her bare hand on a counter, and her hand finds silk before her mind does. "She wore no gloves" is four words, and it is what makes the whole turn possible: skin against silk. Two red patches appear in her cheeks. And then a question about her own size, the first thing in the story she has asked for herself.

That is the third part: the turn, the point where the story changes direction. What changes can be the situation (a new fact arrives), the character's understanding (she sees something she could not see before), or, as here, the want itself. Before the counter, Mrs. Sommers wants shirt waists for her children. After it, she wants something she has not let herself want for years, and for the rest of the afternoon she spends the fifteen dollars on it: the stockings, then boots fitted properly, kid gloves, two expensive magazines, a lunch in a restaurant she has only ever looked into, a matinee. Chopin is careful to say that she "was not thinking at all". The turn happened in her hand.

And here is where Chopin leaves her, on the cable car home, watched by a stranger:

In truth, he saw nothing - unless he were wizard enough to detect a poignant wish, a powerful longing that the cable car would never stop anywhere, but go on and on with her forever.
(Chopin, "A Pair of Silk Stockings," 1897)

The story never tells you whether she was right or wrong to spend it, and never shows you her children's faces when she comes home without their percale. It ends on a want: the newest one, and the most impossible.

Remember: a story moves when someone wants something specific, something stands in the way, and at some point the direction changes. The turn does not have to be loud. In Chopin it is a hand on a counter.

Three more stories on the same frame

Want, obstacle and turn are not a formula that every story fills in the same way. Here are three stories you met in the last lesson, mapped on the same frame, each doing something different with it:

Read across the rows and three variations stand out. In Jewett, the turn reverses the want: Sylvia climbs the tree to win the ten dollars and comes down unable to give the secret away. In Poe, the narrator never changes at all; he wanted revenge on the first page and has it on the last, and the turn belongs to the other man, which is why the story is so cold. In Hemingway, the turn is a failure: Krebs's want to avoid consequences produces a consequence the moment he tells the truth. What the three share is movement. Something is wanted, something resists, and the situation at the end is not the situation at the start.

The lake, rebuilt

Now the draft. Here it is again, beside a revision that keeps the same family, the same cabin, the same fire and the same father's story, and adds an engine:

Here is what changed, part by part.

• Want. Jordan now wants something specific: to tell his father he has quit, before the weekend ends. You would know whether he had managed it.
• Obstacle. Some of it is outside him (one room, a sister who is everywhere, a father busy on the dock) and some is inside (he swims out to the raft twice so nobody will ask, which is a boy avoiding the conversation he came to have).
• Turn. The father's legend turns out to have a failure in it, "Almost", and the person who uncovers it is the eight-year-old, asking the plain question. What changes is Jordan's understanding: the father he was afraid of disappointing once failed at the same thing, and never told it that way. The sentence becomes sayable.
• Ending. The story does not end with a speech about acceptance. It ends with an action: a cooler set down on gravel, a man looking at the far dock. The reader decides what he is thinking, which is the method of Chopin's cable car and Chekhov's closing sentences.

Notice what did not change. There is still a fire, a father's story, pine, a lake. Nothing dramatic was added: no storm, no bear. The same material became a story because someone in it wanted something.

Common misconceptions

• "Conflict means a fight." The obstacle in Chopin's story is an empty stomach and a lifetime of putting herself last. An obstacle is whatever stands between the character and the want, and it is often partly inside the character.
• "The character has to get what she wants by the end." Mrs. Sommers gets something she did not want at the start; Sylvia gives up what she wanted; Krebs loses the uncomplicated life he wanted. A story needs a want to push against, not a want that is granted.
• "The turn is a twist ending." Chopin's turn comes in the middle of the story, and it is a hand resting on a counter. A turn is a change of direction, not a surprise saved for the last line.
• "The want has to be big." Fifteen dollars. A heron's nest. One sentence said to a father beside a car. Small, specific wants make better stories than large, vague ones, because the reader can tell exactly what is at stake.

Putting it together

A draft in which nothing happens is rarely short of description or drama. It is short of a want. Chopin's story shows the whole engine at small scale: a specific want (percale and shoes for the children), an obstacle that is partly inside the character (hunger, exhaustion, self-denial), and a turn so quiet it happens in a bare hand before it happens in a mind. Jewett reverses the want, Poe lets the victim turn instead of the narrator, and Hemingway makes the turn a failure; all three stories end somewhere different from where they began.

Remember: when a draft sits still, ask three questions in order. What does this person want, concretely enough that you would know if they got it? What stands in the way, outside and inside? Where does the direction change? Then go back to the want and the obstacle you wrote in the first ten minutes: you already have two of the three.

Sources

1. Chopin, K. (1897). A pair of silk stockings. In The Awakening, and Selected Short Stories. Project Gutenberg. gutenberg.org
2. Jewett, S. O. (1925). A white heron (first published 1886). In W. Cather (Ed.), The Best Stories of Sarah Orne Jewett (Vol. 2). Houghton Mifflin. Project Gutenberg. gutenberg.org
3. Poe, E. A. (1846). The cask of Amontillado. Godey's Lady's Book. Project Gutenberg. gutenberg.org
4. Hemingway, E. (1925). Soldier's home. In In Our Time. Boni and Liveright. Wikisource. en.wikisource.org

Three minutes before you read

Think of an older person who taught you to do something with your hands or body: ride a bike, float, knead dough, tie a knot, throw. Write three sentences about the teaching, not the skill. What did their hands do? What did they say more than once? Keep it rough. Then read the story below straight through, without stopping to analyse. It is just under 1,500 words and was written for this course, so that you can watch every decision in it being taken apart afterwards.

Parallel

Her grandfather's license was good until the fourteenth of May. After that, the eye doctor said, it would not be renewed. The doctor had said it with Ana's mother in the room, which was the only reason anyone knew.

So on the Saturday before her road test it was her grandfather in the passenger seat of his own Buick, and Ana behind the wheel, and two orange traffic cones in the empty lot behind the mattress store that had closed in March. He had brought the cones from home. They had stood in his garage for as long as she could remember, with CITY TRANSIT stencilled around the base, and she had never asked where they came from, because she knew.

"Mirrors," he said, before she had put the car in drive.

"I did my mirrors."

"Do them again."

She did them again. The car smelled of cough drops and of the vinyl cleaner he wiped over the dashboard every Sunday after church, and the seat was pushed all the way back, the way he kept it, so that her toes only just reached the pedals. She did not move it forward. It seemed like the kind of thing you should ask about first.

He had driven the number 9 bus for thirty-one years, from the depot on Grand out past the hospital to the end of the line at Riverside and back, eight times a day. His hands were the biggest thing about him, square and spotted, and they had held a steering wheel the size of a table for all of those years. He had never had an accident. He liked to say so. For the last ten years he had trained the new drivers, and he liked to say that too, and to add that most of them were hopeless for the first week and some of them were hopeless forever.

The test was at nine the next morning. If she passed, she could drive herself to the lifeguard job at the city pool in June. If she failed, the next opening was in July, and the job would go to someone who could get there.

"Pull up beside the front cone," he said. "Not that close. Not that close. Ana."

She stopped. The front cone was a foot from her mirror. It had seemed a reasonable distance.

"Now back."

She backed. She turned the wheel the way her mother had shown her over the phone, drawing it in the air, and the Buick swung its long back end around like a boat, and there was a soft, final bump from somewhere behind her.

"That," her grandfather said, "was the cone."

She got out and stood the cone back up. It had left a smear of orange on the bumper, and she rubbed at it with her thumb and made it worse. When she got back in he had his hand on the door handle, gripping it the way people grip the bar on a roller coaster.

"You can let go of that," she said. "We're parked."

He let go of it.

The second time she ended up three feet from the curb that wasn't there, angled like a car abandoned in a snowstorm. The third time she stopped so far forward that the front cone was behind her. By the fifth there was a second smear of orange on the bumper, and she had stopped looking at him. Each time he told her what she had done wrong before she had finished doing it, and each time his hand went to the door handle, and each time his right foot pressed the floor on his side, hard, where there was no brake.

"Everybody says this is easy," she said.

"It is easy." He looked out through the windshield at the back of the mattress store, at the dumpster and the loading dock and a shopping cart lying on its side. "Thirty-one years it was easy."

"Well, it isn't easy for me."

"Because you're not using your mirror. I keep saying. Your mirror."

"I am using my mirror."

"Then you're using it wrong."

She put the car in park, harder than she needed to. "Can you just not talk? One time. Can you let me do it one time without talking?"

He did not answer. He folded his hands in his lap, which she had never seen him do, and looked straight ahead, and after a moment she saw that he was not looking at the store at all. He was looking at the cones. He was squinting at them the way he squinted at the television listings, leaning forward an inch and then back, as if the cones might come clear at a different distance. They were bright orange, thirty feet away, on bare black asphalt, and he could not see them.

She thought about the fourteenth of May. She thought about last Sunday, when he had asked her to read him the numbers on a pill bottle and made a joke of it, and about the way he let her mother drive to church now and said it was because of his back. She thought about the door handle and the brake that wasn't there, and she understood that he had not been watching her park at all. He had been guessing. For an hour he had been guessing where the cones were and where the car was and calling out the guesses, because calling them out was better than saying he could not tell.

She turned off the engine. It ticked. Outside, a plastic bag lifted off the asphalt and settled again.

"How did you teach them?" she said.

"Who?"

"The new drivers. At the depot. Before they were any good."

He was quiet for so long that she thought he was angry. Then he said, "You don't teach it with your eyes. Everybody tries to teach it with their eyes." He took off his glasses and folded them and put them in his shirt pocket, behind the pen he always carried and never used. "Start the car."

She started the car.

"Pull up beside the front cone. Your mirror even with his mirror." He had his eyes closed, and his voice had changed: slower, lower, the voice he must have used on a thousand new drivers at the depot. "Go slow. Slower than you want. Tell me when."

"Now."

"Stop. Wheel all the way right. All the way, till it won't go. Now back. Slow. Watch your left mirror, not the cone. The mirror. Tell me when you see the whole back cone in it."

She backed, slowly. The back cone slid into the corner of her mirror, then filled it, orange and whole.

"Now."

"Stop. Straighten the wheel. A turn and a half, count it if you have to. Now back, straight, slow, till your front bumper clears his back bumper." He meant the front cone; he said his. "Tell me."

"Now."

"Wheel all the way left. Back. Slow. Slow."

The Buick folded itself into the space between the cones like something lying down to sleep. Ana put it in park and looked out her window, and the curb that wasn't there was exactly where it should have been, a hand's width from her tires. She had not felt it happen. It had happened the way her grandfather's voice happened, one instruction at a time, each arriving just before she needed it.

"Well?" he said. His eyes were still closed.

"It's good."

"How good?"

"It's perfect."

"One is luck," he said. "Do it again."

She did it again, and then again, and he said the same words each time, in the same order, with his eyes shut and his hands in his lap, and she began to hear that they were not really instructions at all. They were a route. He had driven it so many times that he did not need to see it. By the fourth park she said "Now" before he asked, and he stopped talking and let her do the rest.

She drove them home the long way, down Grand past the depot, because he did not ask her not to. He kept his glasses in his pocket. He did not reach for the door handle once, and when she braked at the yellow light on Fifth, early and a little hard, he said nothing at all. At the light by the hospital the number 9 pulled up beside them, huge and humming, and the driver looked down into the Buick, a young man with a shaved head and a paper cup of coffee, and her grandfather lifted two fingers off his knee, the way she had seen him lift them off the wheel of every bus he ever passed. The young man could not possibly have known who he was. He lifted two fingers back.

(Written for this course, 2026.)

Stop here and write three sentences

Before reading any commentary, write one sentence for each of these: what Ana wants, what stands in her way, and the exact moment where the story changes direction. Use the story's own words for the third if you can. Then read on and compare. If your answers differ from the commentary, that is worth knowing too: it may mean the story was unclear, or it may mean you noticed something the commentary did not.

The first three sentences: a date, a verdict and a secret

"Her grandfather's license was good until the fourteenth of May." Hold it against Lesson 3's test: what does it give, and what does it keep back? It gives a relationship (granddaughter and grandfather), an object (a license) and an exact date. It keeps back the reason, and the second sentence supplies the reason while withholding something bigger: "After that, the eye doctor said, it would not be renewed." The third sentence then does the most work of the three: "The doctor had said it with Ana's mother in the room, which was the only reason anyone knew." That clause is characterisation in eleven words. It tells you the grandfather is a man who would not have told anyone. Everything he does in the car follows from it.

Notice also what the opening does not say: that the grandfather is sad, proud, frightened, or losing his independence. The story promises (a man losing the thing a girl is about to gain) and withholds his feelings, which is exactly what the story is about.

A lot behind a closed store: setting that presses

The setting is "the empty lot behind the mattress store that had closed in March". It could have been a school parking lot or a quiet street, and the practice would have gone the same way. It was chosen because everything in it has stopped: a store that closed, a dumpster, a loading dock nobody uses, "a shopping cart lying on its side". It is a place where something ended, and the grandfather looks at it when he says "Thirty-one years it was easy." A setting presses on a story when its details carry the same pressure the characters are under. This one never says "endings"; it just puts a man about to stop driving in a lot where everything else has already stopped.

The objects in the car work the same way. The cones stencilled CITY TRANSIT carry his whole career into the scene, and "she had never asked where they came from, because she knew" tells you something about both of them: he took them, and she has always let him keep that. The seat "pushed all the way back, the way he kept it" is his body left behind in the car, and Ana's choice not to move it forward ("It seemed like the kind of thing you should ask about first") shows, without saying, that she treats the car as his and is careful with him. That is Lesson 2's showing, done with an object.

Thirty-one years in one paragraph

The paragraph that begins "He had driven the number 9 bus for thirty-one years" is pure summary. It covers three decades, a route, a pair of hands, an accident record and ten years of training drivers, in about a hundred words. Why tell here, when the rest of the story is scene? Because the reader needs all of it before the practice goes wrong, and none of it is a moment the reader should live through. The paragraph also carries a voice. "He liked to say so" is Ana's dry, affectionate view of a man who repeats himself, and "some of them were hopeless forever" is his voice, remembered. Telling, placed on purpose, as Lesson 2 argued.

The short paragraph after it is summary too, and it does a different job: it sets the stakes, what will be lost if the want fails. "If she failed, the next opening was in July, and the job would go to someone who could get there." A road test matters more when a lifeguard job depends on it.

What Ana wants, and what is in the way

Ana's want is concrete: to park between those cones reliably before nine the next morning. Her obstacles come in three layers. The first is the car itself, a long old sedan whose back end "swung ... around like a boat". The second is her grandfather, who narrates every mistake "before she had finished doing it", grips the door handle and presses a brake "where there was no brake". The third is inside her: impatience, and a refusal to look at what is happening to him. She rubs at the orange smear "and made it worse", and by the fifth attempt "she had stopped looking at him". Not looking is the obstacle that matters, because it is what keeps her from understanding the other two.

Notice that the grandfather is an obstacle and not a villain. An obstacle can be someone the character loves. The most interesting ones often are.

Lines that mean something else

Read the argument again, only the speech:

"Everybody says this is easy."
"It is easy. ... Thirty-one years it was easy."
"Well, it isn't easy for me."
"Because you're not using your mirror. I keep saying. Your mirror."

On the surface this is an argument about parking. Underneath, the grandfather's line "Thirty-one years it was easy" is about himself: it was easy, and now it is not, for him, and he knows why. That gap between what is said and what is meant is subtext, the meaning a reader understands although nobody states it. Lesson 7 is about writing it deliberately. For now, notice the repetition of "your mirror". He keeps returning to it because it is the part of the method he can still talk about without seeing, and because saying it is easier than saying anything else.

The turn: a squint at thirty feet

Ana snaps: "Can you just not talk?" And then the story turns, on a detail Ana finally lets herself see:

He was squinting at them the way he squinted at the television listings, leaning forward an inch and then back, as if the cones might come clear at a different distance. They were bright orange, thirty feet away, on bare black asphalt, and he could not see them.

This is a turn of understanding, the second kind from Lesson 4. The situation has not changed (same lot, same cones, same license date); what Ana knows has changed, and it changes what she does next. Notice how the paragraph after it gathers earlier details and gives them new meaning: the door handle, the phantom brake, and two new ones, the pill bottle and the claim that he lets her mother drive "because of his back". A good turn often works like this. It does not introduce a new fact so much as rearrange facts the reader already has, so that they suddenly point in one direction.

Then Ana does something new. She stops trying to park and asks him a question: "How did you teach them?" She has changed tactics, from resisting his teaching to asking for it in the form he can still give.

A route, not instructions

The grandfather takes off his glasses and closes his eyes. The method he recites is a real one: new drivers are commonly taught to stop at fixed reference points (mirror even with the other car, the rear car whole in the left mirror, the front bumper clearing the other car's back bumper) and turn the wheel at each. He can teach it with his eyes closed because it never depended on seeing the cones; it depends on sequence. That is why the story says "they were not really instructions at all. They were a route."

Here the title opens up. "Parallel" names the manoeuvre, and it also names the two lives in the car, running side by side in opposite directions: a girl about to gain a license, a man about to lose one, doing the same thing together for one afternoon. A title that works on two levels like this does not need to state the theme. It lets the reader find the second meaning, usually about two-thirds of the way through.

Two fingers off a knee

The story could have ended with Ana passing the test, or with a line like "She knew she would never forget that afternoon." It ends instead with a gesture. The number 9 bus pulls up beside them, and the grandfather lifts two fingers the way bus drivers greet each other, and a young driver who "could not possibly have known who he was" lifts two fingers back. Nobody explains it. The reader is left holding it, the way Chopin leaves you holding Mrs. Sommers's wish on the cable car. What does it mean? That he still belongs to something. That the job goes on without him. That the gesture belongs to the work, not to the man, which is a comfort and a grief at once. An action at the end lets all of those be true together; a sentence of explanation would have picked one.

The last paragraph also closes the story's promises quietly. "He kept his glasses in his pocket." "He did not reach for the door handle once." The obstacle Ana fought all afternoon, his fear, has let go, and the story shows it by what he does not do.

Worth holding on to: every choice in this story is small (a seat not moved, a squint, two fingers), and every one of them carries weight because it was placed where the want, the obstacle or the turn needed it.

Common misconceptions

• "A model story is a template to copy." Nobody needs another story about a grandfather and a road test. What transfers is the set of decisions: a first line that withholds the right thing, a setting chosen for its pressure, summary placed where the reader needs history, a turn that rearranges old details, an ending on an action.
• "The person in the way has to be the villain." The grandfather is Ana's main obstacle for most of the story, and he is also the person she loves and the one who teaches her. Obstacles people love make better stories than villains, because the reader cannot simply want them defeated.
• "The ending should say what the character learned." A last line that explains closes down meanings the gesture holds open. The two-finger wave says more than any sentence about growing up could, because the reader does the understanding.
• "Close reading means finding hidden symbols." The cones are not symbols of anything. They are cones he took from work, and they matter because of what they tell you about him. Read for what the details do, not for what they secretly stand for.

Looking back

You have now read one complete story twice, once as a reader and once as a writer. The first time you felt it; the second time you watched the parts: a first line built on a date and a withheld feeling, a setting where everything has stopped, one paragraph of summary placed on purpose, dialogue with a second meaning under it, a turn that happens when Ana finally looks, a method that works with eyes closed, a double-edged title and an ending on a gesture. None of it is a trick. Each piece exists because want, obstacle or turn needed it.

Worth holding on to: go back to the three sentences you wrote before reading. The teacher you remembered probably repeated something, or did something with their hands, or lost patience once. Any one of those is the seed of a scene.

Sources

1. Wikipedia contributors. (2026). Parallel parking (Techniques). Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
2. Chopin, K. (1897). A pair of silk stockings. In The Awakening, and Selected Short Stories. Project Gutenberg. gutenberg.org
3. Wikipedia contributors. (2026). Subtext. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
4. Wikipedia contributors. (2026). Setting (narrative). Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org

A profile that tells you everything and shows you no one

Many writing classes begin a story by handing out a character questionnaire. Here is one, filled in by a student, exactly as it might come back:

Name: Maya Chen. Age: 16. Appearance: long black hair, brown eyes, five foot four. Personality: kind, funny, a little shy. Loves: music, drawing, her dog. Hates: math, mornings. Plays: guitar. Family: mom, dad, little brother.

And here is the first paragraph of the story it produced:

Maya was a sixteen-year-old girl with long black hair and brown eyes. She was kind and funny but a little shy. She loved music and played the guitar, but she hated math.

This is the plausible wrong answer, and it is worth being exact about why it fails, because the questionnaire is sensible-looking and very widely used. Every fact in it is true of Maya. Not one of them makes her a person. You could meet a thousand kind, funny, slightly shy sixteen-year-olds who play guitar and hate math, and the paragraph would describe all of them. Lesson 1 showed what adjectives do to a sentence: they describe an emptiness in more detail. A trait list does the same thing to a person.

Tracing the failure, one step at a time

1. The traits are adjectives. "Kind", "funny" and "shy" are labels, the character version of "a really nice day". The reader is told the verdict and given no evidence.
2. Nothing costs anything. Maya's kindness is never tested. She is never kind to someone she dislikes, or when it is inconvenient, so "kind" means nothing yet.
3. Everything agrees. Every trait is pleasant and consistent with every other. Real people are not arranged like that. A list with no contradiction in it describes a brochure.
4. She wants nothing. "Loves music" is a preference, not a want. Lesson 4 showed that a story needs a want; so does a person on the page.
5. We are never inside her. The paragraph stands outside Maya and reports. There is no moment in which we hear her think in her own words.

The usual next fix also fails. A student told the profile is flat adds backstory: her parents divorced when she was ten; she moved twice. That is more information, and it is still a list. Facts about a person do not become a person until they press on a moment in which she wants something.

Write first: one person, one minute

Before reading any published character, take five minutes. Think of someone you know well but not intimately: a neighbour, a coach, a cousin, a cashier you see every week. Write down one thing they do that seems to contradict what they say or what they seem to be. Then write one sentence they might think to themselves, in their own words, with no quotation marks. Keep it. The rest of the lesson will show you what you have just written.

Inside a mind: Miss Brill and her fur

Katherine Mansfield published "Miss Brill" in 1920. Miss Brill is an English teacher, no longer young, living alone in a French town, who goes every Sunday to hear the band in the public gardens. The story begins as she puts on her fur:

Miss Brill put up her hand and touched her fur. Dear little thing! It was nice to feel it again. She had taken it out of its box that afternoon, shaken out the moth-powder, given it a good brush, and rubbed the life back into the dim little eyes. "What has been happening to me?" said the sad little eyes. Oh, how sweet it was to see them snap at her again from the red eiderdown!
(Katherine Mansfield, "Miss Brill," 1920, in The Garden Party, and Other Stories, 1922)

Whose words are "Dear little thing!"? There are no quotation marks, and the narrator is writing in the third person, yet no narrator would call a moth-eaten fur a dear little thing. Those are Miss Brill's words, placed straight into the narration. So is "Oh, how sweet it was". The narration has slipped inside her head and speaks in her voice while keeping "she" instead of "I". That technique has a name, free indirect style, and it is the most powerful single tool for interiority: the reader's access to what a character thinks and feels, in the character's own terms, at a particular moment.

Notice what the interiority tells you without a single adjective. A woman who talks to her fur, who imagines its eyes asking "What has been happening to me?", who has rubbed "the life back into" them, is lonely. Mansfield never uses the word. You learn it the way you would learn it about a real person: by being in the room with her thoughts.

Seeing more than she does

Interiority has a second power, subtler than the first. Here is Miss Brill, a little later, watching the other people who sit on the benches every Sunday:

They were odd, silent, nearly all old, and from the way they stared they looked as though they'd just come from dark little rooms or even - even cupboards!
(Mansfield, "Miss Brill")

Hold on to that. Then she makes a discovery that delights her: the whole park is like a play, and she is in it.

They were all on the stage. They weren't only the audience, not only looking on; they were acting. Even she had a part and came every Sunday. No doubt somebody would have noticed if she hadn't been there; she was part of the performance after all.
(Mansfield, "Miss Brill")

That is her want, finally visible: not to watch, but to belong, to be one of "the company". Then a young couple sits down on her bench:

"Why does she come here at all - who wants her? Why doesn't she keep her silly old mug at home?"
"It's her fu-fur which is so funny," giggled the girl. "It's exactly like a fried whiting."
(Mansfield, "Miss Brill")

And the ending:

But to-day she passed the baker's by, climbed the stairs, went into the little dark room - her room like a cupboard - and sat down on the red eiderdown. She sat there for a long time. The box that the fur came out of was on the bed. She unclasped the necklet quickly; quickly, without looking, laid it inside. But when she put the lid on she thought she heard something crying.
(Mansfield, "Miss Brill")

"Her room like a cupboard." Miss Brill had pitied the odd old people who seemed to come from dark little rooms, even cupboards, and all along she was one of them. The reader could see it before she could, because interiority works in two directions at once: it puts you inside the character's view, and it lets you see the edges of that view. When a reader understands something a character does not, that gap is called dramatic irony, and in "Miss Brill" it is where all the pity comes from. Even at the end, she does not say she is hurt. She hears "something crying", and the something is her.

The upshot: interiority is not a paragraph explaining a character's feelings. It is the character's own words and perceptions inside the narration, chosen so that the reader sees both what she sees and what she cannot.

Two pulls at once: Huck at the close place

In Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), Huck has spent the novel on a raft with Jim, a man escaping slavery. Everything Huck has been taught by his town and his church tells him that helping Jim is a sin. In chapter 31 he writes a letter to Jim's owner telling her where Jim is, and feels, he says, "all washed clean of sin". (The novel uses the racist language of its time and place, including in that letter; the passage below begins after it.) Then he goes on thinking:

And got to thinking over our trip down the river; and I see Jim before me all the time: in the day and in the night-time, sometimes moonlight, sometimes storms, and we a-floating along, talking and singing and laughing. But somehow I couldn't seem to strike no places to harden me against him, but only the other kind. [...] and then I happened to look around and see that paper.
It was a close place. I took it up, and held it in my hand. I was a-trembling, because I'd got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it. I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself:
"All right, then, I'll go to hell" - and tore it up.
(Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, 1885, chapter 31)

What makes this the most famous moment in the book is a contradiction: two things true of the same person that pull against each other. Huck does the right thing while believing, sincerely, that it will damn him. He does not experience his choice as courage. He experiences it as giving in to wickedness: "It was awful thoughts and awful words, but they was said." The reader, who knows better than Huck what is right, watches a boy choose it while thinking himself lost. A character who was simply "brave and kind" could never produce this scene. Huck's conscience, as he has been taught it, and his heart, as he lives it, pull in opposite directions, and the tear down the middle of the letter is the tear down the middle of him.

