This post is the tenth and final in the Story Course series. If you just subscribed or just discovered this post, please start with the first post.
We’ve arrived at the end of Story Course. I have a few more thoughts I’d like to share about close reading, and be sure to read (or skip) to the end for your “Thanks for sticking with me” gift.
In the methodology I’ve prescribed for this course, we’ve focused on our reactions to and our interactions with the story. Specifically, we’ve returned regularly to these questions:
At this point in the story, what do you feel?
What have you noticed?
What do you wonder about?
What do you think will happen next?
I want to mention again that I learned/lifted this approach from George Saunders, and I highly recommend you read his book A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, which is his course on close reading through some masterful Russian short stories. Pick up a copy at your local bookstore (use Indiebound.org to find a local shop, or order online from Bookshop.org while supporting a local shop).
This isn’t the only way, of course, to study a story. For your future adventures as a reader, here are some other ways you can approach a story.
For a couple of years I facilitated a writing workshop for a small group of fellow writers. One of the participants in that group always asked “What is the project of this story?” and she followed this question with “Was the project successful?” I found this a productive line of inquiry, and you can apply all of your close reading skills to try to answer it.
In my book discussion groups, a lot of the participants like to talk about the writer — what’s their age, sex, and background, how much of the story is autobiographical, what was the cultural or political environment within which the writer lived and created the work. Honestly, this isn’t my favorite approach to studying fiction. Yes, it can generate a lot of conversation in your book group, and for books that are overtly political or deeply rooted in the culture of their time — Animal Farm, Huck Finn, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, for example — this examination of external influences can be insightful. Often, however, it feels to me more like gossip and idle speculation than an objective study of the text. That’s admittedly a personal preference. If you find value in this method, then by all means use it to enrich your understanding of the fiction you read.
On the other hand, one of my favorite frameworks for studying fiction is to tick through the list of the elements of fiction. In our close reading of Until This Is Over, for example, we’ve considered these elements:
Plot - Freytag’s Pyramid, exposition, rising action, climax, in medias res
Character - Multiple ways of thinking about Teresa and Scotty, including:
Physical description - There’