Words against needs: Gurov

Contradiction does not have to be dramatic. Here is how Chekhov introduces Gurov, the man you met in Lesson 3 hearing gossip about a lady with a little dog:

He had begun being unfaithful to her long ago - had been unfaithful to her often, and, probably on that account, almost always spoke ill of women, and when they were talked about in his presence, used to call them "the lower race."
It seemed to him that he had been so schooled by bitter experience that he might call them what he liked, and yet he could not get on for two days together without "the lower race."
(Anton Chekhov, "The Lady with the Dog," 1899, translated by Constance Garnett, 1917)

This is telling, as Lesson 2 would put it, and it is excellent telling, because it hands you a contradiction in one sentence: the man sneers at women and cannot do without them. The narrator even offers a guess about the cause ("probably on that account"): he speaks ill of women because he treats them badly. A reader distrusts a character who is all one thing. A reader believes a character whose words and needs pull against each other, because that is what people are like.

The same girl, rebuilt

Now go back to Maya. Keep everything the profile said that is worth keeping, and put it under pressure in a single moment:

Trace what happened to each trait. "Shy" became a towel against a door and a name borrowed from a brother. "Funny" became the joke of making her brother responsible for her backing out, a joke that is also a plan. "Loves music" became a want: to be heard. "Hates math" survived, but now it does work: it is her cover story, "true, and ... she did not care about it at all". The contradiction is the engine of the whole paragraph: she wants to be heard and has spent two years making sure no one could hear her. And the last two sentences are interiority, her private logic in her own terms: the towel is the thing she wants to be free of, and she has attached her whole future to one performance. "Kind", notice, has disappeared. It will return when she is kind to someone at a cost, and not before.

Common misconceptions

• "Knowing everything about a character makes her real." Writers do sometimes fill in long profiles, and the knowledge can help. But the reader never sees the profile. What the reader sees is the character wanting something in a moment, and a trait that never presses on a moment might as well not exist.
• "Contradiction means the character is badly written." Inconsistency with no reason is a flaw. Contradiction, two real pulls in one person, is what Huck's torn letter and Gurov's "lower race" are made of, and it is what makes readers believe in them.
• "Interiority means explaining what a character feels." Mansfield never says Miss Brill is lonely. She lets "Dear little thing!" and a room "like a cupboard" say it. Interiority is the character's own words and perceptions, not the narrator's summary of them.
• "Readers need a likeable main character." Readers need a character they understand. Gurov is unfaithful and contemptuous, and readers have followed him for more than a century because they can see inside him.

What you now know

A character questionnaire produces labels, and labels on a person fail exactly as adjectives on a sentence do. Three things make a person on the page instead. Interiority lets the reader into the character's own words and perceptions, as free indirect style does with Miss Brill's "Dear little thing!", and lets the reader see past her, to the cupboard she lives in. Contradiction gives two real pulls in one person, like Huck choosing right while believing himself damned, or Gurov sneering at women he cannot do without. Wanting gives the character a direction: Miss Brill wants to belong, Maya wants to be heard.

The upshot: build a character from a moment, not a list. Go back to the person you wrote about in the first ten minutes. The contradiction you noticed and the sentence they think to themselves are the beginning of a character, and neither one is an adjective.

Sources

1. Mansfield, K. (1922). Miss Brill (first published 1920). In The Garden Party, and Other Stories. Constable. Project Gutenberg. gutenberg.org
2. Twain, M. (1885). Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Chapter 31). Charles L. Webster. Project Gutenberg. gutenberg.org
3. Chekhov, A. (1917). The lady with the dog. In The Lady with the Dog and Other Stories (C. Garnett, Trans.; The Tales of Chekhov, Vol. 3). Project Gutenberg. gutenberg.org
4. Wikipedia contributors. (2026). Free indirect speech. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org

An evening on the point, and the thing nobody says

Nick and Marjorie are rowing along the shore of a Michigan bay, past the ruin of a lumber mill that closed ten years ago. This is from "The End of Something", the third story in Hemingway's In Our Time:

"There's our old ruin, Nick," Marjorie said.
Nick, rowing, looked at the white stone in the green trees.
"There it is," he said.
"Can you remember when it was a mill?" Marjorie asked.
"I can just remember," Nick said.
"It seems more like a castle," Marjorie said.
Nick said nothing. They rowed on out of sight of the mill, following the shore line. Then Nick cut across the bay.
"They aren't striking," he said.
"No," Marjorie said. She was intent on the rod all the time they trolled, even when she talked. She loved to fish. She loved to fish with Nick.
(Ernest Hemingway, "The End of Something," In Our Time, 1925)

On the surface this is a conversation about a ruin and some fish. Read it again knowing the title. Marjorie calls the ruin "our" ruin and wants it to be a castle. Nick, who can "just remember" when it was a working mill, says nothing. Then he changes the subject to the fish, which "aren't striking", and a moment later, when two trout break the surface, he insists: "But they won't strike." Everything he says is about fishing. Everything he means is about them.

Later, by the fire, the real subject finally surfaces, and even then it arrives sideways:

"You don't have to talk silly," Marjorie said; "what's really the matter?"
"I don't know."
"Of course you know."
"No I don't."
"Go on and say it."
Nick looked on at the moon, coming up over the hills.
"It isn't fun any more."
(Hemingway, "The End of Something," 1925)

"It isn't fun any more" is the nearest Nick ever gets to "I want to break up", and it is enough. Marjorie takes the boat and rows home alone.

Write first: a conversation about the wrong thing

Take five minutes. Two people, in a kitchen or a car or a locker room. One of them has something hard to say: they are moving, they failed, they know a secret. Write eight to twelve lines in which they talk only about something else: the dishes, a game, the weather, a pair of shoes. Do not let the hard thing be said. Do not worry about punctuation yet; this lesson will fix it.

Naming it: subtext

What you have just watched, and just written, is subtext: meaning that runs underneath what the characters say, understood by the reader although nobody states it. You met the word in Lesson 5, in the grandfather's "Thirty-one years it was easy." Here is why it matters so much in dialogue. In life, people rarely say exactly what they mean when the stakes are high. They avoid, deflect, joke, change the subject, talk about fish. Dialogue in which characters announce their feelings ("I feel like our relationship has lost its spark, Marjorie") sounds false for exactly that reason. It also leaves the reader nothing to do. Subtext hands the reader the job of hearing what is not said, and a reader doing that job is paying close attention.

In short: the most important thing in a conversation is often the thing nobody says. Let characters talk about the ruin and the fish, and let the reader hear the end of something.

The procedure: punctuating a raw exchange, step by step

Subtext is art. Punctuation is rules, and the rules are learnable in one sitting. Here is a raw exchange, as it might come out of a notebook, with no punctuation at all:

i found your notebook dev said on the bus where do you want it tamsin didnt look up keep it she said i dont need it anymore you wrote in it yesterday i saw you

Work through it in six steps. Each step names a rule and where it comes from.

1. Give every new speaker a new paragraph. Purdue University's Online Writing Lab puts it plainly: "Write each person's spoken words, however brief, as a separate paragraph." So there are three paragraphs here: Dev, Tamsin, Dev.
2. Put the spoken words inside quotation marks, and nothing else. "Dev said" is not spoken; it goes outside.
3. Attach a speech tag with a comma, and put the comma inside the closing quotation mark. A tag is the phrase that says who spoke ("Dev said"). The Online Writing Lab's rules: use commas to set off dialogue tags, and "Put commas and periods within quotation marks." So: "I found your notebook," Dev said.
4. Keep a question mark inside the quotation marks when the spoken words are the question, and do not replace it with a comma. The tag that follows still begins with a small letter, because it continues the same sentence. Mansfield does exactly this in "Miss Brill": "But why? Because of that stupid old thing at the end there?" asked the boy.
5. If the words beside the speech are an action rather than a way of speaking, make them a separate sentence. This is called an action beat. Hemingway: "Sure. Let it go." Marjorie dropped the line overboard. There is a period after "go", because "Marjorie dropped the line" is not a way of saying anything.
6. If a tag interrupts one spoken sentence, put a comma after the tag and continue in small letters. Mansfield again, at the end of "The Garden Party": "Isn't life," she stammered, "isn't life - " The sentence is one sentence, broken by the tag.

Here is the result:

"I found your notebook," Dev said. "On the bus. Where do you want it?"
Tamsin didn't look up. "Keep it," she said. "I don't need it anymore."
"You wrote in it yesterday. I saw you."

Notice the second line: an action beat ("Tamsin didn't look up.") before the speech, then a tag after the first phrase. Both belong in Tamsin's paragraph, because both are about Tamsin. And notice that the punctuated version has acquired subtext just by being laid out: Dev's last line means something like "I know you're lying, and I've been watching you," and Tamsin's "I don't need it anymore" sounds like someone giving up on more than a notebook.

Change one input: tag or beat

Here is the procedure's most useful test. Change a single word beside a line of dialogue and watch the punctuation flip.

Tags: why "said" disappears

Go back to Hemingway's passage and count the tags: "Marjorie said", "he said", "Marjorie asked", "Nick said", "Marjorie said", "he said", "Marjorie said". Said and asked, over and over. Nick and Marjorie's feelings are enormous, and not one tag tells you about them. There is no "she said wistfully", no "he muttered darkly". The lines and the beats ("Nick said nothing") carry everything.

This is a deliberate discipline, and one twentieth-century novelist made it a rule. Elmore Leonard, in a 2001 list of his rules for writing, put it at number three: "Never use a verb other than 'said' to carry dialogue." His reasoning, paraphrased: the line belongs to the character, and any fancier verb is the writer sticking his nose in. His next rule forbade adverbs on "said" altogether. Tags such as retorted, exclaimed, chortled and hissed are sometimes mocked as said-bookisms, and writers on dialogue generally agree that they call attention to themselves when overused. "Said" works because readers stop seeing it. It tells them who is talking and gets out of the way.

A tag is not always needed. When two people are talking and the pattern is clear, lines can stand alone, as Hemingway's do by the fire ("I don't know." "Of course you know." "No I don't."). Add a tag or a beat when the reader might lose track, and not otherwise.

An over-tagged exchange, rewritten

Here is what changed. Every adverb went (curiously, hesitantly, angrily, defensively, dismissively), because each one told the reader what the line should have shown. Every said-bookism went too (replied, retorted, exclaimed, sighed); "sighed" was also a punctuation error, since nobody can sigh the word "whatever". The exclamation points went, because Sam's hurt is sharper when she does not shout. Sam's hesitation became an action: she keeps rinsing a thermos that is already clean, which is a girl avoiding a friend's eyes. Jess's anger became two words, "Right. Leo.", that say "I don't believe you" without saying it. And the last line is new: Jess stays hurt and stays a friend at the same time, and the offer of the couch says both. The "before" version has characters announcing their feelings. The "after" version has people.

Common misconceptions

• "Using lots of different speech verbs shows a good vocabulary." It shows the writer. Hemingway uses said and asked almost exclusively in a story full of feeling, and Leonard made "said" a rule. Variety belongs in the lines, not the tags.
• "Good dialogue sounds exactly like real speech." Real speech is full of hesitations, repetitions and small talk. Written dialogue keeps the feel of speech, the fragments and the dodges, and cuts almost everything else.
• "Characters should say what they feel so the reader understands." Marjorie understands Nick perfectly, and he never says "I want to break up." Readers understand subtext the same way people do: from what is avoided.
• "'Keep it,' she smiled is fine because everyone writes it." Everyone writes it, and it is still an error: smiling is not a way of speaking. Use a beat ("Keep it." She smiled.) or a tag plus action ("Keep it," she said, smiling).

Summing up

Dialogue does two jobs at once. On the surface it has to be correctly punctuated, and the rules are few: a new paragraph for each speaker, commas and periods inside the closing quotation marks, question marks inside when the spoken words ask, lowercase tags that continue the sentence, and action beats as sentences of their own. Underneath, it has to carry what the characters cannot or will not say. Hemingway's fish that will not strike and Jess's "Right. Leo." are the same move: the real subject stays under the surface, and the reader hears it.

In short: tag with "said" or not at all, let actions and lines carry the feeling, and let people talk about the wrong thing. Now go back to the conversation you wrote in the first ten minutes and punctuate it by the six steps.

Sources

1. Hemingway, E. (1925). The end of something. In In Our Time. Boni and Liveright. Wikisource. en.wikisource.org
2. Purdue Online Writing Lab. (n.d.). Quotation marks with fiction, poetry, and titles (Writing dialogue). Purdue University. owl.purdue.edu
3. Purdue Online Writing Lab. (n.d.). Additional punctuation rules when using quotation marks. Purdue University. owl.purdue.edu
4. Leonard, E. (2001, July 16). Writers on writing: Easy on the adverbs, exclamation points and especially hooptedoodle. The New York Times.
5. Mansfield, K. (1922). The Garden Party, and Other Stories (Miss Brill; The garden-party). Constable. Project Gutenberg. gutenberg.org

Three narrators, three passages

Read these three openings of scenes, each from a different story, before any terms get attached to them. Ask of each one a single question: who is telling this, and how much do they know?

I guess looking at it, now, my old man was cut out for a fat guy, one of those regular little roly fat guys you see around, but he sure never got that way, except a little toward the last, and then it wasn't his fault, he was riding over the jumps only and he could afford to carry plenty of weight then. I remember the way he'd pull on a rubber shirt over a couple of jerseys and a big sweat shirt over that, and get me to run with him in the forenoon in the hot sun.
(Ernest Hemingway, "My Old Man," In Our Time, 1925)

Only the tall fellow was left. He bent down, pinched a sprig of lavender, put his thumb and forefinger to his nose and snuffed up the smell. When Laura saw that gesture she forgot all about the karakas in her wonder at him caring for things like that - caring for the smell of lavender. How many men that she knew would have done such a thing? Oh, how extraordinarily nice workmen were, she thought. Why couldn't she have workmen for her friends rather than the silly boys she danced with and who came to Sunday night supper?
(Katherine Mansfield, "The Garden Party," 1922)

It was like a great main-mast to the voyaging earth; it must truly have been amazed that morning through all its ponderous frame as it felt this determined spark of human spirit creeping and climbing from higher branch to branch. [...] The old pine must have loved his new dependent. More than all the hawks, and bats, and moths, and even the sweet-voiced thrushes, was the brave, beating heart of the solitary gray-eyed child.
(Sarah Orne Jewett, "A White Heron," 1886)

The first is told by a boy, Joe, about his father, a jockey. The second stays close beside a girl named Laura on the morning of her family's garden party. The third is told by someone who knows what a pine tree feels. Three stories, three different answers to the question of who is telling and how much they know.

Write first: one moment, told by you

Before reading further, take five minutes and write six to eight sentences about a moment when you were waiting for someone: outside an office, at a pickup, by a phone. Write it in the first person, "I", exactly as you remember it. You will rewrite it twice before the lesson ends, and the differences between the three versions will teach you more than any definition.

The three options, side by side

The choice of who tells a story, and from where, is called point of view. There are more than three options, but these three cover most of the fiction you will read and write. The most useful way to tell them apart is not by pronoun but by knowledge: what is this narrator allowed to know?

The core of it: a point of view is a promise about knowledge. Once you choose one, the story may know only what that narrator could know.

First person: a boy who does not know what the reader knows

In first-person narration, the narrator is a character, and the story arrives in that character's words. Listen to Joe's: "I guess", "one of those regular little roly fat guys you see around", "he sure never got that way". Nobody else in the book talks like this. That is the first gift of first person: a voice, a way of speaking that is itself a portrait.

Notice the word "now" in "I guess looking at it, now". Joe is telling this later, looking back. He knows how things ended, "a little toward the last", but he still does not know everything. By the end of the story his father has been killed in a fall at a steeplechase, and Joe overhears two men with betting tickets calling his father a crook who "had it coming to him". A friend tells him not to listen. The story's last lines are Joe's:

But I don't know. Seems like when they get started they don't leave a guy nothing.
(Hemingway, "My Old Man," 1925)

Across the story the reader has been collecting clues that Joe's father was mixed up in fixing races, clues that Joe reports without understanding. The first-person narrator can only give you what he has, and a reader who sees past him feels the ending twice: once as Joe's grief, once as the truth he cannot face. That gap is the second gift of first person, and it is also its cost. Anything Joe does not see, the story cannot show directly.

Close third: Laura and her bread-and-butter

Close third person uses "she" or "he", but the narration stays beside a single character, inside her perceptions and often inside her words. Here is more of Laura's morning, as she watches the workmen put up the marquee:

It's all the fault, she decided, as the tall fellow drew something on the back of an envelope, something that was to be looped up or left to hang, of these absurd class distinctions. Well, for her part, she didn't feel them. Not a bit, not an atom.... [...] Just to prove how happy she was, just to show the tall fellow how at home she felt, and how she despised stupid conventions, Laura took a big bite of her bread-and-butter as she stared at the little drawing. She felt just like a work-girl.
(Mansfield, "The Garden Party," 1922)

"Not a bit, not an atom" is Laura's phrase, not the narrator's: the free indirect style from Lesson 6. So close third can do almost everything first person can. But it has one advantage first person lacks. Because the narration is in the third person, it can show Laura very slightly from outside, and the reader can smile at her. A rich girl proving she despises class distinctions by taking a big bite of bread-and-butter, and feeling "just like a work-girl", is funny and a little sad, and Mansfield never has to say so.

Now look at the limit. A few lines earlier, a pale workman scans the tennis court, and the narration asks: "What was he thinking?" It cannot answer. The story is in close third on Laura, and Laura cannot see into a stranger's mind, so the narration can only wonder, as she does. That question is the point of view keeping its promise.

Omniscient: a narrator who talks to the woods

The narrator of "A White Heron" is under no such limit. It knows what the old pine feels ("must have loved his new dependent"). It can see Sylvia from a place nobody is standing: "Sylvia's face was like a pale star, if one had seen it from the ground." It knows her future, telling you that "Many a night Sylvia heard the echo of his whistle haunting the pasture path". It comments: "Alas, if the great wave of human interest which flooded for the first time this dull little life should sweep away the satisfactions of an existence heart to heart with nature". And at the very end it turns away from the reader altogether and speaks to the landscape:

Whatever treasures were lost to her, woodlands and summer-time, remember! Bring your gifts and graces and tell your secrets to this lonely country child!
(Jewett, "A White Heron," 1886)

That is an omniscient narrator: all-knowing, free to enter any mind or none, and often, as here, a presence with its own voice and feelings. What it gains is range. Jewett can give you the tree, the girl, the future and her own judgement in one page. What it costs is secrecy. An omniscient narrator who knows everything and withholds something must be seen to withhold it, which is why most modern writers who use omniscience use it lightly.

One scene, three narrators

Here is a scene written for this lesson, told three ways. The facts are fixed. At a county fair, Luis, sixteen, has promised his mother he will watch his sister Rosa, eight, who insists on riding the Ferris wheel alone. The wheel stops with Rosa's car at the very top. Their mother is on the phone with the landlord. What changes from version to version is only who tells it, and so what the reader is allowed to know.

First person (Luis):

I told Mom I'd watch Rosa, which is how I ended up at the bottom of the Ferris wheel holding a lemonade and a stuffed banana while my eight-year-old sister rode it alone. She'd made me promise not to get on. Then the wheel stopped, and her car was the one at the very top, swinging a little, and I couldn't see her face. I don't know what I thought I was going to do. Climb it? I stood there with the banana. Behind me, by the lemonade stand, Mom was on the phone with Mr. Kessler again, saying "Next Friday, I promise, next Friday," and I didn't turn around.

Close third (on Luis):

Luis had told his mother he would watch Rosa, which was how he came to be standing at the bottom of the Ferris wheel holding a lemonade and a stuffed banana while his eight-year-old sister rode it alone. She had made him promise not to get on. Then the wheel stopped, and her car was the one at the very top, swinging a little, and he could not see her face. What was he going to do, climb it? He stood there with the banana. Behind him, by the lemonade stand, his mother was on the phone with Mr. Kessler again, saying "Next Friday, I promise, next Friday," and he did not turn around.

Omniscient:

The wheel stopped because a boy in the bottom car had been sick on his shoes, and the operator, who had worked the county fair for twenty-two summers and seen worse, was hosing the car down. At the very top, Rosa Mendez, eight, was not frightened at all. She was looking for their building. From up here she could see the water tower and the bus garage and, she was almost sure, the green roof of the Alvarado Apartments, which she had decided to memorize, because nobody had told her they were moving but she knew. Far below, her brother stood holding a lemonade and a stuffed banana, certain she was terrified. Behind him their mother said "Next Friday, I promise" into her phone and thought that if Luis had not turned around by now he never would, which was the one kindness she had been given all week.

Compare what each version gives and takes away.

• First person gives Luis's voice ("I don't know what I thought I was going to do. Climb it?") and his fear, which the reader shares because the reader knows no more than he does. The reader does not know why the wheel stopped or what Rosa feels, and so the reader is afraid for her too.
• Close third keeps nearly all of that, and his question survives as free indirect style ("What was he going to do, climb it?"). The small difference is that the narration can describe him from half a step outside ("He stood there with the banana"), which makes him slightly more comic and slightly more alone.
• Omniscient knows why the wheel stopped, that Rosa is not frightened, that she has worked out the family is moving, and what their mother is thinking. The reader loses the fear for Rosa and gains something else: the irony of three people each protecting the others with silence. The last clause ("which was the one kindness she had been given all week") is the narrator's own judgement, something neither of the other versions could contain.

None of the three is correct. Each is a different story. The first two are about a brother's fear. The third is about a family that is keeping a secret from itself.

A slip, caught

The most common point-of-view error is not choosing the wrong one. It is choosing one and then breaking its promise. Here is a slip in the close-third version, and its repair:

"Rosa wasn't scared at all" is something only Rosa, or an omniscient narrator, could know. In close third on Luis it leaks information the scene depends on hiding. The repair keeps the reader inside Luis's ignorance and turns it into his thought, which is what close third is for. The same test works on any draft: for each sentence, ask whether the narrator you chose could know it.

Common misconceptions

• "First person is easier because it is like talking." It is the hardest to keep honest, because every sentence must be something that character would say and could know. Joe's voice in "My Old Man" never slips into a vocabulary he would not have.
• "Third person means the narrator knows everything." Close third is as limited as first person: Mansfield's narration can only ask "What was he thinking?" Knowledge, not the pronoun, is what separates close third from omniscient.
• "Omniscient is old-fashioned and wrong." It is less common now, but Jewett's narrator speaking to the woods is a deliberate choice, and the omniscient Ferris wheel scene tells a story the other two cannot.
• "A first-person narrator tells the truth, since it is their story." Joe tells the truth as far as he knows it. First person puts the reader beside a mind, not beside the facts, and the most interesting first-person stories live in the gap.

The takeaway

Hemingway's Joe, Mansfield's Laura and Jewett's all-knowing narrator show three answers to one question: how much is this story allowed to know? First person gives a voice and a mind the reader can see past; close third gives nearly the same intimacy with a half step of distance and a strict limit ("What was he thinking?"); omniscience gives range, irony across minds and a narrator with opinions, at the price of secrecy. The Ferris wheel scene, told three ways, became two stories about a brother's fear and one about a family's silence.

The core of it: choose the point of view by deciding what the reader must not know yet, and whose mind would keep it hidden. Then keep the promise sentence by sentence.

Sources

1. Hemingway, E. (1925). My old man. In In Our Time. Boni and Liveright. Wikisource. en.wikisource.org
2. Mansfield, K. (1922). The garden-party. In The Garden Party, and Other Stories. Constable. Project Gutenberg. gutenberg.org
3. Jewett, S. O. (1925). A white heron (first published 1886). In W. Cather (Ed.), The Best Stories of Sarah Orne Jewett (Vol. 2). Houghton Mifflin. Project Gutenberg. gutenberg.org
4. Wikipedia contributors. (2026). Narration (Narrative point of view). Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org

A draft that skips its best moment

Here is a first draft, written for this lesson. Read it once and ask where it goes too fast.

All through junior year I liked Dani Reyes from a distance. I watched her at lunch every day and I sat behind her in chemistry. I never said anything to her. Then one day in April she asked me if I was going to the spring concert, and we talked for a while, and I told her I'd save her a seat. I was so happy for the rest of the week. But on the night of the concert my ride fell through and I got there late, and she was already sitting with someone else. I went home feeling stupid.

Nothing in it is false and the plot is a good one: a long, silent admiration; one conversation; a promise; a delay; a disappointment. In fact it is almost exactly the plot of one of the most admired short stories in English, which you are about to read. So the problem is not the story. The problem is speed. Seven months and one five-minute conversation get the same treatment, a sentence each. The most important moment in the draft, the first time the two of them talk, is covered by four words: "we talked for a while". The reader is told it happened and never gets to be there.

Write it first: one moment, slowed down

Before reading on, pick the moment in that draft that most deserves to be lived through rather than reported. (You will probably pick the conversation. That is the right choice, but you may argue for the concert.) Take six minutes and write it as eight to twelve lines in which we are there: a specific place, a specific time, what each of them says, one thing the narrator notices about her. Do not summarise any of it.

The same story in 1914: Joyce's Araby

In "Araby", the third story in Dubliners, a boy in Dublin is secretly devoted to the older sister of his friend Mangan. Here is how Joyce handles the months of silent admiration:

Every morning I lay on the floor in the front parlour watching her door. The blind was pulled down to within an inch of the sash so that I could not be seen. When she came out on the doorstep my heart leaped. I ran to the hall, seized my books and followed her. I kept her brown figure always in my eye and, when we came near the point at which our ways diverged, I quickened my pace and passed her. This happened morning after morning. I had never spoken to her, except for a few casual words, and yet her name was like a summons to all my foolish blood.
(James Joyce, "Araby," Dubliners, 1914)

Look at the first two words: "Every morning". This is not one morning; it is dozens of them, folded into a single description of what always happened, and "This happened morning after morning" says so. Call it a summary of a habit: many repetitions compressed into one. Joyce does not pick a particular Tuesday and dramatise it, because no particular Tuesday was different from the others. What the reader needs is the pattern, and the pattern is given concretely (the blind pulled down "to within an inch of the sash", "her brown figure") and fast.

Where Joyce stops and plays the moment

Then comes the one evening that was different:

At last she spoke to me. When she addressed the first words to me I was so confused that I did not know what to answer. She asked me was I going to Araby. I forgot whether I answered yes or no. It would be a splendid bazaar, she said; she would love to go.
"And why can't you?" I asked.
While she spoke she turned a silver bracelet round and round her wrist. She could not go, she said, because there would be a retreat that week in her convent. Her brother and two other boys were fighting for their caps and I was alone at the railings. She held one of the spikes, bowing her head towards me. The light from the lamp opposite our door caught the white curve of her neck, lit up her hair that rested there and, falling, lit up the hand upon the railing. It fell over one side of her dress and caught the white border of a petticoat, just visible as she stood at ease.
"It's well for you," she said.
"If I go," I said, "I will bring you something."
(Joyce, "Araby," 1914)

This is a scene: one continuous moment, at a specific time and place, between specific people, rendered closely enough that the reader seems to be present. And watch what Joyce does to time inside it. The conversation itself would take less than a minute. But between "And why can't you?" and "It's well for you," he stops the clock and lets the lamplight travel: from her neck, to her hair, to her hand on the railing, to the border of her petticoat. That is the boy's attention, frozen on her. The scene slows down precisely where the boy's feeling is strongest, and the reader's attention is held there as long as his is.

Then, immediately, Joyce speeds up again:

What innumerable follies laid waste my waking and sleeping thoughts after that evening! I wished to annihilate the tedious intervening days.
(Joyce, "Araby," 1914)

Several days, one exclamation. The idea underneath all of this has a name, pace: the speed at which a story is told, which is not the speed at which it happens. The number of words a moment gets depends on how much it matters, not on how long it took.

Bottom line: summary is fast-forward, scene is play, and a close-up like Joyce's lamplight is slow motion. A story is built by deciding, moment by moment, which speed each part deserves.

The street is blind: setting as pressure

Here is the first sentence of "Araby":

North Richmond Street, being blind, was a quiet street except at the hour when the Christian Brothers' School set the boys free. An uninhabited house of two storeys stood at the blind end, detached from its neighbours in a square ground. The other houses of the street, conscious of decent lives within them, gazed at one another with brown imperturbable faces.
(Joyce, "Araby," 1914)

A "blind" street, in the older sense Joyce uses, is one that is closed at one end: a dead end with no way through. The boy's whole world starts at a dead end, beside an empty house, among neighbours who stare at each other with "brown imperturbable faces", and a few lines later we learn that the previous tenant of his own house, a priest, "had died in the back drawing-room". Nothing in this setting is neutral. It is a place where things stop.

That is the job setting does in the strongest stories: it presses against the character's want. You saw a mild version in Lesson 5's closed mattress store. Joyce's setting presses hardest at the end. The uncle comes home late (Joyce gives the clock: "At nine o'clock I heard my uncle's latchkey"), the train crawls, and the boy arrives at the bazaar at "ten minutes to ten":

Nearly all the stalls were closed and the greater part of the hall was in darkness. I recognised a silence like that which pervades a church after a service.
(Joyce, "Araby," 1914)

At the one open stall, a young woman is flirting with two young men ("O, I never said such a thing!" "O, but you did!"), and when she asks the boy, without much interest, whether he wants to buy anything, he murmurs, "No, thank you." Then a voice calls that the light is out, and the story ends in the dark: "Gazing up into the darkness I saw myself as a creature driven and derided by vanity; and my eyes burned with anguish and anger." The place he dreamed of as enchanted turns out to be closing, dark and ordinary, and the setting delivers the turn before the boy can put it into words. Time pressed on him (the late uncle, the slow train, the clock) and place finished the job.

A speed map of Araby

Read the right-hand column again. Every speed was chosen for a reason the reader can feel, and the reasons are always the same two questions: does anything change in this stretch, and does the reader need to be there when it does?

The draft, rebuilt

Here is what changed, speed by speed.

• The seven months stayed summary, as a habit ("every day, second period, for seven months"), because nothing in them changes. But the summary got one concrete detail, the doodled houses with smoking chimneys, so that the reader knows what the narrator has spent seven months looking at.
• The conversation became a scene, with a place (the soccer field), a time (a fire drill on a Tuesday in April), a detail the narrator notices (hands pulled up inside her sleeves) and dialogue with a little subtext ("I'm going," I said, which I had not been, until then).
• The week of waiting became one sentence, like Joyce's "innumerable follies".
• The concert became a scene with the setting pressing on it: a cancelled ride at a specific time, two miles, shut doors, a clipboard, the house lights down, a full back row. As in Joyce's bazaar, the place delivers the disappointment. "I went home feeling stupid" is gone, because the last image says it better, and the final clause, about the brother's solo, adds a turn of its own: everything she predicted was wrong.

Common misconceptions

• "Summary is bad and scene is good." Joyce's months of watching are summary, and they are among the best sentences in the story. Summary is the right speed for habits, background and waiting; the error is using it for the moment that changes things.
• "A scene should take as long to read as it took to happen." Joyce's railing scene would last a minute in life and takes longer on the page, because it slows down on the lamplight. Scenes can be stretched or tightened; what makes them scenes is continuity and presence.
• "Setting is description at the start of a story." In "Araby" the setting works from the first word ("blind") to the last ("darkness"), and it works by pressing on the boy's want, not by being described once and left behind.
• "More scenes make a story more exciting." A story told entirely in scene would give the watching mornings, the waiting days and the train ride equal weight with the railing, and the railing would stop standing out. The contrast between speeds is what makes a scene feel important.

Pulling it together

The draft about Dani Reyes had the plot of "Araby" and none of its force, because it ran every moment at the same speed. Joyce compresses months into a habit ("Every morning ... morning after morning"), stops the clock on the moment that changes everything (the lamplight at the railing), speeds through the waiting ("innumerable follies"), and lets clock time and place press on the boy until a dark, closing bazaar delivers the turn. Scene and summary are not better and worse; they are two speeds, and a story is the pattern of its speeds.

Bottom line: find the moment that changes something and give it a scene with a place, a time and a detail; compress what does not change; and choose a setting that pushes against what your character wants. Then compare the scene you wrote in the first ten minutes with the rebuilt draft.

Sources

1. Joyce, J. (1914). Araby. In Dubliners. Grant Richards. Project Gutenberg. gutenberg.org
2. Wikipedia contributors. (2026). Araby (short story). Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
3. Wikipedia contributors. (2026). Pace (narrative). Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
4. Wiktionary contributors. (2026). blind (adjective: closed at one end; having a dead end). Wiktionary. en.wiktionary.org

A kitchen, five people, and a birdcage

On 8 August 1916, in a fish house on Lewis Wharf in Provincetown, Massachusetts, fitted out as a makeshift theatre, a collective of writers, artists and amateur actors called the Provincetown Players performed a one-act play about a murder in which the murderer never appears. Its author, Susan Glaspell, played one of the two women in it. The play is Trifles, and it grew out of a real case: years earlier, as a young reporter for the Des Moines Daily News, Glaspell had covered the trial of an Iowa farm wife accused of killing her husband in his sleep.

Here is how the play asks the stage to look when the lights come up:

SCENE: [...] a gloomy kitchen, and left without having been put in order - unwashed pans under the sink, a loaf of bread outside the bread-box, a dish-towel on the table - other signs of incompleted work.
(Susan Glaspell, Trifles, first performed 1916, printed in Plays, 1920)

John Wright has been found strangled in his bed. His wife, Minnie, is in jail in town. The Sheriff, the County Attorney and a neighbouring farmer, Mr. Hale, have come to the farmhouse looking for a motive. Two women have come along to collect a few things for Minnie: the Sheriff's wife, Mrs. Peters, and Hale's wife, Mrs. Hale. Early on, the County Attorney finds Minnie's jars of preserved fruit burst by the cold:

SHERIFF: Well, can you beat the women! Held for murder and worryin' about her preserves.
COUNTY ATTORNEY: I guess before we're through she may have something more serious than preserves to worry about.
HALE: Well, women are used to worrying over trifles.
(The two women move a little closer together.)
(Glaspell, Trifles)

Hold on to that stage direction. It is the whole play in eight words.

Write first: a room that tells on its owner

Before reading further, take five minutes. Choose a room that belongs to someone who is not in it: a bedroom, a locker, a car, a grandparent's kitchen. Write five details of it as a stage direction would: present tense, only what an audience could see or hear, no thoughts and no explanations. Make the five details add up to one thing you know about the absent person without saying it. Glaspell's "loaf of bread outside the bread-box" is the kind of detail you are after: work begun and abandoned.

What the stage cannot do, and what it does instead

Lesson 2 began with the playwright Mark Swan's motto, "Show - not tell", pinned above his desk in the 1910s. Here is why a playwright needed it most. A play has no narrator. There is no "she thought", no summary of her years of marriage, no free indirect style. An audience knows only what it can see and hear: the set, the objects on it, what the actors do, and what they say. Every piece of interiority you learned in Lesson 6 has to be turned into something visible or audible.

Glaspell solves this with three tools. The first is objects. Minnie never appears, and the audience comes to know her entirely through her things. Her fruit jars have burst. Her quilt, which the women find in her sewing basket, is neatly sewn except for the last block, where the stitching goes wild. In a cupboard there is an empty birdcage with its door hinge "pulled apart". And in a pretty sewing box, wrapped in silk, the women find the bird:

MRS PETERS: It's the bird.
MRS HALE: (jumping up) But, Mrs Peters - look at it! It's neck! Look at its neck! It's all - other side to.
MRS PETERS: Somebody - wrung - its - neck.
(Their eyes meet. A look of growing comprehension, of horror. Steps are heard outside. MRS HALE slips box under quilt pieces, and sinks into her chair.)
(Glaspell, Trifles; "It's neck" is printed so in this edition)

A hard man who wanted silence killed the one thing in that house that sang. The women understand the motive; the men, upstairs looking for evidence, never will. The second tool is movement: women stepping closer together, a box slipped under quilt pieces as steps approach. The third is lines that mean two things, and the play ends on one. The men have been laughing all afternoon at the women's question about whether Minnie meant to quilt the quilt or knot it. The County Attorney asks one last time, as a joke:

COUNTY ATTORNEY: (facetiously) Well, Henry, at least we found out that she was not going to quilt it. She was going to - what is it you call it, ladies?
MRS HALE: (her hand against her pocket) We call it - knot it, Mr Henderson.
(CURTAIN)
(Glaspell, Trifles)

The dead bird is in her pocket. "Knot it" answers the joke, keeps the secret, and, for anyone listening, recalls the knot of a rope. The title does the same double work: the men call the women's concerns trifles, and the trifles are the evidence.

Why this matters: on the stage, what a prose writer would narrate has to become something an audience can see or hear. Glaspell's objects, movements and double-edged lines are the whole toolkit, and they are enough to convict a woman and acquit her in the same room.

The procedure: building a scene in seven steps

Here is a procedure for writing a stage scene, each step taken from what Trifles does.

1. Choose a place under pressure. Not just a location but a situation: a kitchen that has been left mid-task, a room someone is about to lock. Write it as a short setting note.
2. Put people in it who want different things. The men want evidence that will stand up in court. Mrs. Hale wants, increasingly, to protect Minnie. Mrs. Peters, "married to the law", is torn. Different wants in one room make every line a move.
3. Give the scene an object that carries what cannot be said. The quilt, the cage, the bird. An object can be handled, hidden, found and handed over, which means it can act.
4. Use entrances and exits to control who can say what. In Trifles the women speak their real thoughts only when the men are upstairs or in the barn. Every entrance cuts a conversation off; every exit lets one begin.
5. Write stage directions only for what an audience can see or hear. "The two women move a little closer together" is visible. "Mrs. Hale feels loyal to Minnie" is not, and does not belong in a direction.
6. Let lines mean two things. Subtext from Lesson 7 is not an option in a play; it is almost the only way to show a mind.
7. End on a line or an image, then stop. "We call it - knot it, Mr Henderson." Curtain. No one explains.

Script format

Plays printed in books, like Glaspell's, often run the speaker's name into the line ("MRS HALE: I knew John Wright."). A play you submit to a contest or a theatre should use standard play format. The Dramatists Guild of America's formatting guide sets it out: start with a list of characters and a note of place and time; open each scene with a Setting (what is on stage) and an At Rise (what is happening when the lights come up); put each speaking character's name in ALL CAPS, centred or set well in from the left, above the speech; put a brief direction in parentheses beside or under the name, and a longer one on its own line in parentheses, indented, with any character names inside it in capitals. Trailing off is shown with an ellipsis; being cut off, with a dash. The end is marked, as Glaspell marks hers: CURTAIN, BLACKOUT, or END OF SCENE. It looks like this:

              MRS HALE
       (Her hand against her pocket.)
We call it - knot it, Mr Henderson.

                    CURTAIN

The model scene: Lines

Here is a complete short scene written for this course in standard format. Two friends are running lines for the school play. One of them got the lead.

LINES

CHARACTERS
MAYA, 16. Just cast as Nell.
TESS, 16. Her best friend. Cast as
   Townsperson Four.
MR. OKAFOR, 40s. The drama teacher.

SETTING: An empty classroom after
   school. Chairs upside down on the
   desks, except two. Half-erased
   chemistry notes on the whiteboard.

AT RISE: MAYA sits on a desk with a
   stapled script, highlighted in
   yellow. TESS stands at the window
   holding her own copy, closed.

              MAYA
You don't have to do this.

              TESS
I said I would. Page?

              MAYA
Forty-one. From "The lamp's gone out."

              TESS
      (Not opening her script.)
The lamp's gone out.

              MAYA
      (Reading, as NELL.)
Then light it again. That's what the
keeper does. That's the whole job.

              TESS
You're not supposed to look at the
page.

              MAYA
I'm not off book yet.

              TESS
Opening's in nine days.

              MAYA
I know when opening is.

      (Pause. TESS opens her script at
      last and turns the pages.)

              TESS
      (Reading.)
And if the keeper doesn't want the
job anymore?

              MAYA
That's not the line.

              TESS
It's the line. Page forty-two. You
highlighted it.

      (MAYA looks. It is the line.)

              MAYA
      (Quietly, as NELL.)
Then somebody else keeps the light.
And the keeper goes down to the rocks
and watches the ships like everybody
else.

      (Silence. MR. OKAFOR enters with
      a ring of keys.)

              MR. OKAFOR
Ladies, I'm locking up. Tess, you're
understudying Nell, so you should
know these too.

              TESS
I know them.

              MR. OKAFOR
Good. Five minutes.

      (He exits.)

              MAYA
You're my understudy?

              TESS
He asked on Tuesday.

              MAYA
You didn't say.

              TESS
You didn't ask.
      (She closes her script.)
You won't need an understudy. You
never get sick.

              MAYA
I could get sick.

              TESS
Don't.

      (MAYA holds out her highlighter.
      TESS looks at it for a long moment,
      then takes it and uncaps it.)

              TESS
Forty-one. From the top.

              MAYA
The lamp's gone out.

      (TESS, without looking at the
      page, mouths the next line along
      with her. The lights fade.)

                    END OF SCENE

(Written for this course, 2026.)

The seven steps, in the model

• Place under pressure. An empty classroom at the end of the day, chairs up, and then a clock: "Five minutes." The room is about to be locked, which is why things get said.
• Different wants. Maya wants to be ready and, underneath, wants Tess not to mind. Tess wants to be a good friend and also wanted the part. Nobody states either want.
• An object. Two scripts: Maya's highlighted, Tess's closed. Then the highlighter, held out and taken, which is the reconciliation, done with the hands.
• An entrance and an exit. Mr. Okafor walks in and, without knowing it, reveals that Tess is the understudy. That fact changes the scene, and his exit is what lets the girls talk about it.
• Visible directions only. "(Not opening her script.)" "(MAYA looks. It is the line.)" Each one is something an audience can watch.
• Lines that mean two things. The play they are rehearsing, about a lighthouse keeper, keeps fitting their situation: "And if the keeper doesn't want the job anymore?" "Then somebody else keeps the light." And the plainest exchange in the scene, "I could get sick." "Don't.", means: I would give it to you, and I would not take it.
• An ending on an image. Tess mouths the lines without looking. She knows every one of them. That single visible action says she wanted the part, that she prepared for it anyway, and that she will help her friend play it.

Change one input: a sentence of thought, put on stage

Glaspell wrote this material twice, and her two versions show the difference between the forms exactly. A year after the play, she turned it into a short story, "A Jury of Her Peers". The story begins in a different kitchen, inside a different woman's head:

When Martha Hale opened the storm-door and got a cut of the north wind, she ran back for her big woolen scarf. As she hurriedly wound that round her head her eye made a scandalized sweep of her kitchen. [...] But what her eye took in was that her kitchen was in no shape for leaving: her bread all ready for mixing, half the flour sifted and half unsifted.
(Susan Glaspell, "A Jury of Her Peers," 1917, in The Best Short Stories of 1917)

Prose can do this: go into Martha Hale's mind ("scandalized"), show her own half-finished work, and let the reader connect it later to Minnie's. The play cannot enter anyone's mind, so it does the connecting on stage: Mrs. Hale, alone with Mrs. Peters, looks at the half-wiped table and makes "a move as if to finish work". The same meaning, turned from thought into gesture.

Try the same flip on the model scene. Suppose a prose draft of it contained this sentence:

The prose sentence is impossible on a stage; there is no one to say it. An actor could turn to the audience and speak it as an aside, but that would flatten it into an announcement. Instead, the scene splits the sentence into things an audience can take in: a line from someone who does not understand its weight, a three-word answer, and a silent action at the end. The audience assembles "she wanted it more than anything" for itself, which is Lesson 2's argument for showing, made compulsory.

Common misconceptions

• "A play is a story told mostly in dialogue." A play is a story told in what can be seen and heard, and some of its strongest moments are silent: the women moving closer together, the box slipped under the quilt, Tess mouthing the lines.
• "Stage directions are where you explain what characters feel." The Dramatists Guild format puts directions in parentheses for actors and directors, and good ones describe only what can be staged. If a direction explains a feeling, move the feeling into an action or a line.
• "Characters in plays have to say what they mean, since there is no narrator." The opposite. With no narrator, subtext is the main way a play shows a mind. Mrs. Hale's "We call it - knot it" is the best line in the play because it means more than it says.
• "Formatting is for professionals; the words are what matter." Standard format lets a reader see instantly who speaks and what is action, and contests for young playwrights generally ask for it. It is part of making the words readable.

Recap

Trifles keeps its murderer off stage and puts her whole life on it anyway: burst fruit jars, a wild block of stitching, a cage with a broken hinge, a strangled canary in a silk-lined box, and two women who close ranks, first by stepping together and at last by hiding the evidence under a joke. That is the playwright's toolkit, because a play has no narrator: objects, movement, entrances and exits, and lines that mean two things. Standard format then makes the scene readable: characters and setting first, names in capitals over their speeches, directions in parentheses, and a marked end.

Why this matters: writing for the stage trains the hardest skill in all fiction, turning a feeling into something that can be seen. Go back to the room you described in the first ten minutes and ask what object in it could be picked up, hidden or handed over in a scene.

Sources

1. Glaspell, S. (1920). Trifles (first performed 1916). In Plays. Project Gutenberg. gutenberg.org
2. Glaspell, S. (1918). A jury of her peers (first published 1917). In E. J. O'Brien (Ed.), The Best Short Stories of 1917. Small, Maynard. Project Gutenberg. gutenberg.org
3. Dramatists Guild of America. (2020). Formatting guide [PDF]. dramatistsguild.com
4. Wikipedia contributors. (2026). Trifles (play). Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org

A road in the rain, in a hundred and thirty words

In 1922 Hemingway was a young correspondent for the Toronto Star, covering the war between Greece and Turkey. Two years later, in a thin book printed in Paris, he published eighteen very short pieces of fiction. This is one of them, complete:

Minarets stuck up in the rain out of Adrianople across the mud flats. The carts were jammed for thirty miles along the Karagatch road. Water buffalo and cattle were hauling carts through the mud. No end and no beginning. Just carts loaded with everything they owned. The old men and women, soaked through, walked along keeping the cattle moving. The Maritza was running yellow almost up to the bridge. Carts were jammed solid on the bridge with camels bobbing along through them. Greek cavalry herded along the procession. Women and kids were in the carts crouched with mattresses, mirrors, sewing machines, bundles. There was a woman having a kid with a young girl holding a blanket over her and crying. Scared sick looking at it. It rained all through the evacuation.
(Ernest Hemingway, in our time, Paris, 1924, chapter 3; reprinted as chapter II of In Our Time, New York, 1925)

There is no main character, no name, no dialogue, no explanation of the war. Adrianople, the city now called Edirne, is being evacuated, and you are given what an eye would take in on the road: minarets, mud, thirty miles of carts, camels among the carts, and the contents of people's lives listed without comment: "mattresses, mirrors, sewing machines, bundles." Then, at the centre of the procession, a birth, a girl holding a blanket, and a flat four-word verdict: "Scared sick looking at it." The last sentence is about the weather, and it is devastating, because the rain has been falling on all of this the entire time.

"No end and no beginning" describes the carts, and it also describes the piece. It drops you into the middle of the road and takes you out again before anything is resolved. That is the first thing to understand about very short fiction: it is not a short story with the middle cut out. It is a different shape, closer to a single long look.

Write first: a note, then a hundred words

Take seven minutes. First, write a one-line note about something small you saw or heard this week that seemed to contain a bigger story: a person, an object, a sentence someone said. Then write exactly one hundred words that grow from the note. No title yet, no explanation of what it means. Stop at a hundred, even mid-thought. You will return to it in the activity.

What a very short story is

Flash fiction is a very short story that still suggests a character's change or implies a larger story beyond its edges. There is no single official length. Named forms run from the six-word story to the "drabble" of exactly one hundred words, and the magazines and contests that publish flash each set their own limit, so check the one you are sending to. In the 1920s American magazines called the form the "short short story". Hemingway's eighteen pieces in In Our Time are among the best-known early examples in English.

They are not the source of the most famous "Hemingway" story of all. You may have heard that he wrote "For sale: baby shoes, never worn" to win a bet. Versions of that text were circulating by 1906, when Hemingway was seven, and there is no reliable evidence that he wrote it. A flash story's power to seem larger than itself is exactly why legends attach to it.

To see how a flash piece gets made, the rest of this lesson follows one, written for this course, from its first note to its final form.

Stage one: a notebook note

July. License plate game the whole way to Dad's new place. What if somebody finally saw Alaska - on THAT trip?

That is all it was: a memory of a family game, and a question. The question is the important part. It contains the whole idea of the piece: the rarest, most exciting thing in a game, arriving at the worst possible moment. A notebook note does not need to be a sentence of good prose. It needs to hold a contradiction you want to find out about.

Stage two: a first draft that explains itself

My parents had been fighting for about a year, and in July my dad decided to move out. We drove him to his new apartment in Arizona with all his stuff in a trailer. The whole way there my little brother and I played the license plate game, which was a game we always played on trips. I think we played it so we wouldn't have to think about what was happening. It was really sad.

Every fact the final version needs is here, and the draft does not work. It starts a year early, with the fighting. It explains its own meaning ("I think we played it so we wouldn't have to think about what was happening") and then names the feeling ("It was really sad"). In a piece of five hundred words, a sentence that explains is a sentence stolen from something the reader could have seen. So the next draft started as late as possible, in the middle of the game, and left every explanation for the reader to make.

Stage three: License Plates

License Plates

The rule was that you had to see the whole plate, not just the colour, and you had to say the state out loud before anybody else. Nevada was five points. Anything from east of the Mississippi was ten. Alaska was a hundred, and in eleven years of family road trips nobody had ever seen one.

"Utah," Ben said. "Utah, Utah, Utah."

"One Utah," Maddie said. "You can't say it four times."

"There were four."

There had been four. She wrote them down.

In the front seat their mother drove with both hands, and their father sat with the road atlas open on his knees, although the car had a screen that could tell them where they were to the foot, and nobody had said anything up there since the state line. Behind them, in the side mirror, the orange trailer followed the way it had followed them all day, carrying the brown couch and the good lamp and four boxes marked DAVE BOOKS in their mother's handwriting.

"Arizona doesn't count," Ben said. "We're in Arizona."

"Arizona counts."

"It's too easy."

"Then it's one point," Maddie said. "Easy ones are one point. That's the rule."

She had made up the rule just then. Ben accepted it, the way he accepted all of them, and she wrote ARIZONA 1 in the notebook and underlined it twice.

The apartment was in a building called The Palms, and there were no palms. Their father got out and stood in the parking lot with the atlas under his arm while their mother backed the trailer up to the stairs. It took her three tries. Nobody helped her, because nobody knew how.

They carried the couch up together, all four of them, and it was the most they had touched each other in a year.

On the way home, in the dark, with the trailer gone and the back of the car so empty it echoed, Ben fell asleep against the window. Their mother drove with one hand. At a gas station an hour from home a pickup pulled in at the next pump, and on the back of it was a plate Maddie had never seen before, and across the top of it, the word ALASKA.

She looked at it for a long time. She did not wake Ben. She did not say it out loud. She opened the notebook to the back page, where nobody would look, and wrote ALASKA, and did not give herself the points.

(Written for this course, 2026.)

How it got there: five decisions

It starts late. The first draft began a year before the trip. The final version begins inside the game, with its rules, and never mentions the fighting at all. The divorce arrives through objects: a trailer, "the good lamp", and four boxes labelled DAVE BOOKS "in their mother's handwriting". That last phrase tells you who packed his books for him, which tells you a great deal.

The game is the engine. The want belongs to Maddie: to keep the game going, so that the car has something in it besides silence. The obstacle is the silence itself ("nobody had said anything up there since the state line") and the destination. Watch her invent a rule on the spot ("Easy ones are one point. That's the rule.") to keep her brother playing. The turn comes at the gas station, when the impossible prize finally appears.

Every detail does two jobs. This is the main discipline of flash, because there is no room for a detail that does only one. The atlas is a real object and also a father pretending to be needed: the car's screen already knows the way. "The Palms, and there were no palms" is a joke and also a promise that has not been kept. "It took her three tries. Nobody helped her, because nobody knew how" is about backing up a trailer and about a family that has never done this before. And "it was the most they had touched each other in a year" carries a whole year of distance in one sentence about carrying a couch.

The title works. "License Plates" names the game, and license plates are also the thing that says where you belong. The family's belonging is exactly what is being taken apart.

It ends on an action that withholds. Maddie sees the plate nobody has seen in eleven years, and does not claim it. She writes ALASKA on the back page "where nobody would look" and does not give herself the points. The reader supplies why: the game only mattered as long as the family was in the car together, and a hundred points means nothing now; or she is keeping this one thing for herself; or both. The first draft said "It was really sad." The last line lets you feel it without being told.

So what?: flash fiction is not a small story. It is a story built so that every sentence carries weight in two directions, which is why it is the best training in the course for the sentence work of Lesson 1 and the showing of Lesson 2.

Common misconceptions

• "Flash fiction is just a scene cut out of a longer story." Hemingway's Adrianople piece is complete in its hundred and thirty words; "License Plates" contains a whole divorce. A flash piece implies what surrounds it rather than leaving it out by accident.
• "Flash needs a twist ending." The Alaska plate is not a twist; the reader half-expects it from the first paragraph. What makes the ending work is what Maddie does with it, which is a change in her, not a surprise for the reader.
• "Short means simple." "Scared sick looking at it" and "did not give herself the points" are simple sentences doing complicated work. The shorter the form, the more each sentence has to carry.
• "Hemingway wrote the six-word baby-shoes story." Versions existed by 1906, when he was seven. What he did write were eighteen vignettes, and they are better.

What to remember

Hemingway's vignette shows the form at its purest: one long look at an evacuation, no names, no explanation, a list of possessions, a birth, and the rain that fell through all of it. "License Plates" shows how a piece gets there: a note holding a contradiction (the rarest prize, arriving at the worst moment), a first draft that explained itself and started a year too early, and a final version that starts inside the game, lets objects carry the divorce, makes every detail do two jobs, and ends on an action that withholds.

So what?: in flash, if a sentence does only one job, it is probably the sentence to cut. Look at your hundred words from the start of the lesson and find the one sentence that explains; then cut it, and see what the others can carry without it.

Sources

1. Hemingway, E. (1924). in our time (Chapter 3). Three Mountains Press. Project Gutenberg. gutenberg.org
2. Hemingway, E. (1925). In Our Time (Chapter II). Boni and Liveright. Wikisource. en.wikisource.org
3. Wikipedia contributors. (2026). Flash fiction. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
4. Wikipedia contributors. (2026). Ernest Hemingway (Paris). Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org

A thousand words, written in one day

On 19 April 1894, Kate Chopin wrote a story of about a thousand words. Vogue printed it that December as "The Dream of an Hour", and it is now known as "The Story of an Hour". If you have met it in an English class, you probably read it for what it means. This lesson reads it for how it is made, which is a different question with different answers. Reading this way is called reading as a writer: reading to see how a text does what it does, so that you can use its methods yourself.

Here is the whole story. The paragraphs are numbered so the annotation can refer to them. Read it once straight through, at normal speed, without stopping.

The Story of an Hour

[1] Knowing that Mrs. Mallard was afflicted with a heart trouble, great care was taken to break to her as gently as possible the news of her husband's death.

[2] It was her sister Josephine who told her, in broken sentences; veiled hints that revealed in half concealing. Her husband's friend Richards was there, too, near her. It was he who had been in the newspaper office when intelligence of the railroad disaster was received, with Brently Mallard's name leading the list of "killed." He had only taken the time to assure himself of its truth by a second telegram, and had hastened to forestall any less careful, less tender friend in bearing the sad message.

[3] She did not hear the story as many women have heard the same, with a paralyzed inability to accept its significance. She wept at once, with sudden, wild abandonment, in her sister's arms. When the storm of grief had spent itself she went away to her room alone. She would have no one follow her.

[4] There stood, facing the open window, a comfortable, roomy armchair. Into this she sank, pressed down by a physical exhaustion that haunted her body and seemed to reach into her soul.

[5] She could see in the open square before her house the tops of trees that were all aquiver with the new spring life. The delicious breath of rain was in the air. In the street below a peddler was crying his wares. The notes of a distant song which some one was singing reached her faintly, and countless sparrows were twittering in the eaves. There were patches of blue sky showing here and there through the clouds that had met and piled one above the other in the west facing her window.

[6] She sat with her head thrown back upon the cushion of the chair, quite motionless, except when a sob came up into her throat and shook her, as a child who has cried itself to sleep continues to sob in its dreams.

[7] She was young, with a fair, calm face, whose lines bespoke repression and even a certain strength. But now there was a dull stare in her eyes, whose gaze was fixed away off yonder on one of those patches of blue sky. It was not a glance of reflection, but rather indicated a suspension of intelligent thought.

[8] There was something coming to her and she was waiting for it, fearfully. What was it? She did not know; it was too subtle and elusive to name. But she felt it, creeping out of the sky, reaching toward her through the sounds, the scents, the color that filled the air.

[9] Now her bosom rose and fell tumultuously. She was beginning to recognize this thing that was approaching to possess her, and she was striving to beat it back with her will - as powerless as her two white slender hands would have been. When she abandoned herself a little whispered word escaped her slightly parted lips. She said it over and over under her breath: "free, free, free!" The vacant stare and the look of terror that had followed it went from her eyes. They stayed keen and bright. Her pulses beat fast, and the coursing blood warmed and relaxed every inch of her body.

[10] She did not stop to ask if it were or were not a monstrous joy that held her. A clear and exalted perception enabled her to dismiss the suggestion as trivial.

[11] She knew that she would weep again when she saw the kind, tender hands folded in death; the face that had never looked save with love upon her, fixed and gray and dead. But she saw beyond that bitter moment a long procession of years to come that would belong to her absolutely. And she opened and spread her arms out to them in welcome.

[12] There would be no one to live for her during those coming years; she would live for herself. There would be no powerful will bending hers in that blind persistence with which men and women believe they have a right to impose a private will upon a fellow-creature. A kind intention or a cruel intention made the act seem no less a crime as she looked upon it in that brief moment of illumination.

[13] And yet she had loved him - sometimes. Often she had not. What did it matter! What could love, the unsolved mystery, count for in face of this possession of self-assertion which she suddenly recognized as the strongest impulse of her being!

[14] "Free! Body and soul free!" she kept whispering.

[15] Josephine was kneeling before the closed door with her lips to the keyhole, imploring for admission. "Louise, open the door! I beg, open the door - you will make yourself ill. What are you doing, Louise? For heaven's sake open the door."

[16] "Go away. I am not making myself ill." No; she was drinking in a very elixir of life through that open window.

[17] Her fancy was running riot along those days ahead of her. Spring days, and summer days, and all sorts of days that would be her own. She breathed a quick prayer that life might be long. It was only yesterday she had thought with a shudder that life might be long.

[18] She arose at length and opened the door to her sister's importunities. There was a feverish triumph in her eyes, and she carried herself unwittingly like a goddess of Victory. She clasped her sister's waist, and together they descended the stairs. Richards stood waiting for them at the bottom.

[19] Someone was opening the front door with a latchkey. It was Brently Mallard who entered, a little travel-stained, composedly carrying his grip-sack and umbrella. He had been far from the scene of the accident, and did not even know there had been one. He stood amazed at Josephine's piercing cry; at Richards' quick motion to screen him from the view of his wife.

[20] But Richards was too late.

[21] When the doctors came they said she had died of heart disease - of the joy that kills.

(Kate Chopin, "The Story of an Hour," written 1894; text from Wikisource)

Three sentences before the pencil

Before any analysis, write three sentences, fast. First: the number of the paragraph where you felt the story turn. Second: one detail you remember without looking back. Third: one question you would ask Chopin about how she did something, beginning "How did you...". Those three sentences are your reader's reaction, and the procedure below is a way of finding out what caused it.

The procedure: seven passes with a pencil

Annotating is not highlighting the parts you like. It is writing, in the margin, what each part of the text is doing. Work through the story in seven passes. Each is quick; together they take about twenty minutes for a story this length.

1. Read it straight through as a reader. You have done this. Your turning point from the three sentences is your first mark.
2. Number the paragraphs, so you can talk about them precisely.
3. Beside each paragraph, write a verb for what it does. Not "spring outside" but "lets the outside in". Not "her sister" but "misreads her". Useful verbs: plants, delays, opens, names, resists, complicates, cuts away, echoes, reverses, drops, ends.
4. Mark the first line's promise (Lesson 3) and circle where the story keeps it.
5. Mark want, obstacle and turn (Lesson 4).
6. Mark the speeds (Lesson 9): summary, scene, slow motion, and any paragraph of a single line.
7. Mark echoes: anything that appears twice. Then write what changed between the two appearances.

The annotation

Here is the result for "The Story of an Hour". Compare it with the margin you would have written.

What the annotation shows

Read down the "move" column and the story's engine becomes visible. The want (in Lesson 4's sense) arrives only in paragraph 9, and it is a want the character did not know she had: "free, free, free!" The obstacles are her own will, which tries to "beat it back", and then the whole world outside the door, which assumes she is grieving. The turn is the word itself. And the second turn, the reversal in paragraph 19, is delivered in the most ordinary objects Chopin could find.

The speeds follow the same design. Paragraphs 1-3 are fast summary: news, telegrams, weeping. Paragraphs 4-17 are one continuous scene in a single room, slowed almost to stillness, most of it spent inside her mind. Then paragraphs 18-21 accelerate: the stairs, the door, the umbrella, and a paragraph of five words. The story spends its words in the room with the open window, because that is where the change happens.

Two more moves deserve a name because you will use them. One is the plant: a detail placed early, in a position where it seems merely useful, which the ending then pays off. The heart trouble in the first sentence is a plant. The idea is often called Chekhov's gun, after Chekhov's repeated advice to young playwrights that nothing should appear in a story that is not going to be needed. The other is the misreading: letting other characters get the meaning wrong while the reader gets it right. Josephine at the keyhole and the doctors at the end both misread Louise, and the reader's understanding is sharpened each time by the contrast.

In short: a move is something a passage does, described with a verb. Annotating is writing those verbs down until the machinery of the story is visible.

Change one input: tell the reader first

Here is a test of how much the moves depend on the order of information. Suppose Chopin had opened like this instead (these sentences were written for this lesson):

Brently Mallard had missed the train. He did not know it had crashed, and he did not know that at that moment, forty miles away, his wife was being told that he was dead.

Nothing else in the story has to change, and every move flips. The spring outside the window, which in Chopin's version is the future opening, becomes painful to read, because the reader knows it is not coming. "Free, free, free!" stops being a discovery and becomes dramatic irony: the reader winces at a joy she is about to lose. The goddess of Victory on the stairs becomes dread. The latchkey is no longer a shock; the reader has been waiting for it the whole time. What Chopin's order gives you is the experience of discovering the freedom alongside Louise, and then losing it with her. The alternative order would give you the experience of watching a trap close. Both are real stories. They are different stories, made from identical events, and the difference is one decision about when the reader learns what.

What to steal

Reading as a writer ends with taking something. Here are five moves from this story that work in almost any piece:

• Plant in the first sentence a detail the last sentence needs.
• Delay the naming of a feeling; let the character feel it before she can say it.
• Let the setting in through a window: put the character where the world can reach her.
• Echo a phrase with its meaning reversed ("life might be long").
• Give the drop a paragraph of its own.

Common misconceptions

• "Annotating means highlighting the good parts." Highlighting records what you liked. Annotation records what the text is doing, with a verb in the margin, and that is what you can reuse.
• "Reading as a writer means hunting for symbols." The open window does not need to "stand for" freedom to do its job. It is where the chair faces and how spring gets into the room. Ask what a detail does before asking what it means.
• "You have to know what the author intended." You cannot know whether Chopin thought the word "plant". You can see that the heart trouble in paragraph 1 is needed in paragraph 21. Describe what the text does, and you never have to guess.
• "Taking a story apart ruins it." The second reading is usually the stronger one. The heart trouble in the first sentence is invisible the first time and devastating the second.

The short version

Chopin's thousand words plant a heart condition, set a woman apart from the expected, open a window onto spring, delay the naming of her feeling until a single whispered word, complicate it with love and a kind husband, let her sister misread her through a keyhole, echo "life might be long" in reverse, lift her to a goddess on the stairs, and drop her with a man carrying an umbrella and a paragraph of five words. The seven passes with a pencil turn that experience into a list of moves, and the moves are what a writer can take.

In short: read once for the feeling, then again with a pencil for the verbs. Go back to your three sentences: the paragraph where you felt the turn, the detail you remembered, and your question for Chopin. The annotation table probably answers the question, and the answer is a move you can now use.

Sources

1. Chopin, K. (1894). The story of an hour (first published in Vogue as The dream of an hour). Wikisource. en.wikisource.org
2. Wikipedia contributors. (2026). The Story of an Hour. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
3. Wikipedia contributors. (2026). Chekhov's gun. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org

A poem, or prose with the margins moved?

A student hands in this as a poem:

I woke up this morning and I looked
out the window and I saw that it
was raining again and I thought about
how my grandmother always used to say
that rain is good for the garden.

Here is the plausible wrong idea behind it, and it is held by a great many people who write poems: free verse is prose broken into lines, and since there are no rules, a line can end anywhere. This lesson traces exactly where that idea fails. Start with the simplest test there is. Take the line breaks out:

I woke up this morning and I looked out the window and I saw that it was raining again and I thought about how my grandmother always used to say that rain is good for the garden.

Nothing is lost. The sentence reads exactly as it did, which means the breaks were doing nothing. Look at where they fell: after "looked", after "it", after "about". The last word of a line is a place of weight; the reader's eye and voice pause there, however briefly. These breaks put that weight on the weakest words in the sentence. "It" is not worth a pause. Neither is "about". A reader reading aloud would stumble on every line end, and a reader reading silently would simply ignore them, which is the same as the breaks not being there.

So the failure is not that the draft breaks rules. Free verse, poetry without a regular meter or rhyme scheme, has no rules about where lines end. The failure is that free verse replaces rules with decisions, and this draft did not make any.

Write first: one sentence, three ways

Take five minutes. Find one sentence you wrote this week, in a notebook, an essay or a text message, at least fifteen words long. Break it into lines three different ways. In one version, break only where you would pause for breath. In another, break before the most surprising word, so that it begins a line. In the third, give one word a line of its own. Read all three aloud. Mark the version in which the sentence means something slightly different from the original. That difference is what a line break is for.

A firetruck in 1921

Here is a poem by William Carlos Williams, a doctor in Rutherford, New Jersey, who wrote poems alongside his medical practice. It is one sentence long:

Among the rain
and lights
I saw the figure 5
in gold
on a red
firetruck
moving
with weight and urgency
tense
unheeded
to gong clangs
siren howls
and wheels rumbling
through the dark city.
(William Carlos Williams, "The Great Figure," Sour Grapes, 1921)

Now apply the test. Take the breaks out: "Among the rain and lights I saw the figure 5 in gold on a red firetruck moving with weight and urgency tense unheeded to gong clangs siren howls and wheels rumbling through the dark city." It is still a vivid sentence, but it has become a report. Something has been lost, and you can say exactly what, line by line.

• "Among the rain / and lights": the break separates two sensations so that they arrive one at a time, as they would on a wet street at night: first the rain, then the lights in it.
• "I saw the figure 5 / in gold": the number comes first, alone, before we know what it is painted on. That is how the eye works at speed. You see the bright thing before you understand it.
• "on a red / firetruck": the colour hangs at the end of its line, and the object arrives on the next. For an instant, the reader has only "red".
• "moving / with weight and urgency / tense / unheeded": the lines shrink to single words, and the poem moves fast, one word per beat, the way the truck does.
• "to gong clangs / siren howls / and wheels rumbling / through the dark city.": the lines lengthen again as the sounds trail off down the street. The truck is gone, and the last line is the longest in the second half, like a noise fading.

This is what a line break does when it is chosen: it controls the order in which the reader receives things, where the reader pauses, and how fast the reader moves. A line that runs its sentence on into the next line, as nearly all of these do, is called enjambment. Enjambment makes the reader lean forward: the sentence is incomplete, so the eye drops to the next line to finish it, and whatever begins that next line arrives with a small jolt.

The upshot: in free verse, the line break is the poet's main tool of timing. It decides what the reader sees first, what gets the weight at the end of a line, and how fast the poem moves.

Two words split in half

Two years later, in a book called Spring and All (1923), Williams printed an untitled poem numbered XXII. It is now known as "The Red Wheelbarrow", and it is sixteen words long:

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens
(William Carlos Williams, Spring and All, 1923, poem XXII)

Look at where three of the breaks fall: inside "wheel / barrow", inside "rain / water", between "white" and "chickens". Each break pulls apart something you normally see as one thing. "Wheel" alone is a wheel; "barrow" arrives and it becomes a tool. "Rain" alone is weather; "water" arrives and it becomes a substance, the shine on red paint. For a fraction of a second at each line end, you see the part before the whole. The poem is about paying attention to ordinary things, and its line breaks force you to pay that attention, one piece at a time. Put the poem back into a single line of prose and it becomes a sentence about farm equipment. Every bit of its power is in the breaks.

Whitman's long line

Line breaks do not have to be sudden. Walt Whitman, sixty years before Williams, wrote free verse in long lines. Here is a complete poem:

When I heard the learn'd astronomer,
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,
When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them,
When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,
Till rising and gliding out I wander'd off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look'd up in perfect silence at the stars.
(Walt Whitman, "When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer," Leaves of Grass, 1891-92 edition)

Notice two things. First, the first four lines all begin with "When", a repetition called anaphora, and they get longer as they go. The lecture is dragging on, the figures are piling up, and the lines swell with them until the fourth is a sentence and a half long. The reader gets tired, as the speaker does. Second, the poem then releases: "Till rising and gliding out", the night air, and a last line that is short and quiet and ends on "stars". The form is the argument. Numbers and charts get long crowded lines; the sky gets a short one and "perfect silence".

Whitman's lines are mostly end-stopped: each one finishes a phrase and ends with a comma or a period, so the breaks fall where a speaker would breathe. Williams's are mostly enjambed. Both are free verse; they use the line in opposite ways.

One practical note. In many printed editions, including the Project Gutenberg text of Leaves of Grass, Whitman's longest lines are too wide for the page, and the printer runs the end of the line onto a second, indented line. That indent is a turnover, not a line break. When you quote or copy a poem, check whether an indented line is the poet's line or the page's.

The rain draft, rebuilt twice

Now return to the student's poem. First, keep every word and move only the breaks:

I woke up this morning
and looked out the window
and saw that it was raining
again,
and I thought about how my grandmother always used to say
that rain is good for the garden.

Better already. The breaks now fall at the ends of phrases, so each line is a unit of sense. "Again," alone on its line, carries the weariness of another wet morning. The long fifth line imitates a mind drifting into memory, and the last line lands on "garden". The test gives a different answer now: remove the breaks and you lose the pause on "again".

But the words are still prose words, full of the scaffolding of narration ("I woke up", "I looked", "I saw", "I thought"). The second rebuild cuts them:

Rain again.
My grandmother
would have called it
good
for the garden,
and gone out into it
without a coat
to prove it.

"Good" gets a line of its own, so the reader hears the old woman's insistence on the word. "For the garden" arrives after it, as her reason. "And gone out into it / without a coat" gives a person instead of a saying, and "to prove it", placed last, makes the whole poem turn on her stubbornness, which is also, you begin to suspect, the speaker's grief. Every break now does a job you can name.

Common misconceptions

• "Free verse has no rules, so any break is fine." It has no fixed rules, which is different from having no decisions. Every break either does something (times a word, weights a line end, speeds or slows the reader) or wastes the reader's attention.
• "Short lines are more poetic." Whitman's astronomer poem uses long lines, and their length is the point. Short lines make speed and pressure; long lines make accumulation and breath. Neither is more poetic.
• "A line break is just where the line ran out of room." That is a turnover, which printers make. A line break is the poet's, and in poem XXII even "wheel / barrow" is deliberate.
• "If you read a poem aloud you should pause at every line end." Poets and readers disagree about how long to pause at an enjambed line end, but the end of a line always gives its last word some weight, whether the pause is long or barely there.

Putting it together

The idea that free verse is prose chopped into lines fails at a single test: take the breaks out, and if nothing is lost, they were doing nothing. Williams's firetruck shows what chosen breaks do: the rain before the lights, the number before the truck, "red" hanging alone, single words for speed, lengthening lines for a sound fading down the street. Poem XXII splits "wheel / barrow" and "rain / water" to make you see parts before wholes. Whitman's lines swell with the astronomer's lecture and then release into a short line and silence. The student's rain draft improved when its breaks fell on phrases, and became a poem when its words were cut to the ones the breaks could use.

The upshot: for every line end, ask what word is getting the weight there and what arrives at the start of the next line. Then go back to your three versions of one sentence and choose the one in which the breaks change what the sentence means.

Sources

1. Williams, W. C. (1921). The great figure. In Sour Grapes: A Book of Poems. Four Seas. Project Gutenberg. gutenberg.org
2. Williams, W. C. (1923). Spring and All (Poem XXII). Contact Publishing. Wikisource. en.wikisource.org
3. Whitman, W. (1892). When I heard the learn'd astronomer. In Leaves of Grass (1891-92, "deathbed" ed.). Project Gutenberg. gutenberg.org
4. Wikipedia contributors. (2026). The Red Wheelbarrow. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org

A fog, a city, and a piano on Lenox Avenue

In 1916 Carl Sandburg, a Chicago newspaperman, published a book called Chicago Poems. Here is one of them, complete:

The fog comes
on little cat feet.

It sits looking
over harbor and city
on silent haunches
and then moves on.
(Carl Sandburg, "Fog," Chicago Poems, 1916)

And here is how the same book opens, with a poem about the city itself:

Hog Butcher for the World,
Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat,
Player with Railroads and the Nation's Freight Handler;
Stormy, husky, brawling,
City of the Big Shoulders:
(Sandburg, "Chicago," Chicago Poems, 1916)

Read both aloud before going on. Same poet, same city, same year. One whispers; the other shouts. This lesson is about why, and it is built as a comparison, because the fastest way to hear what a poem does with sound and image is to put it next to a poem that does something else.

Write first: three lines for the eye, three for the ear

Take six minutes. Pick a place you know well at a particular hour: a kitchen at six in the morning, a gym after a game, a bus at night. Write three short lines that only show it: things you could photograph, and at least one comparison ("like" or an unstated "is"). Then write three more lines about the same place written to be heard: repeat a sound, or a word, or build a rhythm you can tap on a desk. Do not worry about good or bad yet. You will know by the end of the lesson which of the six lines to keep.

Two Sandburgs: a quiet image and a loud city

Start with "Fog". It is built on one comparison, and the comparison is never announced. The poem never says "the fog is like a cat". It gives the fog a cat's feet, a cat's way of sitting ("looking ... on silent haunches") and a cat's habit of leaving when it pleases ("and then moves on"). That is an image, a concrete picture the reader can see, carried by a metaphor, a comparison made by treating one thing as another. Notice where the metaphor lives: in the verbs and in one noun, "haunches". Sandburg does not describe the fog at all. He only says how it moves.

Now the sound. Read "on silent haunches" slowly. The consonants are soft and breathy: s, l, n, h, sh. There is not one hard stop like k or t in the phrase. The poem is quiet because its sounds are. Put a hard sound into it ("on its crouched, clawed back legs") and the fog becomes a hunting animal instead of a sleepy one.

"Chicago" does the opposite on purpose. "Hog Butcher for the World, / Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat" is made of short phrases, each one crammed with stressed syllables and hard consonants: g, b, t, k. "Stormy, husky, brawling" is three words that each land like a punch. The city is a working man, a "slugger" with "Big Shoulders", and the lines sound like him. The images are loud too: a butcher, a stacker, a man with his shoulders squared.

The devices you have just heard have names. Alliteration repeats a sound at the start of nearby words ("Stormy ... Stacker", "Big ... Butcher"). Consonance repeats consonant sounds anywhere in the words, like the k sounds in "Stacker", "husky" and "Chicago". Assonance repeats vowel sounds ("little cat feet" leans on short and long e and i sounds that keep the line light). None of these is decoration. Each one makes a line sound like what it is about.

Key idea: an image lets the reader see; sound lets the reader feel the thing in the mouth and ear. The strongest lines make both point the same way, as the soft fog and the hard city do.

The Weary Blues

Ten years after Chicago Poems, Langston Hughes, then in his early twenties, published his first book, The Weary Blues (1926). Its title poem had already won the poetry prize of Opportunity, the Urban League's magazine, in 1925. It is set on Lenox Avenue in Harlem, and it takes the music of the blues into the poem itself. Hughes uses the word "Negro", the respectful term of his time, which he used for himself.

Droning a drowsy syncopated tune,
Rocking back and forth to a mellow croon,
I heard a Negro play.
Down on Lenox Avenue the other night
By the pale dull pallor of an old gas light
He did a lazy sway....
He did a lazy sway....
To the tune o' those Weary Blues.
With his ebony hands on each ivory key
He made that poor piano moan with melody.
O Blues!
Swaying to and fro on his rickety stool
He played that sad raggy tune like a musical fool.
Sweet Blues!
Coming from a black man's soul.
O Blues!
In a deep song voice with a melancholy tone
I heard that Negro sing, that old piano moan -
"Ain't got nobody in all this world,
Ain't got nobody but ma self.
I's gwine to quit ma frownin'
And put ma troubles on the shelf."
Thump, thump, thump, went his foot on the floor.
He played a few chords then he sang some more -
"I got the Weary Blues
And I can't be satisfied.
Got the Weary Blues
And can't be satisfied -
I ain't happy no mo'
And I wish that I had died."
And far into the night he crooned that tune.
The stars went out and so did the moon.
The singer stopped playing and went to bed
While the Weary Blues echoed through his head.
He slept like a rock or a man that's dead.
(Langston Hughes, "The Weary Blues," The Weary Blues, 1926)

Listen first. "Droning a drowsy" is alliteration on d, and the d sounds drag, the way a slow tune drags. "Rocking back and forth to a mellow croon" rhymes "croon" with "tune", and the poem keeps pairing lines by rhyme ("night / light", "key / melody", "stool / fool") like a pianist's left hand keeping time. "He did a lazy sway.... / He did a lazy sway...." repeats a whole line, with ellipses that let it trail off, so the reader sways too. "Thump, thump, thump" is onomatopoeia, a word that imitates the sound it names: his foot keeping time on the floor.

Then the blues stanza. "I got the Weary Blues / And I can't be satisfied. / Got the Weary Blues / And can't be satisfied" follows the pattern of a sung blues: a line, the line again, and then an answer that turns it ("I ain't happy no mo' / And I wish that I had died"). The repetition is not padding. It is how the form builds pressure before the release, and Hughes prints it as the singer would sing it.

Now the images. "The pale dull pallor of an old gas light" is a picture and a sound at once (the p's and l's are as dim as the light). "His ebony hands on each ivory key" sets black hands against white keys in two precious materials, so that the man and his instrument are both made valuable. And the last line lands an image that doubles back on the whole poem: "He slept like a rock or a man that's dead." The blues ended in a wish for death, and the singer's sleep echoes it.

One more poem from the same book shows how little a poem needs when sound and image agree:

How still,
How strangely still
The water is today.
It is not good
For water
To be so still that way.
(Hughes, "Sea Calm," The Weary Blues, 1926)

The repetition adds one word each time ("still", "strangely still", "so still"), and each addition makes the calm less natural, until the flat judgement "It is not good". Anyone who has lived near the sea knows the feeling before a storm. The poem produces it with almost no image at all.

Whitman hears America; Hughes answers

Here is Walt Whitman, in the version he left in the 1891-92 Leaves of Grass:

I hear America singing, the varied carols I hear,
Those of mechanics, each one singing his as it should be blithe and strong,
The carpenter singing his as he measures his plank or beam,
The mason singing his as he makes ready for work, or leaves off work,
The boatman singing what belongs to him in his boat, the deckhand singing on the steamboat deck,
The shoemaker singing as he sits on his bench, the hatter singing as he stands,
The wood-cutter's song, the ploughboy's on his way in the morning, or at noon intermission or at sundown,
The delicious singing of the mother, or of the young wife at work, or of the girl sewing or washing,
Each singing what belongs to him or her and to none else,
The day what belongs to the day - at night the party of young fellows, robust, friendly,
Singing with open mouths their strong melodious songs.
(Walt Whitman, "I Hear America Singing," Leaves of Grass, 1891-92 edition)

And here is the last poem in Hughes's The Weary Blues, which the book calls "Epilogue" and which is now known as "I, Too":

I, too, sing America.

I am the darker brother.
They send me to eat in the kitchen
When company comes,
But I laugh,
And eat well,
And grow strong.

Tomorrow,
I'll sit at the table
When company comes.
Nobody'll dare
Say to me,
"Eat in the kitchen,"
Then.

Besides,
They'll see how beautiful I am
And be ashamed, -

I, too, am America.
(Hughes, "Epilogue," The Weary Blues, 1926)

Whitman's poem is a catalogue: long lines, each one a worker, each worker "singing what belongs to him or her". Its sound is accumulation: "singing ... singing ... singing", a chorus that keeps adding voices. Hughes had said Whitman influenced him, and his first line, "I, too, sing America", answers Whitman's first line directly. Where Whitman's lines are long and crowded, Hughes's are short and plain, and his image is a single room: a kitchen where one brother is sent to eat "when company comes". The sound is a steady, patient beat ("But I laugh, / And eat well, / And grow strong"), and the last line changes one word of the first: "sing" becomes "am". Whitman heard a chorus. Hughes points out who was sent out of the room, and claims his place in it.

The comparison, in one table

Read down the last two columns and a pattern appears. Every poem chooses its sounds to suit its subject, and none of them uses sound as decoration. The quiet fog is soft; the brawling city is hard; the blues moves like the blues; the uneasy sea repeats until it frightens; Whitman's crowd grows; Hughes's answer holds steady.

Key idea: choose sounds the way you choose nouns, for what they do to the subject. Then make the image and the sound agree.

Common misconceptions

• "Free verse does not rhyme." "The Weary Blues" rhymes constantly ("tune / croon", "night / light", "stool / fool") and is still free verse, because the rhymes and line lengths follow the music rather than a fixed pattern.
• "Sound devices are decoration you add at the end." In "Fog" the soft consonants are the quiet; in "Chicago" the hard ones are the noise. Change the sounds and the subject changes.
• "An image has to be something you see." Hughes's piano "moan", the thump of the foot, and the "delicious" singing in Whitman are images for the ear. An image is anything the senses can take in.
• "Alliteration means as many words as possible starting with the same letter." A tongue-twister draws attention to itself. "Droning a drowsy" uses two d's, and they are enough to slow the line to the tune's pace.

Looking back

Sandburg's fog and city show the principle at its plainest: one metaphor carried by verbs and soft consonants for a quiet subject, packed stresses and hard consonants for a loud one. Hughes's "The Weary Blues" puts a whole musical form into a poem, rhyme, repetition, onomatopoeia and the blues stanza, while its images (gas light, ebony and ivory, a man asleep "like a rock") do their own work. "Sea Calm" frightens with repetition alone. Whitman's catalogue and Hughes's "Epilogue" show two ways of singing America: a growing chorus, and a single voice claiming its seat at the table.

Key idea: go back to the six lines you wrote at the start. Keep the eye line whose image is carried by a verb, and the ear line whose sounds suit the place. Those two are the start of a poem.

Sources

1. Sandburg, C. (1916). Fog; Chicago. In Chicago Poems. Henry Holt. Wikisource. en.wikisource.org
2. Hughes, L. (1926). The Weary Blues (The weary blues; Sea calm; Epilogue). Alfred A. Knopf. Project Gutenberg. gutenberg.org
3. Whitman, W. (1892). I hear America singing. In Leaves of Grass (1891-92, "deathbed" ed.). Project Gutenberg. gutenberg.org
4. Wikipedia contributors. (2026). The Weary Blues. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
5. Wikipedia contributors. (2026). I, Too. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org

Fourteen lines that say the opposite of a love poem, until they don't

Around 1600, William Shakespeare wrote a love poem that spends twelve lines insulting its subject:

My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun;
Coral is far more red, than her lips red:
If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;
If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.
I have seen roses damask'd, red and white,
But no such roses see I in her cheeks;
And in some perfumes is there more delight
Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.
I love to hear her speak, yet well I know
That music hath a far more pleasing sound:
I grant I never saw a goddess go;
My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground:
And yet by heaven, I think my love as rare,
As any she belied with false compare.
(William Shakespeare, Sonnet 130, published 1609)

Her eyes are not like the sun, her lips are not coral, her breath "reeks" (which in Shakespeare's English meant only "is breathed out", but still). Then two words, "And yet", and everything turns. The last two lines say: I love her as much as any woman ever flattered with false comparisons. The twelve lines of insults were an attack on the flatterers, not on her. That sudden change of direction is the heart of the sonnet, and this lesson teaches you to build one around it.

Write first: before, and today

Take five minutes. Think of a place or a person that has changed: a room, a friend, a park, yourself. Write two sentences. The first describes it as it was. The second begins with the word "Today" and says how it is now. Those two sentences are the skeleton of a sonnet, because the gap between them is a turn. Keep them; you will build on them in the activity.

What a sonnet is

A sonnet is a poem of fourteen lines, in English usually written in iambic pentameter, with a fixed rhyme scheme and a volta, Italian for "turn": the point where the poem's argument or feeling changes direction. There are two main designs, and they put the turn in different places.

Sonnet 130 is the Shakespearean design at its plainest: three quatrains of comparisons (eyes, lips, breasts, hair; roses, perfume; voice, walk), then the couplet's "And yet".

Iambic pentameter, counted on your fingers

An iamb is a two-syllable unit in which the second syllable is stressed: da-DUM, as in "today" or "the sun". Pentameter means five of them in a line: ten syllables, stresses on the even ones. Read Shakespeare's first line aloud, leaning on the capitals:

my MIStress' EYES are NOthing LIKE the SUN

Ten syllables, five stresses, alternating. That regular pulse is what makes the sonnet sound like a sonnet. Now read his second line: "CORal is FAR more RED than her LIPS RED". It does not fit the pattern; it starts on a stress and stumbles at the end, and the stumble is deliberate, the sound of someone listing faults bluntly. Strict meter all the way through is rare even in Shakespeare. What matters is that the pulse is there to be broken on purpose.

To scan a line of your own: count the syllables on your fingers, then read it aloud slowly and mark the syllables your voice leans on. If the count is nine or eleven, or the stresses fall on "the" and "of" instead of on nouns and verbs, the line needs work.

Two more turns: Rossetti and McKay

Christina Rossetti published this Petrarchan sonnet in Goblin Market and Other Poems in 1862:

Remember me when I am gone away,
Gone far away into the silent land;
When you can no more hold me by the hand,
Nor I half turn to go yet turning stay.
Remember me when no more day by day
You tell me of our future that you planned:
Only remember me; you understand
It will be late to counsel then or pray.
Yet if you should forget me for a while
And afterwards remember, do not grieve:
For if the darkness and corruption leave
A vestige of the thoughts that once I had,
Better by far you should forget and smile
Than that you should remember and be sad.
(Christina Rossetti, "Remember," 1862)

The octave rhymes ABBAABBA (away, land, hand, stay, day, planned, understand, pray) and says one thing, three times: remember me. Line 9 begins with "Yet", and the sestet reverses the request: if forgetting me for a while would spare you grief, "Better by far you should forget and smile / Than that you should remember and be sad." The speaker who asked to be remembered ends by releasing the listener from remembering. The turn is not a trick. It is the moment the speaker's love becomes larger than her wish.

Claude McKay, a Jamaican-born poet living in New York, published "If We Must Die" in July 1919, during the summer of mob attacks on Black communities across the United States now called the Red Summer:

If we must die, let it not be like hogs
Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot,
While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs,
Making their mock at our accursèd lot.
If we must die, O let us nobly die,
So that our precious blood may not be shed
In vain; then even the monsters we defy
Shall be constrained to honor us though dead!
O kinsmen! we must meet the common foe!
Though far outnumbered let us show us brave,
And for their thousand blows deal one death-blow!
What though before us lies the open grave?
Like men we'll face the murderous, cowardly pack,
Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!
(Claude McKay, "If We Must Die," 1919, in Harlem Shadows, 1922)

The rhymes are Shakespearean (hogs, spot, dogs, lot; die, shed, defy, dead; foe, brave, blow, grave; pack, back). The argument is closer to Petrarchan: the first eight lines are about how to die, and line 9, "O kinsmen! we must meet the common foe!", turns from dying to fighting. The couplet then drives the turn home: "Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!" A strict form, chosen for a subject of the utmost urgency, gives the anger a shape that holds.

The point: in every sonnet the turn is the reason for the form. The fourteen lines are built so that something can change direction inside them.

The procedure: building a sonnet in eight steps

Here is a model sonnet written for this course, built step by step. The two sentences behind it were: "All summer I was the lifeguard at the town pool." "Today, Labor Day, they drained it."

1. Find the turn. Summer seen from the high chair; the pool draining on the last day. The turn will be "Today the drain is open."
2. Choose the design. Shakespearean, so that the couplet can add a second turn after the first.
3. Write the turn line first, and scan it: "to-DAY the DRAIN is O-pen. DOWN it GOES." Ten syllables, five stresses. It becomes line 9.
4. Draft the first quatrain (ABAB): the chair and the view.
5. Draft the second quatrain (CDCD): the regulars, the people the summer was made of.
6. Draft the third quatrain (EFEF): the draining, and what it shows.
7. Write the couplet (GG) as a second turn, not a summary.
8. Scan every line and fix the ones that force their rhyme or lose the beat.

Here is where step 8 made a difference. The first draft of the second quatrain read:

"To make a drench" is the classic forced rhyme: nobody has ever said it, and it is there only because "bench" needed a partner. The fix was to change the rhyme sound instead of the sense. "Wall" allows "soaked them all", which is what a boy doing a cannonball actually does, and the scan still works ("the BOY who CAN-non-BALLED and SOAKED them ALL"). "Grinning" earned its place too: it gives the boy a face. Here is the finished poem:

Labor Day, the Last Shift

All summer I sat high above the blue
and watched the town go under and come up:
the toddlers in their floaties, and the few
old men who swam their laps at eight, a cup
of coffee cooling for them on the wall,
the girls who never swam but came to tan,
the boy who cannonballed and soaked them all
and got my whistle, grinning, and then ran.
Today the drain is open. Down it goes,
the whole bright summer, swirling to the floor,
and each small crack the sinking water shows
is one I never noticed there before.
I climb down from the chair. It isn't high.
It only felt like height, the whole July.
(Written for this course, 2026.)

The first turn comes where the table says a Shakespearean sonnet often puts one, at line 9: the summer that went "under and come up" now goes down the drain for good. The third quatrain turns the draining into seeing: cracks the speaker "never noticed" while the water hid them. Then the couplet turns again. The chair "isn't high"; it "only felt like height, the whole July." The summer's view from above was a feeling, not a fact, and it is over. A couplet that only summarised ("And so the summer ended, as they do") would have wasted the form's last two lines.

Change one input: move the turn

Suppose the same material were built as a Petrarchan sonnet: eight lines of summer rhyming ABBAABBA, then a sestet beginning "Today the drain is open." The turn would stay at line 9, but there would be no couplet. The poem would end on the cracks and the empty pool, worked out across six lines, instead of snapping shut on the chair. Neither version is better. The Shakespearean couplet suits a speaker who has one last, sharper thing to say. The Petrarchan sestet suits a speaker who needs six lines to think the change through, as Rossetti's does. Choosing the design means choosing how your poem ends.

Common misconceptions

• "Any fourteen-line poem is a sonnet." Fourteen lines without a turn are only a length. The volta is what makes the form do its work; the rhyme scheme and meter support it.
• "Iambic pentameter means every line must be perfectly regular." Shakespeare's second line breaks the pattern on purpose. The meter is a pulse the reader can feel, so that a broken beat means something.
• "The couplet should sum up the poem." In Sonnet 130 and in the model, the couplet reverses or deepens. A summary couplet repeats what the reader already has.
• "Sonnets are only love poems." McKay's is a call to fight back against mob violence; the model is about a job ending. The form holds any subject that has a turn in it.

What you now know

A sonnet is fourteen lines, usually in iambic pentameter, with a rhyme scheme and a turn. The Shakespearean design (three quatrains and a couplet, ABAB CDCD EFEF GG) tends to turn at the couplet, as Sonnet 130 does with "And yet", and often at line 9 as well, as McKay does with "O kinsmen!". The Petrarchan design (octave and sestet) turns at line 9, as Rossetti's "Yet if you should forget me" does. You build one by finding the turn first, writing that line, and fitting the fourteen lines around it, then scanning every line and changing the rhyme rather than the sense when a line comes out forced.

The point: go back to your two sentences, the "before" and the "Today". The "Today" sentence is your line 9 or your couplet. Everything else is there to make it land.

Sources

1. Shakespeare, W. (1609). Shake-speares Sonnets (Sonnet 130). Project Gutenberg. gutenberg.org
2. Rossetti, C. (1913). Remember (first published 1862). In Goblin Market, The Prince's Progress, and Other Poems (The World's Classics). Oxford University Press. Project Gutenberg. gutenberg.org
3. McKay, C. (1922). If we must die (first published 1919). In Harlem Shadows. Harcourt, Brace. Project Gutenberg. gutenberg.org
4. Wikipedia contributors. (2026). Volta (literature). Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org

A house on a hill, and one sentence said four times

In 1896 Edwin Arlington Robinson, a poet from Gardiner, Maine, paid a hundred dollars to have five hundred copies of his first book printed. A year later he brought out a second book, The Children of the Night, and this poem was in it:

They are all gone away,
The House is shut and still,
There is nothing more to say.

Through broken walls and gray
The winds blow bleak and shrill:
They are all gone away.

Nor is there one to-day
To speak them good or ill:
There is nothing more to say.

Why is it then we stray
Around that sunken sill?
They are all gone away,

And our poor fancy-play
For them is wasted skill:
There is nothing more to say.

There is ruin and decay
In the House on the Hill:
They are all gone away,
There is nothing more to say.
(Edwin Arlington Robinson, "The House on the Hill", in The Children of the Night, 1897)

Count what the poem is made of. Nineteen lines. Only two rhyme sounds, the long a of "away" and the "ill" of "still". And two whole lines that keep coming back: "They are all gone away" four times, "There is nothing more to say" four times. That second line is the poem's grief and its quiet joke. Someone who truly had nothing more to say would stop talking. This speaker says so, walks around the house again, and says so again. The repetition is not a failure to think of something new. It is what the poem is about.

The form is the villanelle. This lesson sets it beside the haiku, the shortest form most of you were taught in school, and uses the pair to argue about a question every form raises. Does a rule free a poem, or cage it? Good poets have said both, and both sides have evidence.

Write first: a sentence you keep saying

Take five minutes. Write down a sentence you say, or hear, more often than you would like. "It's fine." "Five more minutes." "Did you remember your key?" "We'll see." Then write four short moments of one or two lines each, and end every one of them with that exact sentence, so that it means something different each time: once as a joke, once as a lie, once as a kindness, once as a warning. Keep the page. You have just drafted the engine of a villanelle, and you will come back to it in the activity.

The pattern: nineteen lines, two refrains, two rhymes

A villanelle has nineteen lines: five tercets, stanzas of three lines, and a closing quatrain of four. It uses only two rhyme sounds. Its two refrains are whole lines that return. The poem's first line comes back as the last line of stanzas 2 and 4; its third line comes back as the last line of stanzas 3 and 5; and the two meet as the poem's last two lines. Poets write the pattern with letters. A1 and A2 are the two refrains, which rhyme with each other; a and b are the two rhyme sounds.

The rules are younger, and shakier, than they look. Villanella was Italian for a rustic song or dance, and the early songs called villanelles had refrains but no fixed shape. The nineteen-line pattern comes from a single French poem, Jean Passerat's "J'ay perdu ma Tourterelle" ("I have lost my turtledove"), published in 1606, which later compilers of French rhyming dictionaries and verse handbooks treated as the model. Who first turned that one poem into rules, and when, is still argued over. Most villanelles have been written in English, beginning in the late nineteenth century. In 1887 an anthology edited by Gleeson White printed thirty-two English villanelles by nineteen poets. There is no required meter: most nineteenth-century villanelles used short lines like Robinson's, and most twentieth-century ones used pentameter. A slight change to a refrain line is allowed.

The case against: "a dainty thing"

One of White's nineteen poets was W. E. Henley, and his contribution argued against the form from inside it:

A dainty thing's the Villanelle.
Sly, musical, a jewel in rhyme,
It serves its purpose passing well.

A double-clappered silver bell
That must be made to clink in chime,
A dainty thing's the Villanelle;

And if you wish to flute a spell,
Or ask a meeting 'neath the lime,
It serves its purpose passing well.

You must not ask of it the swell
Of organs grandiose and sublime -
A dainty thing's the Villanelle;

And, filled with sweetness, as a shell
Is filled with sound, and launched in time,
It serves its purpose passing well.

Still fair to see and good to smell
As in the quaintness of its prime,
A dainty thing's the Villanelle,
It serves its purpose passing well.
(W. E. Henley, "Villanelle", in Gleeson White, ed., Ballades and Rondeaus, Chants Royal, Sestinas, Villanelles, etc., 1887)

Henley's claim is that the villanelle is a pretty toy. It is "a jewel in rhyme", a little "silver bell", good for casting a charm or asking someone to meet you under a lime tree. What it cannot do is "the swell / Of organs grandiose and sublime": grief, anger, the large subjects. Many later poets agreed. Most of the modernists of the early twentieth century looked down on the villanelle as a relic of the overdecorated verse of the 1890s.

Now look at how Henley's poem proves his point. His refrains come back meaning exactly what they meant the first time. "It serves its purpose passing well" says the same thing in line 3 and in line 19; nothing has happened in between to change it. And listen for the words that are there only because the rhyme needed them. Thirteen of the poem's nineteen lines must end on the sound of "Villanelle", and by the last stanza the poem is calling the form "good to smell". Nobody thought a poem smelled good until a rhyme on -ell ran short. That is the practical charge against every fixed form, and it is the one you will feel yourself: to reach a rhyme or fill a count, a writer adds words that do no work, and a reader can hear them.

The case for: "no prison is"

Eighty years before White's anthology, William Wordsworth had made the opposite case, about the sonnet, in a sonnet. He began with nuns who do not mind their narrow rooms and bees content to "murmur by the hour in Foxglove bells", and then turned:

In truth, the prison, unto which we doom
Ourselves, no prison is: and hence to me,
In sundry moods, 'twas pastime to be bound
Within the Sonnet's scanty plot of ground:
Pleas'd if some Souls (for such there needs must be)
Who have felt the weight of too much liberty,
Should find short solace there, as I have found.
(William Wordsworth, "Prefatory Sonnet", beginning "Nuns fret not at their Convent's narrow room", lines 8-14, in Poems, in Two Volumes, 1807)

"The weight of too much liberty" is a phrase worth keeping. Anyone who has stared at a blank page with no assignment, no length and no subject knows that weight. A limit you choose is not a prison, Wordsworth says; it gives the mind a plot of ground to work. More than a century later T. S. Eliot put the same idea in practical terms, in a remark the poet Anne Ridler passed on: very strict form is a help, because while you concentrate on its technical difficulties, the content of the poem gets "a more unconscious and freer release". The rules keep the front of your mind busy, and the back of your mind says what it has been waiting to say.

Robinson's poem is the evidence for this side, because its refrains do change. Follow "They are all gone away" through its four returns. In line 1 it is a flat report about a house. In line 6 it arrives after "Through broken walls and gray / The winds blow bleak and shrill", and the absence now has weather in it. In line 12 it answers a question the speaker has just asked, "Why is it then we stray / Around that sunken sill?", and it answers almost harshly: stop visiting, they are gone. In line 18 it comes after "ruin and decay" and hands straight over to the other refrain. The words never change. What changes is what you know when you reach them.

The same happens to "There is nothing more to say". In line 9 it follows "Nor is there one to-day / To speak them good or ill": no one is left even to gossip about the family. In line 15 it follows "And our poor fancy-play / For them is wasted skill": even imagining their story is useless, says a speaker who is at that moment spending his skill on them in a poem. By line 19 a man who has said "nothing more to say" four times has shown us, without a word of explanation, that he cannot stop saying it.

Why this matters: a refrain earns its place when the lines before it change what it means. If you could move a refrain to any other stanza without loss, it is decoration, and Henley's objection wins.

Seventeen sounds: the haiku

In early 1686 Matsuo Basho (1644-1694) wrote one of the best-known haiku in Japanese. Here it is in romanized spelling, broken into its three phrases, with a literal English version made for this course:

furu ike ya
kawazu tobikomu
mizu no oto

old pond:
a frog jumps in,
the sound of water
(Matsuo Basho, 1686; romanization as given in Wikipedia's article on haiku; literal version made for this course)

Japanese verse does not count syllables the way English does. It counts on, units of sound that are often shorter than an English syllable: a long vowel counts as two on, and a syllable ending in n counts as two. Basho's poem counts fu-ru-i-ke ya (5), ka-wa-zu to-bi-ko-mu (7), mi-zu no o-to (5). Traditionally a haiku has seventeen on in that 5-7-5 pattern, and two other things besides. One is a kireji, a "cutting word" that divides the poem into two parts and makes you feel the gap between them. Here it is ya, after the old pond, so that the stillness is set against the sudden jump. The other is a kigo, a season word. Kawazu, the frog, is a season word for spring, and haiku had traditionally been written about frogs singing. Basho gave the splash instead. In Japanese a haiku is usually printed as a single line; the three-line layout is an English habit. The form began as the hokku, the opening verse of a long linked poem written by several poets together, and Masaoka Shiki gave the stand-alone verse the name haiku at the end of the nineteenth century.

In the next century Yosa Buson (1716-1784), who was a painter as well as a poet, wrote:

sumizumi ni
nokoru samusa ya
ume no hana

in every corner
the cold stays on:
plum blossoms
(Yosa Buson; romanization as given in Wikipedia's article on Buson; literal version made for this course)

Count it: su-mi-zu-mi ni (5), no-ko-ru sa-mu-sa ya (7), u-me no ha-na (5). The cut, ya again, falls after "the cold", and on the far side of the cut the plum is in flower. Two seasons share one place: winter still lying in the corners, spring already on the branch. Nothing is explained. The reader stands in the gap the cutting word makes and feels both at once.

And Kobayashi Issa (1763-1827) wrote this after the death of his small daughter, Satoyo:

tsuyu no yo wa
tsuyu no yo nagara
sari nagara

this world of dew
is a world of dew, and yet,
and yet
(Kobayashi Issa; romanization as given in Wikipedia's article on Issa; literal version made for this course)

This is the shortest form in the lesson doing what the longest form does. Of its seventeen on, eight go to saying tsuyu no yo, "dew world", twice. The first half states an old consolation: life is as brief as dew on grass, so loss is to be expected. The repetition agrees with the consolation, flatly, as if reciting it. Then sari nagara, "and yet", refuses it. Repetition and compression are not opposites. Issa makes them the same move.

The 5-7-5 question

Most English speakers learn one rule about haiku: five syllables, then seven, then five. It is the villanelle dispute again, in small. The case for the rule is real. A count is a clear constraint, anyone can check it, and it forces choices, which is Wordsworth's argument. In 1973 the Haiku Society of America noted that seventeen syllables was still the norm for haiku written in English.

The case against is stronger than most schoolbooks admit. First, an English syllable and a Japanese on are not the same size. The English word "haibun" has two syllables; in Japanese it is four on (ha-i-bu-n). Even the word "on" is two on. So seventeen English syllables hold a good deal more sound, and more words, than seventeen on, and the same Haiku Society of America note, which saw a trend toward shorter haiku, put the English equivalent of seventeen on at about twelve syllables. Second, the masters did not treat the count as law. Here is Basho again:

Fuji no kaze ya
ogi ni nosete
Edo miyage

the wind from Fuji:
I bring it on my fan,
a present from Edo
(Matsuo Basho; romanization as given in Wikipedia's article on haiku, without its long-vowel mark; literal version made for this course)

Fu-ji no ka-ze ya is six on, not five, so the poem counts 6-7-5, eighteen in all. Basho kept the cut and let the count go, and the poem is no worse for the extra sound.

Here is what the strict count does to an English draft, and what happens when the draft is cut back to the words that work:

The draft is correct and dead. "In the month of" is four syllables spent saying "in". "Opens up" needs its "up" only to reach seven. "And it is so fun" is five syllables of telling, which fill the count and name a feeling instead of making one. The revision keeps the season word, June, and does the kireji's job in the English way: there is no cutting word in English, so poets make the cut with punctuation or a line break, and this one uses a colon, with "first swim of June" on one side and the cold on the other. Then it lets the count go. What is left is an image the draft never found. Going down a pool ladder, you climb down, and the cold climbs up you, one rung at a time. Twelve syllables, every one of them working.

What would settle it

Neither side wins in general, because the evidence for both is in the poems, and good and bad poems exist in every form. What settles the question is a pair of tests you can run on any draft, line by line.

1. The return test, for any refrain or repeated phrase. Cover everything except the refrain and the two lines before it. Does the refrain mean something it did not mean last time? Robinson's do; Henley's do not. If yours do not, change the lines before the refrain, not the refrain itself, until arriving at it feels different; or alter the refrain slightly, which the form allows.
2. The deletion test, for any count or rhyme. Strike out each word the form made you add. If the poem loses nothing, the form hobbled you at that point: cut the word and break the count, as Basho did. If the word you were forced to find is better than the one you would have chosen freely, the form helped. That is Wordsworth's plot of ground and Eliot's freer release.

Both results turn up in the same draft, often in the same stanza. So the useful answer to "does form free a poem or cage it?" is "show me the line."

A villanelle built for this course

Here is a model villanelle, written for this course from a sentence like the one you wrote at the start: a question a grandmother asks every week.

Sunday Visit

She asks me every Sunday what grade I'm in.
Eleventh, Gran. She claps. Already? No.
I tell her, and she's glad, and we begin.

She deals the cards and lets me think I'll win.
She keeps the score in pencil, row by row.
She asks me, halfway through, what grade I'm in.

My mother dries a plate that's dry. Her chin
is doing what it did at Christmas. So
I tell her, and she's glad, and we begin.

Last week I told her fifth grade, for the grin
she used to give me, six whole years ago.
She asks me, at the door, what grade I'm in.

I could say college. I could say I've been
to Paris, and she'd clap, and wouldn't know.
I tell her, and she's glad, and we begin.

Until the Sunday when she doesn't, thin
and quiet in her chair, the radio low,
she asks me every Sunday what grade I'm in.
I tell her, and she's glad, and we begin.
(Written for this course, 2026.)

The first refrain changes on purpose, by one phrase each time, which the form allows. "Every Sunday" in line 1 is a ritual. "Halfway through" in line 6 is a symptom: she has forgotten within the hour. "At the door" in line 12 is a goodbye. And "every Sunday" returns in line 18, but after "Until the Sunday when she doesn't" it has become a countdown.

The second refrain never changes a word; the lines before it do the changing. In stanza 3 the sentence runs across the line break into the refrain: "Her chin / is doing what it did at Christmas. So / I tell her". Now "I tell her" is something the speaker does to keep her mother from crying. In stanza 5, after "I could say college. I could say I've been / to Paris, and she'd clap, and wouldn't know", "I tell her" means I tell her the truth, even though a lie would please her just as much. At the end, "we begin" means the speaker has chosen to keep beginning, for as many Sundays as there are.

One line went through the deletion test. The first draft of line 5 was "Her hands are thin and spotted, soft as snow." "Soft as snow" was there for the rhyme, and it was a phrase anyone could write about anyone's grandmother. The revision, "She keeps the score in pencil, row by row", is an act rather than a description, and it does a second job: a woman who keeps careful score in pencil is still sharp at some things, which makes the question in the next line hurt more.

Common misconceptions

• "A haiku is any poem of five, seven and five syllables." Japanese haiku count on, which are often shorter than English syllables, and a traditional haiku also has a cut and a season word. Seventeen syllables with no cut is a sentence with a word count. Basho himself wrote 6-7-5.
• "A villanelle's refrains must come back word for word." A slight change is allowed, and the best refrains change their meaning even when the words stay put, because the lines before them change.
• "The rules of a form are ancient laws." The villanelle began as a country song with no fixed shape, and its nineteen-line pattern was built by later writers out of one poem from 1606. Forms are tools that people made, and people adjust them.
• "Repetition is lazy writing." Repetition you did not notice is a flaw. Repetition you chose, and made to change, is the engine of Robinson's villanelle and of Issa's world of dew.

Where this leaves us

The villanelle repeats and the haiku compresses. A villanelle is nineteen lines, five tercets and a quatrain, on two rhymes, with two refrains that alternate and then meet at the end. A haiku, in Japanese, is seventeen on in a 5-7-5 pattern with a cutting word and a season word; English writers often use fewer syllables, about twelve by one estimate, and make the cut with punctuation or a line break. Henley argued that a fixed form is a pretty toy that makes writers pad, and his own unchanging refrains prove it. Wordsworth, Eliot and Robinson argued, and showed, that a chosen limit can be where a poem finds what it could not have found freely. The argument is settled one line at a time, by the return test and the deletion test.

Why this matters: go back to the sentence you wrote at the start. If it meant four different things in four places, you already have a refrain that passes the return test, and the form's job is to give it nineteen lines to change in.

Sources

1. Robinson, E. A. (1897). The house on the hill. In The Children of the Night (1905 printing). Project Gutenberg. gutenberg.org
2. White, G. (Ed.). (1887). Ballades and rondeaus, chants royal, sestinas, villanelles, etc. (includes W. E. Henley, Villanelle, "A dainty thing's the Villanelle"). Walter Scott. Project Gutenberg. gutenberg.org
3. Wordsworth, W. (1807). Prefatory sonnet ("Nuns fret not at their convent's narrow room"). In Poems, in two volumes (Vol. 1). Project Gutenberg. gutenberg.org
4. Wikipedia contributors. (2026). Villanelle. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
5. Wikipedia contributors. (2026). Haiku. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org

One sunset, seen twice

When Samuel Clemens was twenty-one he began training as a cub pilot on Mississippi steamboats, the apprentice of an experienced pilot named Horace Bixby. More than twenty years later, writing as Mark Twain in Life on the Mississippi (1883), he described a sunset from his first months on the river. Then he described it again.

Now when I had mastered the language of this water and had come to know every trifling feature that bordered the great river as familiarly as I knew the letters of the alphabet, I had made a valuable acquisition. But I had lost something, too. I had lost something which could never be restored to me while I lived. All the grace, the beauty, the poetry had gone out of the majestic river! I still keep in mind a certain wonderful sunset which I witnessed when steamboating was new to me. A broad expanse of the river was turned to blood; in the middle distance the red hue brightened into gold, through which a solitary log came floating, black and conspicuous; in one place a long, slanting mark lay sparkling upon the water; in another the surface was broken by boiling, tumbling rings, that were as many-tinted as an opal; where the ruddy flush was faintest, was a smooth spot that was covered with graceful circles and radiating lines, ever so delicately traced; the shore on our left was densely wooded, and the somber shadow that fell from this forest was broken in one place by a long, ruffled trail that shone like silver; and high above the forest wall a clean-stemmed dead tree waved a single leafy bough that glowed like a flame in the unobstructed splendor that was flowing from the sun. There were graceful curves, reflected images, woody heights, soft distances; and over the whole scene, far and near, the dissolving lights drifted steadily, enriching it, every passing moment, with new marvels of coloring.

I stood like one bewitched. I drank it in, in a speechless rapture. The world was new to me, and I had never seen anything like this at home. But as I have said, a day came when I began to cease from noting the glories and the charms which the moon and the sun and the twilight wrought upon the river's face; another day came when I ceased altogether to note them. Then, if that sunset scene had been repeated, I should have looked upon it without rapture, and should have commented upon it, inwardly, after this fashion: This sun means that we are going to have wind to-morrow; that floating log means that the river is rising, small thanks to it; that slanting mark on the water refers to a bluff reef which is going to kill somebody's steamboat one of these nights, if it keeps on stretching out like that; those tumbling 'boils' show a dissolving bar and a changing channel there; the lines and circles in the slick water over yonder are a warning that that troublesome place is shoaling up dangerously; that silver streak in the shadow of the forest is the 'break' from a new snag, and he has located himself in the very best place he could have found to fish for steamboats; that tall dead tree, with a single living branch, is not going to last long, and then how is a body ever going to get through this blind place at night without the friendly old landmark.

No, the romance and the beauty were all gone from the river. All the value any feature of it had for me now was the amount of usefulness it could furnish toward compassing the safe piloting of a steamboat. Since those days, I have pitied doctors from my heart. What does the lovely flush in a beauty's cheek mean to a doctor but a 'break' that ripples above some deadly disease. Are not all her visible charms sown thick with what are to him the signs and symbols of hidden decay? Does he ever see her beauty at all, or doesn't he simply view her professionally, and comment upon her unwholesome condition all to himself? And doesn't he sometimes wonder whether he has gained most or lost most by learning his trade?
(Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi, 1883, end of Chapter 9, "Continued Perplexities")

Two versions of one sunset. In the first, every detail is color and motion: "blood", "gold", "opal", "silver", "flame". In the second, the same details, in the same order, are information. The log means the river is rising. The slanting mark is a reef "which is going to kill somebody's steamboat one of these nights". The silver streak is the "break" from a new snag. Twain has not changed the river. He has changed the person looking at it.

Write first: something you learned too well

Take eight minutes. Think of something you have learned so well that it changed how it looks to you: a sport you play or referee, an instrument, a job, a video game, a second language, a relative's illness, the kitchen of a restaurant. Write two short paragraphs. In the first, describe one moment of it as you saw it before you knew it well. In the second, describe the same moment as you see it now, detail for detail, the way Twain does. Then write one sentence that begins "Since then, I have" and goes somewhere you did not expect. Keep all of it; it is the start of your essay.

Two I's and a turn

Every personal essay has two people called "I" in it. One is the person it happened to: the cub pilot who "stood like one bewitched" and did not yet know what a slanting mark on the water meant. The other is the person writing, years later, who knows how it turned out and what it cost. The narrative belongs to the first I. The meaning belongs to the second. A memoir is nonfiction built from the author's own memories, usually of one period, event or career rather than a whole life, and the personal essay is its shorter cousin, one of the forms of creative nonfiction. Readers take the statements in both as fact. What makes either more than a report is the second I, thinking on the page.

The reflective turn is the moment an essay pivots from the first I to the second: from what happened to what it means, seen from now. Twain's turn is one sentence: "Since those days, I have pitied doctors from my heart." Look at what it does. It leaves the river. It takes what Twain learned about his own trade and hands it to a stranger's, a doctor who looks at "the lovely flush in a beauty's cheek" and sees a symptom. And it ends not on an answer but on a question: "doesn't he sometimes wonder whether he has gained most or lost most by learning his trade?" Twain does not tell you which. He has shown you both columns of the ledger and left you to add them up.

Remember: a reflective turn widens an essay. It takes the writer's experience, finds where else it is true, and it is allowed to end on a question.

Thoreau's ants: a war on a woodpile

On 4 July 1845 Henry David Thoreau moved into a cabin he had built beside Walden Pond, near Concord, Massachusetts, and he stayed two years, two months and two days. In Walden (1854), in a chapter called "Brute Neighbors", he describes what he saw one day at his woodpile:

One day when I went out to my wood-pile, or rather my pile of stumps, I observed two large ants, the one red, the other much larger, nearly half an inch long, and black, fiercely contending with one another. Having once got hold they never let go, but struggled and wrestled and rolled on the chips incessantly. Looking farther, I was surprised to find that the chips were covered with such combatants, that it was not a duellum, but a bellum, a war between two races of ants, the red always pitted against the black, and frequently two red ones to one black. The legions of these Myrmidons covered all the hills and vales in my wood-yard, and the ground was already strewn with the dead and dying, both red and black. [...] I was myself excited somewhat even as if they had been men. The more you think of it, the less the difference. And certainly there is not the fight recorded in Concord history, at least, if in the history of America, that will bear a moment's comparison with this, whether for the numbers engaged in it, or for the patriotism and heroism displayed. For numbers and for carnage it was an Austerlitz or Dresden. [...]

I never learned which party was victorious, nor the cause of the war; but I felt for the rest of that day as if I had had my feelings excited and harrowed by witnessing the struggle, the ferocity and carnage, of a human battle before my door. [...] The battle which I witnessed took place in the Presidency of Polk, five years before the passage of Webster's Fugitive-Slave Bill.
(Henry David Thoreau, Walden, 1854, "Brute Neighbors")

Thoreau does two things at once. He watches like a naturalist: he measures ("nearly half an inch long"), and in the part left out here he carries the chip indoors, sets it under a glass on his windowsill and holds a microscope to it. And he tells the fight in the language of epic war: "legions", "Myrmidons", "Austerlitz or Dresden". Telling something small in the grand style of epic is called mock-heroic, and it is usually a joke. Here the joke turns. "I was myself excited somewhat even as if they had been men. The more you think of it, the less the difference." That is the first turn: the comparison he began as play has become an argument, and the argument is about people.

Then, at the end of the episode, comes a second turn, disguised as a date: "The battle which I witnessed took place in the Presidency of Polk, five years before the passage of Webster's Fugitive-Slave Bill." That is 1845. James K. Polk was the president under whom the United States went to war with Mexico, and the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 required that people who escaped slavery be returned to their enslavers, and that citizens of the free states cooperate. Thoreau does not write "human wars are as senseless as ants' wars" or "slavery is a war too". He dates his ants by the country's worst quarrels and lets the reader draw the line. A reflective turn does not have to explain itself. Sometimes it only has to put two things side by side.

Douglass's fight: the turn announced, then earned

In January 1833 Frederick Douglass, then an enslaved teenager, was hired out for a year to Edward Covey, a Maryland farm-renter who, in Douglass's words, "had acquired a very high reputation for breaking young slaves". Twelve years later, free in the North, Douglass published the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845). Before he tells what happened in Covey's stable, he stops and tells you what it will mean: "You have seen how a man was made a slave; you shall see how a slave was made a man." Then he tells it:

Long before daylight, I was called to go and rub, curry, and feed, the horses. I obeyed, and was glad to obey. But whilst thus engaged, whilst in the act of throwing down some blades from the loft, Mr. Covey entered the stable with a long rope; and just as I was half out of the loft, he caught hold of my legs, and was about tying me. As soon as I found what he was up to, I gave a sudden spring, and as I did so, he holding to my legs, I was brought sprawling on the stable floor. Mr. Covey seemed now to think he had me, and could do what he pleased; but at this moment - from whence came the spirit I don't know - I resolved to fight; and, suiting my action to the resolution, I seized Covey hard by the throat; and as I did so, I rose. [...] We were at it for nearly two hours. Covey at length let me go, puffing and blowing at a great rate, saying that if I had not resisted, he would not have whipped me half so much. The truth was, that he had not whipped me at all. [...]

This battle with Mr. Covey was the turning-point in my career as a slave. It rekindled the few expiring embers of freedom, and revived within me a sense of my own manhood. It recalled the departed self-confidence, and inspired me again with a determination to be free. [...] I felt as I never felt before. It was a glorious resurrection, from the tomb of slavery, to the heaven of freedom. My long-crushed spirit rose, cowardice departed, bold defiance took its place; and I now resolved that, however long I might remain a slave in form, the day had passed forever when I could be a slave in fact.
(Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, 1845, Chapter X)

Douglass puts the turn in three places. He announces it before the scene, in a sentence that reverses its own words, "a man was made a slave ... a slave was made a man", the figure called chiasmus, so that the grammar performs the reversal his life is about to make. He tells the scene itself in plain, physical sentences: the rope, the loft, the throat, "nearly two hours". And he names the change afterward, precisely: he remained "a slave in form", and in fact he did remain enslaved for four more years, but not "a slave in fact". The first I fought in the stable. The second I, writing in 1845, knows what the fight was.

Notice one more thing the second I does. A little later, wondering why Covey never had him punished by the law, Douglass writes that "the only explanation I can now think of does not entirely satisfy me; but such as it is, I will give it." The reflecting self is allowed to be unsure. Saying so out loud is one of the ways a reader learns to trust him.

Three turns, side by side

Notice what none of the three does. None ends with a moral, a sentence like "and that taught me never to give up." A moral states a lesson the writing has not shown. A turn shows the second I thinking, and trusts you to follow.

A personal essay written for this course

Here is a complete essay, written for this course, that borrows Twain's move and then does something he did not. Read it through once before the commentary.

Offside

My sister's team plays at nine on Saturday mornings, on the far field behind the middle school, the one with a bump in the middle that the ball always finds. Last Saturday I sat in the bleachers with my father and a thermos of hot chocolate and tried to watch the game the way he does, which is to follow the ball and shout "Go, go, go!" whenever it moves toward the other goal. I lasted about four minutes. Then the Comets' left wing drifted two steps past the last defender, the pass came to her, she scored, every parent on our side stood up, and I said, out loud, "That's offside."

My father looked at me the way you would look at someone who had just explained a magic trick at a seven-year-old's birthday party.

Two years ago I could not have told you what offside was. At fourteen I took the referee course, eight hours on a Saturday in a middle school cafeteria, with a rulebook of seventeen laws and a test I passed by two questions. My first game was under-eights. Nobody kept score except every single parent. I made twenty-five dollars and went home and slept for three hours.

What nobody tells you about refereeing is that it takes the ball away from you. A fan watches the ball. A referee cannot afford to. You learn to watch the space instead: the line of defenders and the gap behind it, the player drifting where she should not be, the coach who has started to pace, the parent in the red jacket who is about to say something. You learn that offside is judged at the moment the ball is kicked, not the moment it arrives, so your eyes have to be in two places at once. By my second season I could stand in the right place without thinking, a little behind the play and to the left, where the ball and the next pass are both in front of me. I got good at it. And somewhere in getting good at it, the game went flat. A goal used to be a goal. Now it is a question. Was she on? Was the ball out? Was that a hand? Did I see it, or did I guess?

Last October I refereed a game in which a man followed me along the touchline for the whole second half, telling me what I had missed. He was not wrong about all of it. I was fifteen. At halftime I went and stood in the parking lot next to somebody's minivan and considered not going back. Then I went back, and I did what our instructor had told us to do: I stopped looking at the sideline. If you look, they know you're listening. I missed a foul in the last minute, and he told me so. I wrote the score on the card, handed it to both coaches, and walked to my mother's car without looking at him once.

For a long time, if you had asked me, I would have said that refereeing ruined soccer, the way learning how a card trick works ruins the trick. I used to think I had only lost something.

On Saturday, somewhere in the second half, I saw something my father had not, because he was watching the ball. On the Comets' right side there is a girl who has not touched the ball all season. She runs when everyone runs. She stands where the play just was, always a second late, and nobody passes to her, and she has stopped asking. You would never see her if you were watching the ball. You can see her only if you have learned to watch everything the ball leaves behind.

That girl is my sister.

Watching the ball is how you enjoy a game. Watching the space is how you see who is in it. I don't know if the trade was worth it. I don't know how to watch just for fun any more, and I may not get that back. But at halftime I climbed down from the bleachers and walked over to the corner flag, where the Comets were drinking from their water bottles, and I waited until my sister came near. "Stand wide," I told her. "Way out on the right, where nobody is. That's where it comes." She looked at me as if I had explained a magic trick. Then she went and stood there.
(Written for this course, 2026.)

How "Offside" works

• Two I's, told apart by tense. The first I sits in the bleachers, in the cafeteria, in the parking lot, all in the past tense. The second I speaks in the present: "Now it is a question", "I don't know if the trade was worth it." You always know who is talking.
• Scene, summary, scene. The essay opens in a scene on Saturday, drops back into summary that covers two years in two paragraphs, gives one scene of pressure from October, and returns to Saturday. Ending where it began lets the turn happen in the same place the essay started, so the reader feels how much has changed.
• Twain's move, then a reversal. The fourth paragraph is Twain's two sunsets: the fan's game against the referee's. Twain stopped at the loss and a question. The essay counts the loss honestly, and then finds what the trade bought.
• A turn earned by a scene. "I used to think I had only lost something" is the hinge, but the proof is the girl on the right side and the one-line paragraph after her. The essay never says "refereeing taught me empathy". It shows the one person only a referee's eyes could see.
• Doubt, then an action. Like Twain, the essay admits it cannot add up the ledger. Then it ends on an act, and on an echo: the look from the first scene returns, but this time the explained trick is a gift.

Revising a moral into a turn

The first draft of "Offside" ended differently. Here are the two endings side by side.

Three changes. First, "look out for people who are left out" named a lesson in general; the revision found the particular person and made her the proof, which is why "That girl is my sister" can stand alone as a paragraph. Second, "a better person" was a verdict on the writer, and readers resist verdicts a writer gives himself; the revision replaces it with doubt, which invites the reader in. Third, "I will never watch soccer the same way again" announced a new way of seeing; the revision demonstrates it, by walking to the corner flag and using it.

Common misconceptions

• "A personal essay has to end with the lesson you learned." Twain ends on a question, Thoreau on a date, Douglass on a change he names exactly. A stated moral is usually the weakest sentence in an essay.
• "Only a dramatic life makes a good essay." Douglass's fight is dramatic, but Thoreau's subject is ants on a woodpile and Twain's is a sunset. What an essay needs is a change in how the writer sees, and that can happen anywhere.
• "Reflection means explaining your feelings." Feelings belong in the scenes, shown. Reflection is thinking: widening, comparing, questioning, naming what changed.
• "Nonfiction cannot use the tools of fiction." Douglass's fight is a scene, with a clock ("nearly two hours") and dialogue ("Take hold of him, take hold of him!"). A memoirist may use every tool a novelist uses. The one thing a memoirist may not do is make it up, which is the subject of the next lesson.

Recap

A personal essay has two I's: the self who lived it and the self who writes it. The narrative belongs to the first and the meaning to the second, and the reflective turn is where the essay moves from one to the other. Twain's turn widens his loss to another trade and ends on a question. Thoreau's sets ants beside men, and then a woodpile beside a nation at war. Douglass's is announced before the scene and named after it, precisely, as a change the law did not recognize. None of them ends on a moral. "Offside" borrows Twain's two ways of seeing, earns its turn with one person, and ends on an action.

Remember: look at your "Since then, I have" sentence. If it states a lesson, cut it. If it goes somewhere you did not expect, it may be your turn; now write the scene that earns it.

Sources

1. Twain, M. (1883). Life on the Mississippi (Chapter 9, Continued perplexities). Project Gutenberg. gutenberg.org
2. Thoreau, H. D. (1854). Walden (Brute neighbors). Project Gutenberg. gutenberg.org
3. Douglass, F. (1845). Narrative of the life of Frederick Douglass, an American slave (Chapter X). Anti-Slavery Office. Project Gutenberg. gutenberg.org
4. Wikipedia contributors. (2026). Life on the Mississippi. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
5. Wikipedia contributors. (2026). Memoir. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org

"Sir": a letter to the man who had owned him

In September 1848, on the tenth anniversary of his escape from slavery, Frederick Douglass published a letter to Thomas Auld, the Maryland man who had legally owned him. It began:

SIR - The long and intimate, though by no means friendly, relation which unhappily subsisted between you and myself, leads me to hope that you will easily account for the great liberty which I now take in addressing you in this open and public manner. The same fact may remove any disagreeable surprise which you may experience on again finding your name coupled with mine, in any other way than in an advertisement, accurately describing my person, and offering a large sum for my arrest. In thus dragging you again before the public, I am aware that I shall subject myself to no inconsiderable amount of censure. I shall probably be charged with an unwarrantable, if not a wanton and reckless disregard of the rights and properties of private life. [...] All will agree that a man guilty of theft, robbery, or murder, has forfeited the right to concealment and private life; that the community have a right to subject such persons to the most complete exposure.
(Frederick Douglass, "To My Old Master, Thomas Auld", 1848, reprinted in My Bondage and My Freedom, 1855)

Douglass had already named Auld in his Narrative three years before, along with Edward Covey and the other men who had held power over him. Here he answers, before anyone can raise it, the objection every memoirist meets sooner or later: what right do you have to put a real person on the page? He expected Auld to be surprised to see their two names together anywhere except in a runaway advertisement offering money for his capture. Now Douglass was the one publishing.

The question matters more to you than it did to Twain or Thoreau, because the people in a teenager's true stories are close at hand. Your mother may read your essay. So may your best friend, your coach and your brother. There are two serious positions about what you owe them, and Douglass, who lived both, supplies evidence for each.

Write first: saw, guessed, their side

Take seven minutes. Choose a real person who matters in a story you could tell: a friend, a sibling, a parent, a coach, someone who hurt you or someone you hurt. Write three sentences. The first is something you saw them do, a fact you witnessed. The second is what you believe about why they did it. The third is what they might say if they read the first two. Label them SAW, GUESSED and THEIR SIDE. Keep the page; the activity uses it.

The case for telling: it happened to you

Douglass's letter makes the strongest form of the writer's case. Privacy matters, and he grants that it does; but a person who has done serious wrong "has forfeited the right to concealment". Near the end he goes further: "I intend to make use of you as a weapon with which to assail the system of slavery". And then, in the same paragraph: "In doing this, I entertain no malice toward you personally. There is no roof under which you would be more safe than mine". The naming is not revenge. It is testimony, and he signs off by stating the relation exactly: "I am your fellow-man, but not your slave."

The case is not only about villains. What happens to you happens to you, whoever else was in the room, and if writers could write only about people who agreed to be written about, the people with the most to hide would be the ones never written about. The writer Anne Lamott put the writer's side in one line in a 2017 talk: "If people wanted you to write more warmly about them, they should've behaved better." Silence has costs as well as speech. The Narrative sold five thousand copies within four months of its publication in 1845, and its force came from its specifics: names, places, dates, deeds.

The writer who tells also takes a risk. Naming his enslavers meant naming himself, and in 1845 Douglass was still, by law, Auld's property. After the Narrative appeared he spent two years in England and Ireland for fear of being recaptured, and supporters there raised the money to buy his freedom.

The case for care: they are real, and you can be wrong

In the same 1848 letter, Douglass asked Auld about his family:

And my dear old grandmother, whom you turned out like an old horse to die in the woods - is she still alive? Write and let me know all about them.
(Frederick Douglass, "To My Old Master, Thomas Auld", 1848)

It was not true, or not true of Auld. In 1877 Douglass, by then United States Marshal for the District of Columbia, went back to St. Michaels, Maryland, and was invited to the bedside of Thomas Auld, then over eighty and dying. In Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1881) he set down exactly what was said, because the newspaper reports of the visit had been, in his words, "in some respects defective and colored":

I told him that I had made a mistake in my narrative, a copy of which I had sent him, in attributing to him ungrateful and cruel treatment of my grandmother; that I had done so on the supposition that in the division of the property of my old master, Mr. Aaron Anthony, my grandmother had fallen to him, and that he had left her in her old age, when she could be no longer of service to him, to pick up her living in solitude with none to help her, or in other words had turned her out to die like an old horse. "Ah!" he said, "that was a mistake, I never owned your grandmother; she in the division of the slaves was awarded to my brother-in-law, Andrew Anthony; but," he added quickly, "I brought her down here and took care of her as long as she lived." The fact is, that after writing my narrative describing the condition of my grandmother, Capt. Auld's attention being thus called to it, he rescued her from her destitution. I told him that this mistake of mine was corrected as soon as I discovered it, and that I had at no time any wish to do him injustice [...]
(Frederick Douglass, Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, 1881, Chapter XVI, "Time Makes All Things Even")

Three things in that paragraph belong to the case for care. First, memory and inference fail even the most careful witness. Douglass had every reason to be exact about Auld, and he still pinned a cruelty on the wrong man, because he reasoned from a supposition about who had inherited whom. Second, true stories act on the world. His account of his grandmother reached the man he blamed, and that man took her in. Writing about real people is never only writing. Third, notice what Douglass did not do: he did not take back a single true charge. Auld had still owned him, hired him out to Covey, sold him to his brother. Douglass corrected one fact and kept the rest.

The Narrative itself shows the other half of care. At the start of the chapter about his escape, Douglass tells the reader that he is leaving things out:

I deem it proper to make known my intention not to state all the facts connected with the transaction. My reasons for pursuing this course may be understood from the following: First, were I to give a minute statement of all the facts, it is not only possible, but quite probable, that others would thereby be involved in the most embarrassing difficulties. Secondly, such a statement would most undoubtedly induce greater vigilance on the part of slaveholders than has existed heretofore among them [...]
(Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, 1845, Chapter XI)

The same writer who named the men who held the whip kept silent about the people who helped him run, and told the reader he was doing it. He regretted the silence; the full story, he says, would "materially add to the interest of my narrative". He kept it anyway, because the people it protected had no power and the people it would have helped had a great deal. And in 1881, looking at the dying Auld, he wrote a sentence the man of 1848 could not have written: "He was to me no longer a slaveholder either in fact or in spirit, and I regarded him as I did myself, a victim of the circumstances of birth, education, law, and custom." Time did not make Douglass forgive slavery. It let him see the man and the system separately.

Shaping or inventing: where the line runs

Care also covers what you do to the facts. Every memoir shapes its material; the question is where shaping stops and invention starts. Here are five choices, roughly in order from ordinary to forbidden.

The rule of thumb in that table: you may arrange the truth, and you may keep some of it back, as Douglass did. You may not add to it. When you do change something, even a name, the honest move is usually to say so.

What would settle it: four questions

No single rule settles this dispute, because each side is right about something. The writer's case is right that your life is yours and that silence protects the powerful. The case for care is right that memory errs, that words act on real people, and that some people in your story have less power than you do. What settles most real cases is four questions, asked of each person and each detail.

1. Is it true, and how do you know? Sort what you SAW from what you GUESSED. Check what can be checked: a date, a place, who owned whom. Mark memory as memory ("as I remember it", "I believed then") wherever it matters.
2. Whose story is it? What someone did to you, in front of you, is yours. Their diagnosis, their family's troubles, a secret they told you in confidence, is theirs, even though you know it.
3. Who holds the power? Douglass named the men who owned and whipped him and protected the people who helped him run. Writing about someone with power over you is different from writing about someone with less power than you: a younger sibling, a classmate with fewer friends, an adult who works for tips.
4. What does this detail do for the piece? If a detail does no work except to wound, cut it. You lose nothing an essay needs.

One more question stands behind the four: could you hand this to the person? Douglass sent Auld a copy of the Narrative. You will not always be able to show someone what you wrote, and if the person is dangerous you should not. But writing as though they will read it keeps SAW and GUESSED apart. The law has a word for published words that injure a real person's reputation, defamation, and its rules vary from country to country. This course cannot give legal advice; if you plan to publish something damaging about a real person, talk first with an adult who knows the law where you live.

Bottom line: fairness is not niceness. Douglass was fair to Auld without being nice to him. He kept every true charge, corrected the false one, and protected the people who could not protect themselves.

A passage revised for fairness

Here is the first draft of a memoir passage written for this course, and its revision after the four questions.

1. The name. "Kayla Morrison ... at Lincoln Middle" became "whom I'll call Jess". A full name and a school identify her to anyone who searches. The essay is about what happened, not about exposing her, and it tells the reader the name is changed.
2. The guess. "She did it because she was jealous" stated a motive as a fact. The revision keeps what was seen and labels the belief as a belief: "For a long time I believed she did it to hurt me. What I know is that she told, and that I never asked her why."
3. The secret that was not the writer's. "Her own house was a mess and her dad drank" was cut. It was her family's private business, it dragged in a man who is not in the scene, the writer could not know it for certain, and it did no work except to wound.
4. Memory marked as memory. "Her fake sad face" became "I remember her face as sad ... I remember deciding the sadness was fake; I am less sure now."
5. A fact added, not only removed. "I had told her two days before, on the bus, and asked her not to tell anyone" makes the betrayal clearer, not softer. Fairness can sharpen a charge.
6. The verdict on the present. "She is still exactly the same person; you can tell from her posts" was cut: a judgment about who she is now, from social media, on a matter outside the story.
7. The writer's own part. "I have never forgiven her, and I never will" gave way to a turn: "she was thirteen, and so was I."

The revision is no less true. It is fairer, and it is a better piece of writing: the draft ended on a grudge, and the revision ends on a reflective turn. Notice one thing it still tells, though: that the writer's parents were divorcing. That fact belongs to the parents too. Here the writer judged that it was hers to tell, because it happened to her as much as to them. You will have to make the same judgment about your own family, and you may judge differently.

Common misconceptions

• "If it's true, I can publish it." A true fact can still be someone else's secret, and truth does not stop harm. Your certainty can also be wrong: Douglass was certain about his grandmother, and he had blamed the wrong man.
• "Changing the name makes it fair." A new name hides a person from strangers, not from the people who know you both, which usually means the people who matter. Fairness lives in how the story is told, not only in the label.
• "Memoir has to be exact, so I can't write dialogue I don't remember word for word." Reconstructing a conversation as faithfully as you can is shaping. Inventing a line to make someone look worse is not.
• "Being fair means being kind." Douglass was fair to Auld and did not soften one true charge. Fairness is accuracy and proportion, and sometimes it makes the accusation stronger.

The takeaway

Writing about real people sets two true things against each other. Your life is yours to tell, and silence protects people who have done wrong: Douglass named the men who owned him, in public, and said why. But memory errs, words act on the world, and some people in your story have less power than you: Douglass pinned a cruelty on the wrong man and corrected it, and he kept silent about the people who helped him escape. Memoir may arrange the truth and keep some of it back; it may not add to it. Four questions settle most cases: is it true and how do you know, whose story is it, who holds the power, and what does this detail do for the piece.

Bottom line: go back to your SAW, GUESSED and THEIR SIDE. Keep the SAW. Label the GUESSED. And let THEIR SIDE into the piece at least once, even if you still disagree with it.

Sources

1. Douglass, F. (1855). To my old master, Thomas Auld (letter of 1848). In My bondage and my freedom. Project Gutenberg. gutenberg.org
2. Douglass, F. (1881). Life and times of Frederick Douglass (Chapter XVI, Time makes all things even). Park Publishing. Project Gutenberg. gutenberg.org
3. Douglass, F. (1845). Narrative of the life of Frederick Douglass, an American slave (Chapter XI). Anti-Slavery Office. Project Gutenberg. gutenberg.org
4. Lamott, A. (2017, April). 12 truths I learned from life and writing [Video]. TED. ted.com
5. Wikipedia contributors. (2026). A Million Little Pieces. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org

Eleven days, and not one sentence kept

Here is the notes app of a writer with a story due, kept over eleven days. It was written for this lesson, but anyone who has tried to write something will recognize it.

Monday: idea?? something about the lake house. or Grandpa's boat. think more
Tuesday: opened doc. "The summer I turned twelve was the summer everything changed." deleted, too cliche
Wednesday: too tired. weekend
Saturday: wrote two paragraphs. terrible. deleted
Sunday: need to feel inspired first. try music?
Tuesday: reread my old stuff from last year. all bad
Thursday: due Monday. still no first sentence

Nothing is wrong with this writer's talent. Look at what the log shows instead: three habits, each of which feels like seriousness and works like a lock. She is waiting for a whole idea to arrive before she starts. She writes only when she feels ready, which is never on a Wednesday. And she deletes every sentence that is not good yet, which is every first sentence anyone has ever written. Working writers found a cure for each of these a long time ago. This lesson takes them one at a time: the notebook, the routine and the first bad draft.

Write first: eight minutes, no deleting

Before you read further, set a timer for eight minutes. Write about a place where you spent a summer, a season or one long day. Do not stop, do not delete, do not reread. If you stall, write "What I really remember is" and keep going from there. When the timer rings, count your words and write the number at the top. Whatever you wrote, it is more than the log above contains.

Problem one: waiting for a whole idea

Ideas almost never arrive whole. They arrive as fragments, a face, a sentence overheard, an odd fact, and most are too small to make a story on their own. The cure is a place to keep them until two of them meet. Anton Chekhov kept notebooks from 1892 until his death in 1904. Here are six entries, as they were translated in 1921:

A bedroom. The light of the moon shines so brightly through the window that even the buttons on his night shirt are visible.

He had nothing in his soul except recollections of his schooldays.

The dog walked in the street and was ashamed of its crooked legs.

A nice man would feel ashamed even before a dog....

Why did Hamlet trouble about ghosts after death, when life itself is haunted by ghosts so much more terrible?

The children growing up talked at meals about religion and laughed at fasts, monks, etc. The old mother at first lost her temper, then, evidently getting used to it, only smiled, but at last she told the children that they had convinced her, that she is now of their opinion. The children felt awkward and could not imagine what their old mother would do without her religion.
(Anton Chekhov, Note-Book of Anton Chekhov, notes of 1892-1904, translated by S. S. Koteliansky and Leonard Woolf, 1921)

Look at the kinds of thing he kept. An image, exact and physical: moonlight bright enough to show a shirt's buttons. A character in one line: a man with nothing in his soul but memories of school. A joke that is also a feeling: a dog ashamed of its legs. A thought. And one entry that is nearly a whole story: the children laugh at their mother's faith until she gives it up, and then they are the ones left uneasy. It has a want, a change and a turn, in four sentences. The translators note that when Chekhov used a note in his work he struck it out. The notebook was a store he drew on, not a diary of his days; he kept a diary separately, and the same volume prints it. Writers have kept stores like this for centuries, and an older kind, the commonplace book, was a notebook for copying out anything worth keeping, from proverbs to poems.

Nathaniel Hawthorne kept the same kind of store in the 1830s, between long entries describing walks, weather and people he saw in Salem and Boston:

To make one's own reflection in a mirror the subject of a story.

A snake, taken into a man's stomach and nourished there from fifteen years to thirty-five, tormenting him most horribly. A type of envy or some other evil passion.

A person to be in the possession of something as perfect as mortal man has a right to demand; he tries to make it better, and ruins it entirely.
(Nathaniel Hawthorne, Passages from the American Note-Books, entries of 1836-1837)

You can find the third note inside a story Hawthorne published six years later. In "The Birth-Mark" (1843), a scientist whose wife is flawless except for one small red mark on her cheek becomes obsessed with removing it. His potion works: the mark fades, and as it fades completely, she dies. Six years between the sentence and the story is normal. A notebook entry is not a plan. It is a seed you may not plant for years, and most you will never plant at all.

What matters here: keep fragments, not finished ideas: an image, a line of speech, a character in a sentence, a situation with a turn. Stories tend to start when two fragments that did not belong together land on the same page.

Problem two: writing only when you feel like it

Anthony Trollope wrote forty-seven novels, many of them while he held a full-time job in the British Post Office. In An Autobiography, published after his death in 1882, he explained how:

It was my practice to be at my table every morning at 5.30 A.M.; and it was also my practice to allow myself no mercy. An old groom, whose business it was to call me, and to whom I paid £5 a year extra for the duty, allowed himself no mercy. [...] three hours a day will produce as much as a man ought to write. [...] It had at this time become my custom [...] to write with my watch before me, and to require from myself 250 words every quarter of an hour. I have found that the 250 words have been forthcoming as regularly as my watch went. But my three hours were not devoted entirely to writing. I always began my task by reading the work of the day before, an operation which would take me half an hour, and which consisted chiefly in weighing with my ear the sound of the words and phrases.
(Anthony Trollope, An Autobiography, 1883, Chapter XV)

Earlier in the book he describes how he kept himself honest:

When I have commenced a new book, I have always prepared a diary, divided into weeks, and carried it on for the period which I have allowed myself for the completion of the work. In this I have entered, day by day, the number of pages I have written, so that if at any time I have slipped into idleness for a day or two, the record of that idleness has been there, staring me in the face, and demanding of me increased labour, so that the deficiency might be supplied. [...] There has ever been the record before me, and a week passed with an insufficient number of pages has been a blister to my eye, and a month so disgraced would have been a sorrow to my heart.

I have been told that such appliances are beneath the notice of a man of genius. [...] A small daily task, if it be really daily, will beat the labours of a spasmodic Hercules. It is the tortoise which always catches the hare.
(Anthony Trollope, An Autobiography, 1883, Chapter VII)

Do not copy Trollope's numbers. A thousand words an hour, three hours a morning, is a professional novelist's pace, and he had a groom to bring the coffee. Copy his structure, which has four parts. A fixed time: 5.30, before the day job could take it. A small, measurable target: words, not "a good chapter", because you can always hit a number and you cannot always hit good. A visible record: the weekly diary that stared him in the face. And a warm-up: half an hour rereading yesterday's pages, listening to their sound, so that today's work would sound like the same book. For a student, the same structure might be twenty minutes before school, four days a week, two hundred words, and a log on the inside cover of the notebook.

Notice, too, the objection Trollope expected: "such appliances are beneath the notice of a man of genius." Many people still believe that real writers wait for inspiration and that routines are for hacks. Trollope's answer is the tortoise. The writer who waits for the mood writes when the mood comes; the writer with a routine writes on the days it does not come, too, and there are far more of those.

Problem three: deleting what is not good yet

The third habit does the most damage, because it looks like high standards. The writer in the log deleted "The summer I turned twelve was the summer everything changed" because it was a cliche, and she was right. But deleting it did not produce a better sentence. It produced nothing, eleven days in a row.

In Bird by Bird (1994), a book on writing still in copyright, Anne Lamott makes the case that a terrible first draft is a normal stage of writing, not a sign that something has gone wrong. She put it in a single line in a 2017 talk: "Every writer you know writes really terrible first drafts". In the same talk she tells the story behind her book's title. Her older brother, in fourth grade, had a report on birds due the next day and had not started, and their father sat down beside him with a bird book and told him to take it bird by bird: read about pelicans and write about pelicans, then chickadees, then geese. The advice for the first draft is the same. Do not write the story. Write the next bird.

Here is a first bad draft, written for this course in one sitting, not reread, printed exactly as it came. It begins with the sentence the log deleted.

The Lake

The summer I turned twelve was the summer everything changed. We went up to the lake house like we always did, me and my mom and my little brother Theo and my grandpa, who was really old by then but still acted young. The lake was really beautiful, the water was blue and sparkling in the sun and there were green trees all around it. Grandpa had a boat, an old aluminum rowboat that he called the Admiral, which is kind of a funny name for a boat that small. Every morning he took me out fishing in it. We never caught anything. I don't think he cared about catching anything, he mostly just liked to sit there. That summer something was different though. He was quieter. He kept forgetting things, like where he put the oars, and one time he called me by my mom's name, which was weird. Mom said he was just tired. I was kind of annoyed at the time because I wanted to go swimming with the kids from the other cabins instead of sitting in a boat doing nothing. On the last day he asked me if I wanted to row. I had never rowed before. I was bad at it and we went in circles and he laughed so hard he had to hold onto the side. It was the last time we went out in the Admiral. He died in March. I think about that summer a lot and I realize now that he was trying to teach me something, about slowing down and appreciating things, and also that you should spend time with the people you love while you can because you never know when it will be the last time. Anyway the Admiral is in our garage now. Nobody uses it.
(Written for this course, 2026: a first draft, in one sitting.)

It is bad in all the usual ways. It opens on the cliche. "Really beautiful", "blue and sparkling" and "green trees all around it" are a postcard anyone could send from any lake. "He was quieter" tells what it could show. And it ends on a moral: "you never know when it will be the last time." But read it again for what is alive, and look where the life is:

• "an old aluminum rowboat that he called the Admiral": a name that is a joke and a character at once.
• "one time he called me by my mom's name, which was weird": the first sign of the grandfather's forgetting, shown, not explained.
• "we went in circles and he laughed so hard he had to hold onto the side": the scene the whole story is about.
• "the Admiral is in our garage now. Nobody uses it.": the ending, already written, and far stronger than the moral just before it.

The writer did not know any of this when she typed the first sentence. The story turned out not to be "the summer everything changed". It is the last row: a kid who would rather be swimming, a grandfather who is forgetting, a boat going in circles, and a laugh. She found it nearly two hundred words in, and she could not have found it without writing those two hundred words. That is what a first bad draft is for. The next lesson takes this draft through two more versions and explains every change.

The log, rewritten

Here is the same writer's log after she changed her system, beside the old one.

Three changes, one for each habit. Fragments go in the notebook instead of waiting to become an idea. Writing happens at a fixed time for a fixed target, and the log records it, Trollope's diary in miniature. And "deleted" has disappeared from the log. "Bad. Kept." has taken its place.

Common misconceptions

• "Real writers wait for inspiration." Trollope paid a groom five pounds a year to wake him at 5.30, and produced forty-seven novels. Inspiration is more likely to arrive at a desk you sit at every day than at one you visit when you feel like it.
• "A writer's notebook is a diary of feelings." Chekhov kept his diary and his notebook apart. The notebook holds material: images, lines, characters, situations. Feelings go in only when they come attached to something you could put in a scene.
• "If the first draft is bad, the idea is bad." The lake draft is bad and the story in it is good. A first draft tests whether there is a story, not whether you can already tell it well.
• "Writing every day means writing a lot every day." Trollope's point was the daily part: "A small daily task, if it be really daily, will beat the labours of a spasmodic Hercules." Twenty minutes kept is worth more than three hours planned.

Summing up

Drafts that never get written usually fail for one of three reasons, and each has a cure. Waiting for a whole idea is cured by a notebook of fragments, the kind Chekhov and Hawthorne kept: images, lines, characters, situations, stored until two of them meet, sometimes years later, as Hawthorne's note met "The Birth-Mark". Writing only when inspired is cured by Trollope's structure: a fixed time, a small measurable target, a visible record, and a warm-up reread of yesterday's work. Deleting what is not good yet is cured by permission to write a first bad draft straight through, because, as the lake draft shows, the story is often found only after nearly two hundred words of wandering.

What matters here: this week's job is not to write well. It is to write at the same time every day, keep what you write, and let the notebook fill.

Sources

1. Chekhov, A. (1921). Note-book of Anton Chekhov (S. S. Koteliansky & L. Woolf, Trans.). Project Gutenberg. gutenberg.org
2. Hawthorne, N. (entries of 1835-1841, published after his death). Passages from the American note-books (Vol. 1). Project Gutenberg. gutenberg.org
3. Trollope, A. (1883). An autobiography (Chapters VII and XV). Project Gutenberg. gutenberg.org
4. Lamott, A. (2017, April). 12 truths I learned from life and writing [Video]. TED. ted.com
5. Lamott, A. (1994). Bird by bird: Some instructions on writing and life. Pantheon Books.

Thirty-six years on one first line

In 1855 Walt Whitman, then thirty-six, paid to print a book of twelve untitled poems called Leaves of Grass. The first poem opened like this:

I celebrate myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.

I loafe and invite my soul,
I lean and loafe at my ease .... observing a spear of summer grass.
(Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass, 1855, the untitled first poem)

He did not stop working on it. In the second edition of 1856 the poem was called "Poem of Walt Whitman, an American"; in 1860 it was "Walt Whitman"; in 1867 it was cut into fifty-two numbered sections; and by the last edition, which he prepared as he was dying in 1891-92, it was "Song of Myself" and began:

I celebrate myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.

I loafe and invite my soul,
I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.

My tongue, every atom of my blood, form'd from this soil, this air,
Born here of parents born here from parents the same, and their parents the same,
I, now thirty-seven years old in perfect health begin,
Hoping to cease not till death.
(Walt Whitman, "Song of Myself", in Leaves of Grass, 1891-92)

Three kinds of change, each a different kind of seeing. He added three words to the first line, "and sing myself", and the poem that had only celebrated now named itself a song, which is also what the new title says. He took out the four dots after "at my ease", a private punctuation of the 1855 book, so the line runs clean. And he added a stanza that the 1855 opening did not have, in which the speaker gives his age: "now thirty-seven years old". Whitman was seventy-two when the last edition was printed. He changed the first line and kept the young man's age. Revising, for him, included deciding what not to touch. Near the end he wrote that the book was "at last complete - after 33 y'rs of hackling at it, all times & moods of my life". The count of years is his; from the first edition to the last is thirty-six.

The word revision is built from re and vision: seeing again. That is the difference between revising and correcting. Correcting a draft fixes its mistakes. Revising it asks what the draft is, and then makes it more that thing. This lesson follows one scene through three drafts and explains every change.

Write first: one sentence about your draft

Take the first bad draft you wrote for the last lesson, or any draft of your own of at least a page. Take six minutes. Without rereading it more than once, write one sentence that begins "This piece is really about" and ends somewhere specific: not "my grandfather" but "the last time my grandfather and I took the boat out". Then underline, in the draft, the single moment that sentence points to. That sentence and that moment are where the second draft starts.

Draft 1: the draft as it came

Here, again, is the first bad draft from the last lesson, exactly as it was written, in one sitting:

The Lake

The summer I turned twelve was the summer everything changed. We went up to the lake house like we always did, me and my mom and my little brother Theo and my grandpa, who was really old by then but still acted young. The lake was really beautiful, the water was blue and sparkling in the sun and there were green trees all around it. Grandpa had a boat, an old aluminum rowboat that he called the Admiral, which is kind of a funny name for a boat that small. Every morning he took me out fishing in it. We never caught anything. I don't think he cared about catching anything, he mostly just liked to sit there. That summer something was different though. He was quieter. He kept forgetting things, like where he put the oars, and one time he called me by my mom's name, which was weird. Mom said he was just tired. I was kind of annoyed at the time because I wanted to go swimming with the kids from the other cabins instead of sitting in a boat doing nothing. On the last day he asked me if I wanted to row. I had never rowed before. I was bad at it and we went in circles and he laughed so hard he had to hold onto the side. It was the last time we went out in the Admiral. He died in March. I think about that summer a lot and I realize now that he was trying to teach me something, about slowing down and appreciating things, and also that you should spend time with the people you love while you can because you never know when it will be the last time. Anyway the Admiral is in our garage now. Nobody uses it.
(Draft 1, written for this course, 2026.)

The writer's sentence, from the warm-up, was: "This piece is really about the last time Grandpa and I took the Admiral out, when he laughed and I didn't know it was the last time." The moment it points to is the row. Nearly everything else in Draft 1 is on the way to that moment or on the way out of it.

Draft 2: the structural revision

The first revision does not touch sentences. It moves, cuts and expands whole blocks, because there is no point polishing a paragraph that is about to disappear. Here is Draft 2:

The Admiral

On the last morning at the lake, Grandpa asked if I wanted to row.

I didn't, really. The kids from the other cabins were already out on the swim raft, yelling, and I could hear them all the way across the water. But he was holding the oars out to me, so I climbed into the middle seat of the Admiral and he sat in the back, where I usually sat.

The Admiral was an old aluminum rowboat, dented all along one side. He had named it after himself, sort of, because Grandma used to call him that when he got bossy. I had never rowed it. I put the oars in the water and pulled and the boat turned to the left. I pulled again and it turned more to the left.

"Both at once," he said. "Both arms. Like you're hugging something."

I tried. We went in a circle. Then another circle. The kids on the raft had stopped yelling and were watching us, and I felt my face get very hot.

Then Grandpa started to laugh. He laughed so hard he had to hold on to the side of the boat, and the boat rocked, and he laughed harder, and he said, "Annie, Annie, you row like a little kid," and I didn't correct him, even though Annie is my mom's name.

We went around one more time. I pulled with both arms, like hugging something, and the Admiral went straight for maybe ten feet, and he clapped.

That was the last time we took it out. He died in March.

The Admiral is in our garage now, upside down on two sawhorses. Nobody uses it. Sometimes when I take the recycling out I knock on the bottom of it, twice, the way he used to knock on it every fall before he flipped it over, to wake up whatever was living under there.
(Draft 2, written for this course, 2026.)

Every change here is structural. Here they are, with the reason for each.

1. It starts late. Draft 1 took nearly two hundred words to reach the row. Draft 2 starts on the last morning, one sentence from the offer to row. The summer frame, "the summer everything changed", and the postcard of blue water and green trees are gone, because the warm-up sentence says the piece is about one morning, not one summer.
2. Summary became scene. "We went in circles and he laughed so hard he had to hold onto the side" was one sentence of summary in Draft 1. In Draft 2 it is the whole middle of the piece: the oars, the instruction, the circles, the laugh, told at the speed they happened. The best moment gets the most room.
3. The forgetting moved into the scene. "He was quieter. He kept forgetting things" told the reader something. Now the forgetting happens in front of us, in the boat, at the worst and best moment: he calls the narrator by her mother's name while he is laughing. "Mom said he was just tired" is gone; the scene no longer needs a grown-up to explain it.
4. The want stayed, and got a job. Draft 1's complaint about wanting to swim with the other kids survives as the swim raft across the water. Now it is pressure: the kids are the audience for the circles, which makes the grandfather's laugh a rescue.
5. The moral was cut. "He was trying to teach me something ... you never know when it will be the last time" is gone entirely. The piece ends on the garage, which Draft 1 already had, plus one new gesture, the knock, which the next draft will fix.
6. The title changed. "The Lake" named the setting. "The Admiral" names the thing that carries the story from the first line to the last.

The core of it: a structural revision answers "what is this piece?" and rebuilds around the answer. It is where most of the improvement happens, and it is the step most writers skip, because fixing commas feels like progress.

Draft 3: the line revision

Now, and only now, the sentences. Here is Draft 3:

The Admiral

On the last morning at the lake, Grandpa knocked twice on the bottom of the Admiral before we flipped it over, the way he always did. "Wake up whatever's living under there," he said. Then he held the oars out to me, handles first.

I didn't want to row. The kids from the other cabins were already out on the swim raft, and their yelling came across the water as clearly as if they were on the dock. But I climbed into the middle seat, and he sat in the back, where I always sat.

The Admiral was an aluminum rowboat with a dent the whole length of one side. Grandma had named it, years ago, for him. I dug the oars in and pulled, and the boat swung its nose to the left. I pulled harder. It swung further.

"Both at once," he said. "Both arms. Like you're hugging something."

I tried. We went in a circle, and then another circle. Out on the raft the yelling stopped. I kept my eyes on my own knees.

Then Grandpa laughed. He laughed until he had to hold on to the side, and the boat rocked, and he laughed harder. "Annie," he said, wiping his eyes. "Annie, you row just like you did when you were six."

Annie is my mother's name. I didn't correct him.

I pulled with both arms, like hugging something, and the Admiral went straight for ten feet, maybe twelve, and he clapped, slowly, as if the whole lake were watching.

That was the last time we took it out. He died in March.

The Admiral is in our garage now, upside down on two sawhorses. Nobody uses it. When I take the recycling out, I knock on it, twice.
(Draft 3, written for this course, 2026.)

1. A plant for the payoff. Draft 2 ended by explaining the knock: "the way he used to knock on it every fall ... to wake up whatever was living under there." Draft 3 moves the knock, and the grandfather's own words, to the first paragraph. Now the last line needs no explanation at all: "I knock on it, twice." A detail planted early and paid off late is the principle behind Chekhov's gun, which here is a knock on a boat in a garage.
2. Verbs. "I put the oars in the water and pulled and the boat turned to the left. I pulled again and it turned more to the left" became "I dug the oars in and pulled, and the boat swung its nose to the left. I pulled harder. It swung further." "Dug" and "swung its nose" give the struggle a body, and the short sentences make the reader feel each failed pull.
3. Telling became an action. "I felt my face get very hot" named the embarrassment. "I kept my eyes on my own knees" shows it, and the reader supplies the hot face.
4. Backstory trimmed. The joke about Grandma calling him the Admiral when he got bossy was charming, and it stopped the scene's clock for two sentences in the middle of a two-minute moment. Draft 3 keeps only what the ending needs: "Grandma had named it, years ago, for him."
5. The key line got its own paragraph. In Draft 2 the mistaken name was buried at the end of a long sentence. In Draft 3 it stands alone, in two short sentences: "Annie is my mother's name. I didn't correct him." The most important sentence in a piece is usually strongest when nothing is crowding it.
6. Dialogue sharpened. "You row like a little kid" could be said by anyone. "You row just like you did when you were six" tells the reader, without explanation, that he is somewhere else in time, teaching his daughter in the same boat.
7. Rhythm and a widened audience. "The Admiral went straight for maybe ten feet, and he clapped" became "straight for ten feet, maybe twelve, and he clapped, slowly, as if the whole lake were watching." The small correction, "maybe twelve", is the narrator's pride; "slowly" slows the reader; and the raft kids who were watching the circles have grown into the whole lake, watching the success.
8. Proofreading. The last pass checked the things a line revision can break: "mom" and "mother" made consistent, "hold onto" made "hold on to", commas placed around the dialogue by the rules in Lesson 7, one tense throughout for the morning and one for the garage.

The order matters: large to small

Work in that order. Structure decides what survives; lines polish what survived; proofreading catches what the polishing missed. Going the other way round wastes the most careful work on the sentences most likely to be cut. Notice, too, what the three drafts did not change. The Admiral, the circles, the laugh, "He died in March" and "Nobody uses it" were all in the first bad draft. Revision did not invent the story. It found the story that the first draft had already written down, and cleared away everything standing in front of it, which is what Whitman did when he added three words to his first line and left a young man's age alone.

Common misconceptions

• "Revising means fixing the spelling and the commas." That is proofreading, the last and smallest level. The biggest change between Draft 1 and Draft 3 happened before a single sentence was polished.
• "If a draft needs this much revision, it wasn't any good." Every line of the final ending was already in the bad first draft. Needing revision is what drafts are for.
• "Each revision should add material." Draft 1 had about three hundred words, and Draft 3 has about the same. Much of revision is cutting and moving; what grows is the scene that matters, and what shrinks is everything else.
• "Revise until nothing of the first draft remains." Whitman kept most of his opening for thirty-six years, and the old poet kept the young poet's "thirty-seven years old". Knowing what to leave alone is part of the skill.

What to carry forward

Revision is seeing a draft again and making it more fully what it is, as Whitman did across thirty-six years and five editions. Work from large to small. First the structure: say in one sentence what the piece is really about, start as late as you can, turn the most important summary into scene, and cut the moral. Then the lines: plant what the ending will need, strengthen verbs, turn telling into action, trim backstory that stops the clock, give the key sentence room, sharpen dialogue. Last, proofread. Print each draft, and explain every change, because a change you cannot explain may not be an improvement.

The core of it: the story is usually already in the first draft. Revision is how you find it and clear the way to it.

Sources

1. Whitman, W. (1855). Leaves of grass (first poem, "I celebrate myself"). Wikisource. en.wikisource.org
2. Whitman, W. (1891-92). Leaves of grass (Song of myself). Project Gutenberg. gutenberg.org
3. Wikipedia contributors. (2026). Song of Myself. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
4. Wikipedia contributors. (2026). Walt Whitman. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org

A letter from Yalta

On 3 December 1898, Anton Chekhov, then thirty-eight and famous, answered a letter from a thirty-year-old writer in the provincial city of Nizhny Novgorod who had asked him what he thought of his stories. The younger writer signed himself Maxim Gorky. Here is part of Chekhov's reply:

You ask what is my opinion of your stories. My opinion? The talent is unmistakable and it is a real, great talent. For instance, in the story "In the Steppe" it is expressed with extraordinary vigour, and I actually felt a pang of envy that it was not I who had written it. You are an artist, a clever man, you feel superbly, you are plastic - that is, when you describe a thing you see it and you touch it with your hands. That is real art. [...]

Shall I speak now of defects? But that is not so easy. To speak of the defects of a talent is like speaking of the defects of a great tree growing in the garden; what is chiefly in question, you see, is not the tree itself but the tastes of the man who is looking at it. Is not that so?

I will begin by saying that to my mind you have not enough restraint. You are like a spectator at the theatre who expresses his transports with so little restraint that he prevents himself and other people from listening. This lack of restraint is particularly felt in the descriptions of nature with which you interrupt your dialogues; when one reads those descriptions one wishes they were more compact, shorter, put into two or three lines. The frequent mention of tenderness, whispering, velvetiness, and so on, give those descriptions a rhetorical and monotonous character - and they make one feel cold and almost exhaust one.
(Anton Chekhov, letter to Maxim Gorky, Yalta, 3 December 1898, translated by Constance Garnett)

This is one of the best workshop letters ever written, and it is worth seeing why before we build a procedure out of it. The praise is specific enough to believe: a named story, and a precise account of the gift ("when you describe a thing you see it and you touch it with your hands"). The criticism is one thing, named once: "not enough restraint". It comes with a picture that makes it memorable, the spectator whose enthusiasm drowns out the play, and it is located exactly, in "the descriptions of nature with which you interrupt your dialogues", down to the words: "tenderness, whispering, velvetiness". And Chekhov admits that taste is involved, which makes the criticism easier to hear, without taking it back.

Then something happened that happens in every workshop. A month later, on 3 January 1899, Chekhov had to write again: "Apparently you have misunderstood me a little. I did not write to you of coarseness of style, but only of the incongruity of foreign, not genuinely Russian, or rarely used words." Gorky had heard "coarseness", which Chekhov never wrote. Feedback is almost always heard as harsher than it was meant. Half of this lesson is about giving it; the other half is about hearing it.

Write first: what they said, what you heard

Take six minutes. Think of the last time someone gave you a response to something you made: a story, an essay, a drawing, a song, a play in a game. Write down, as exactly as you can remember, what they said. Beside it, write what you heard, meaning what you felt it meant about you or the work. If the two columns are different, you have just found Gorky's problem in your own life. Keep the page.

Why a workshop needs rules

A group reading a piece with no rules tends to produce three kinds of useless response: praise too vague to use ("I really liked it"), rewrites of the story the reader would have written, and a writer who spends the whole session explaining what the story meant, so that nobody finds out whether the story means it without the explanation. Writing groups have invented rules against each of these. Here are three well-known sets.

Lerman defines a neutral question as one with no opinion "couched in" it, and gives a set form for opinions: "I have an opinion about ___, would you like to hear it?" The artist may say no. That sounds strange the first time, and it changes the room: the writer is choosing what to hear, instead of bracing to be hit.

The procedure: one workshop, end to end

This course's protocol takes something from each. Here it is in six steps, followed by a worked example.

1. The writer's question. The writer hands in the piece with one sentence on its stage ("a first draft", "going to the school magazine on Friday") and one question ("Does the ending work?").
2. Two readings. Readers read once straight through as readers, with no pen, and once as writers, pen in hand, marking moves, as in Lesson 12.
3. What the piece is doing. Each reader says, in one or two sentences, what they think the piece is doing. The writer listens and writes it down. If the group's account is not the writer's, that gap is the most useful information of the day.
4. What is working, quoted. Readers point to lines, not feelings: "the jar of pickles", not "the middle part was good".
5. The writer's question, then neutral questions. Readers answer the question the writer asked, then ask their own questions with no opinion hidden inside them.
6. Permissioned opinions, then the writer's reply. Readers offer opinions the writer has agreed to hear. The writer, silent until now, may then ask anything, but may not defend.

Small line-level notes, typos, a missing comma, go on the manuscript and are never discussed aloud. The workshop's time is for the things only a group of readers can tell a writer.

The worked example: "Inventory"

Here is a classmate's story, written for this course. Its writer, Maya, handed it in with this note: "First draft. Does the ending work?"

Inventory

Every January the store closes at nine instead of eleven so we can count everything. My mother does the shelves and I do the cooler, because my hands are younger, she says, and don't feel the cold.

Twenty-four cans of Coke Zero. Nineteen root beer. I write the numbers on the clipboard in pencil, the way she taught me, so they can be fixed.

Usually she talks the whole time. She tells me which customers owe us money and which ones she has decided to forgive. Tonight she just counts. Once I hear her stop, and when I look down the aisle she is holding a jar of pickles and not doing anything with it.

At midnight she makes us tea on the hot plate behind the register. There is a letter under the register tray, folded in three. I can see the word LEASE through the paper.

My mother was thinking about all the years she had kept the store open, and how tired she was, and how she didn't know how to tell me.

"Are we done?" I ask.

"Almost," she says. She takes the clipboard and looks at my numbers for a long time. "You write your sevens like your father."

Then she erases one of them and writes it again, exactly the same.

I realized then that the store was closing and that my mother was trying to say goodbye to it without telling me, and that she was sad but also proud of me for helping. I felt sad too, but I also felt closer to her than I had in a long time.
(Written for this course, 2026.)

Here are two workshop letters on it. The first is the kind a group produces without a protocol.

Hi Maya! I really liked your story, it was so sad and relatable. The part about the pickles was kind of random though. I think you should make it longer and add more about the dad, because I wanted to know what happened to him. Also maybe the store could get robbed at the end, that would make it more exciting. The ending was good because it explained everything. Great job!!

Count what it gets wrong. "Really liked" and "relatable" are praise too vague to use. It calls the best detail in the story, the pickles, "random". It asks for more about the father and a robbery, which is the reader's story, not Maya's. And it praises the ending for the very thing that weakens it: "it explained everything". It never answers Maya's question, because it never noticed she asked one. Here is a letter written by the protocol:

Dear Maya,

What I think the story is doing: a girl helps her mother count the store's stock for what she slowly realizes is the last time, and her mother says goodbye to the store, and to something about the father, without saying it.

What is working: the numbers. "Twenty-four cans of Coke Zero. Nineteen root beer." Counting is exactly the right job for a story about something ending, because the whole store is being turned into a list. The pencil, "so they can be fixed", plants your ending, and the jar of pickles is where I first knew something was wrong: she is "holding a jar of pickles and not doing anything with it." I would not change a word of that sentence. LEASE showing through the folded paper is the right amount of information.

Your question was whether the ending works. For me the story ends on "Then she erases one of them and writes it again, exactly the same." That sentence does everything the last paragraph says, and does it better, because I got to understand it myself. When the last paragraph told me she was sad but proud, I felt the story let go of me. Would the story lose anything if it stopped one paragraph earlier?

A neutral question: in the paragraph that begins "My mother was thinking", how does the narrator know what her mother is thinking? Everywhere else she knows only what she can see, and I think that is part of why the pickles work.

Small notes are on the manuscript, including two places where the present tense slips into the past.

Thank you for letting us read this. I would like to read the next draft.

Sam

Every part of the protocol is visible. The letter opens by saying what the story is doing, so Maya can check it against what she meant. It quotes what works, and says why each line works. It answers her question directly, and answers it as a reader's experience ("I felt the story let go of me") followed by a question, not a command. It raises the second issue, the slip into the mother's thoughts that the narrator cannot know, as a neutral question, and the question itself teaches the point about point of view from Lesson 8. The small things go on the manuscript. And the letter does not tell Maya what her story should be about.

Key idea: a good workshop letter tells a writer how the piece reads, where it is strongest and where it loses its hold. It does not tell the writer what to write instead.

Change one input: the same story, a different question

Now suppose Maya had handed in the same pages with a different note: "Final draft. It goes to the school magazine on Friday. I only want line edits." The protocol does not change, but its result does. A first draft needs to know whether the story is there, and nobody should waste its writer's time on commas that are about to be rewritten. A piece due Friday needs the opposite. Readers should not propose a new plot, a longer version or a different ending three days before a deadline; they should give the smallest changes with the biggest effect. Sam's second letter, to the Friday version, would be short: cut the paragraph about the mother's thoughts, the only place the point of view breaks; fix the two tense slips; and consider stopping on "exactly the same", which is a cut, not a rewrite, and can be done by Friday. Same story, same reader, different letter, because the writer asked a different question.

How to hear it

Receiving a workshop is a skill, and it is the half nobody teaches. Seven rules, most of them learned the hard way:

1. Ask your question first. Readers will answer the question you ask. If you ask none, they will answer the one they find easiest.
2. Write everything down, especially what you disagree with. You will not remember it accurately, and the note that annoys you today is often the one you need in a week.
3. Do not defend or explain. That is what the gag rule was for. If you have to explain what a scene means, the scene has not yet done its job, and the explanation will not be printed beside it in the magazine.
4. Sort locations from fixes. When several readers stumble at the same place, the place has a problem, even if every suggested fix is wrong. Readers are good at telling you where they lost the thread and much less reliable at telling you how to mend it.
5. Check what you heard. If a comment seems unfair, ask what the reader meant before deciding. Gorky heard "coarseness"; Chekhov had written "restraint".
6. Wait a day. Revise from your notes tomorrow, not tonight.
7. Decide for yourself. It is your piece. Take the feedback that makes it more fully the thing it is trying to be, and leave the rest.

Common misconceptions

• "Kind feedback means only praise." Chekhov was generous and still named the defect plainly, with examples. Specific praise is what makes criticism believable; praise alone gives the writer nothing to do.
• "The workshop's job is to fix the story." Its job is to show the writer how the story reads. The writer does the fixing, which is why the protocol keeps the group from rewriting it.
• "If the readers disagree, the feedback is useless." Disagreement about how to fix a passage is normal. Agreement about where the trouble is, is the strongest evidence a writer can get.
• "A good reader tells the writer how they would have written it." That is the robbery ending. Respond to the story in front of you.

Pulling it together

Chekhov's letter to Gorky shows the shape of a good response: specific praise, one defect named and located down to the words, an honest admission that taste is involved, and, a month later, a patient correction when the criticism was misheard. Workshops add rules to protect that shape. The Iowa model keeps the writer silent so they listen; the Milford method gives everyone, the author last, the same uninterrupted time; Lerman's Critical Response Process puts meaning before questions and questions before opinions, and asks permission for opinions. This course's protocol starts from the writer's question and stage, says what the piece is doing, quotes what works, asks neutral questions, and keeps small notes on the page. Hearing feedback well means asking first, writing it all down, not defending, trusting agreement about where more than advice about how, and deciding for yourself.

Key idea: the most useful sentence in any workshop letter is the reader's honest account of what the piece is doing. Everything else follows from comparing it with what you meant.

Sources

1. Chekhov, A. (1898-1899). Letters to Maxim Gorky, 3 December 1898 and 3 January 1899. In Letters of Anton Chekhov to his family and friends (C. Garnett, Trans.). Project Gutenberg. gutenberg.org
2. Lerman, L. (n.d.). Critical Response Process. Liz Lerman. lizlerman.com
3. Wikipedia contributors. (2026). Writers workshop (activity). Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org
4. Wikipedia contributors. (2026). Milford Writer's Workshop. Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org

A submission that was never going to work

Here is an email of the kind that editors of student magazines receive every week. It was written for this lesson, but every mistake in it is common.

Subject: SUBMISSION!!!

Dear Sir or Madam,

My name is Riley Chen and I am a 16 year old writer from Lincoln High School in Springfield. I have been writing since I was six and my English teacher says I am the best writer she has ever had. Attached is my story "The Garden," which is about a girl who learns an important lesson about slowing down and appreciating family from her grandmother before she dies. It will make you cry. I have also sent it to five other magazines so please let me know quickly. If you don't like it please tell me what's wrong with it.

Thanks!!
Riley
(followed by a home address and a phone number)

The attachment was a PDF of the story's first draft, not its third, in a decorative script font at 10 points, single-spaced and fully justified, with a photograph of tomato plants on the first page and the title in green. Riley sent it in March, by email, to six places. One of them was the Kenyon Review's prize for young writers. Every one of the six declined it or never answered, and Riley decided he was not a real writer.

Nothing in this story proves that Riley cannot write. Everything in it proves he did not know how submission works. This lesson debugs his submission one failure at a time, and then puts together the thing he should have started with: a portfolio.

Write first: your two best pieces

Take seven minutes. Look back over everything you have written for this course and list the two pieces you would most want a stranger to read. For each, write its genre, its length in words (let your word processor count), and one sentence on what it does best. Then write one sentence about each piece's biggest remaining weakness. Keep the list; the activity builds your portfolio from it.

Failure one: the wrong venue

Here is what the Kenyon Review's page says about its Patricia Grodd Poetry Prize for Young Writers, when this course checked it in September 2026: it is an annual contest for poets who are sophomores and juniors in high school; it takes one unpublished poem per person; submissions are open from November 1 to November 30; it charges no entry fee; and it asks entrants not to send the same poem to any other magazine or contest at the same time. Riley sent a story, not a poem, in March, not November, by email instead of through the contest's online form, while the story was out at five other places. He broke four rules before anyone read a word.

The fix is dull and absolute: read the venue's own page before you send anything, and send only what it asks for, when it asks for it. Here are six venues that take work from teenagers. Each page was opened and read for this course on 24 September 2026, and the details below are what those pages said on that date.

Read that table as a snapshot, not a rulebook. Venues change, and they change without telling you. Teen Ink's own About page says its ownership "has changed hands a few times". When this course checked it, the Grodd Prize page described the rules for November 2025, though the contest runs every year. Polyphony closes a window early when it reaches two hundred submissions. Fees rise, deadlines move, and magazines close. Before every submission, open the venue's page yourself, read the whole of its guidelines, and write down the date you read them.

Notice also how differently the six treat simultaneous submission, which means sending the same piece to more than one place at once. Adroit and Polyphony allow it if you tell them; the Grodd Prize forbids it. And notice Teen Ink's last column. It lets you publish elsewhere, but a poem posted on a public website has been published, and the Grodd Prize, like many magazines, considers only unpublished work. Decide where a piece is going before you post it anywhere.

Failure two: the manuscript

Most magazines expect what is called standard manuscript format, and the most widely used guide to it is by the writer William Shunn. His current version asks for a plain white page with no decoration; one-inch margins; black type, 12 points, in a standard font such as Times New Roman; the writer's contact details in the upper-left corner of the first page and an approximate word count, rounded to the nearest hundred, in the upper right; the title a third to halfway down the page, centered, with the byline below it; the story double-spaced, left-aligned with a ragged right edge, each paragraph indented half an inch with no blank lines between paragraphs; italics for emphasis; a centered # for a scene break; and on every page after the first, a header in the upper right with your surname, a keyword from the title and the page number. Riley's first page broke almost every one of these. Here is what it should have looked like:

Riley Chen                                    about 1,500 words
riley.chen@example.com




                          The Garden

                       by Riley Chen


     The tomatoes came up the summer after Nana stopped
coming outside. Nobody had planted them. They came up
anyway, in the cracks by the back steps, where she used
to knock the dirt off her boots.

(Pages after the first carry the header "Chen / Garden / 2", and so on. Shunn's own sample includes a street address and phone number too; see the note on safety below.)

Then comes the rule that overrides every other: when a venue's guidelines differ from the standard, follow the venue. Shunn says so himself. Polyphony Lit, for example, judges work blind, so it asks you not to put your name on the piece at all; it wants Word or RTF files, 12-point Times, and margins of 1.25 inches at the sides. Adroit asks for poems of up to ten pages single-spaced. A venue that wants no name on the manuscript and gets one may simply decline it.

A note on safety. Shunn himself says you may leave out any contact information you feel unsafe giving. Teen Ink asks writers not to include last names, school names or towns in the work itself. The Scholastic Awards ask for a parent or guardian's name and email when you register. Unless a venue you trust requires more, a name and an email address are enough, and a parent or guardian should know where your work is going.

Failure three: the cover letter

A cover letter is not a sales pitch. It is a short, polite note that tells the editor what is attached and anything they need to know, and then gets out of the way so the work can speak. Go through Riley's sentence by sentence:

• "Dear Sir or Madam" sounds like a form. "Dear Editors" is standard; use a name if the guidelines give one.
• His age is useful to a teen venue. His school and town are not, and Teen Ink's rule about leaving them out is a good habit everywhere.
• "My English teacher says I am the best writer she has ever had" asks the editor to trust someone else's judgment over their own. Cut it.
• "Which is about a girl who learns an important lesson" summarizes the plot, and summarizes it as a moral. Never summarize. The story will tell the editor what it is about.
• "It will make you cry" tells the editor how to feel, which is the one thing a story has to earn by itself.
• "I have also sent it to five other magazines" is honest, which is good, but it is only acceptable where simultaneous submission is allowed, and "so please let me know quickly" puts pressure on people who read hundreds of pieces for free.
• "If you don't like it please tell me what's wrong with it" asks for work most venues cannot do. Choose a venue such as Polyphony, which gives feedback on its general submissions, if feedback is what you want.

Here is the letter he should have sent, for the same story, to a venue whose rules it meets:

Dear Editors,

Please consider my short story "The Garden" (about 1,500 words) for Polyphony Lit's Volume 22 general submissions. I am sixteen and a junior in high school, and this would be my first publication.

The story is also under consideration elsewhere. I will let you know at once if it is accepted.

Thank you for reading student work.

Riley Chen

Five sentences: the title and length, the venue and call, one line about the writer, the simultaneous submission stated plainly, and thanks. That is the whole job.

So what?: an editor forms a first impression from the cover letter and the first page before reading a single sentence of the story. Make both so plain that the only thing left to notice is the writing.

Failure four: reading the rejection

Suppose Riley had done everything right and still received this: "Thank you for sending us 'The Garden.' We read it with interest, but it isn't right for us at this time. We wish you the best in placing it elsewhere." He read it as a verdict on his talent. It is not. A form rejection says one thing only: this piece was not chosen, this time, by these readers. It does not say why, and it may have nothing to do with quality: the issue may already be full, the piece may be too like one they took last month, or the editors may simply prefer something else. Consider the numbers. Teen Ink's own page says it receives over 100,000 submissions a year. The Adroit Prizes go to two students each year, and the Grodd Prize has one winner. Most of what is sent to a selective venue is declined, including work by writers who go on to publish often.

Responses come in rough tiers, and it helps to know them. A plain form rejection tells you nothing. A form rejection with an added line, such as "we'd be glad to see more of your work", is a real signal: someone noticed you. A personal note from an editor, even one sentence, is rarer still and worth keeping. Feedback, such as the notes Polyphony gives on its general submissions, is a gift: read it the way the last lesson taught you to read a workshop letter. And an acceptance is an acceptance: say thank you, and withdraw the piece everywhere else the same day.

What to do after a rejection is simple and unglamorous. Do not write back to argue or explain. Log the response. Send the piece to the next venue on your list within a week. Revise only if several responses, or a personal note, point to the same problem. And keep writing new work, because the writer with ten pieces in circulation takes each rejection far more lightly than the writer with one. A log can be a table as simple as this:

Failure five: the yes that is a trap

One kind of response feels like success and is not. An online "contest" accepts your poem, praises it warmly, and offers to sell you the handsome anthology it will appear in, or charges a fee to publish it. A publisher that is paid by its authors is called a vanity press; it charges in advance and does little for the work, and some such schemes accept nearly everyone because their customers are the writers. Real venues choose, and they do not charge you to be published. Some legitimate contests do charge entry fees, as the table shows, and every paid one there offers a waiver; several excellent venues charge nothing at all. When you are unsure about an offer, look it up on Writer Beware, a watchdog founded in 1998 and sponsored by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association, and read what rights you are giving. Teen Ink, for instance, says openly that it may edit your writing and publish its edited version without asking you first. That is a fair rule to accept, as long as you know it before you submit.

Building the portfolio

Riley's real mistake came before any of the five failures: he sent out one first draft to six places. What he needed first was a portfolio, a small, finished body of work he could choose from. For this course, a portfolio is three to five pieces that show your range, in at least two genres, each at its best revised draft and each in standard manuscript format, with a table of contents and a one-page introduction. The introduction is not a list of compliments to yourself. It says, for each piece, what it is trying to do and what revising it taught you, in the plain voice of the cover letter. Some venues ask for exactly this: the Scholastic Awards have a Writing Portfolio category for graduating seniors. For everyone else, the portfolio is the shelf you submit from. When one piece comes back, another is ready to go out.

Common misconceptions

• "A great story will be accepted wherever it's sent, however it looks." The Grodd Prize would decline a masterpiece of fiction, because it takes poems. Fit and format come before quality can even be considered.
• "A rejection means the writing is bad." A form rejection means the piece was not chosen. With more than 100,000 submissions a year at one teen venue alone, most good work is declined somewhere first.
• "The cover letter is where you sell the story." The cover letter is logistics. A summary, a teacher's praise or a promise of tears makes an editor less likely to read with an open mind.
• "Paying to be published is how young writers get started." It is how vanity schemes make money. Legitimate venues choose work and do not charge to publish it, and the good contests that charge entry fees offer waivers.

What to remember

Debug a submission in order. First the venue: read its page, on the day you submit, and send only what it takes, when it takes it, by the method it asks, under its rules on simultaneous submission, and record the date you checked, because venues change. Then the manuscript: standard format, 12-point type, double-spaced, contact details and word count on page one, header after, unless the venue says otherwise, in which case follow the venue. Then the cover letter: title, length, venue, one line about you, simultaneous submission if any, thanks. Then the response: a form rejection says only that the piece was not chosen; log it and send the piece out again. Keep your contact information to what is needed, never pay to be published, and build a portfolio of revised pieces so that there is always something ready to send.

So what?: the writers who get published are rarely the ones who never hear no. They are the ones who, the week after a no, send the piece out again.

Sources

1. Shunn, W. (2026). Proper manuscript format: Modern edition (last updated 13 July 2026). shunn.net
2. Alliance for Young Artists & Writers. (2026). How to enter. Scholastic Art & Writing Awards. Retrieved 24 September 2026. artandwriting.org
3. The Adroit Journal. (2026). The Adroit Prizes for Poetry & Prose. Retrieved 24 September 2026. theadroitjournal.org
4. Polyphony Lit. (2026). Submission guidelines. Retrieved 24 September 2026. polyphonylit.org
5. The Kenyon Review. (2026). Patricia Grodd Poetry Prize for Young Writers. Retrieved 24 September 2026. kenyonreview.org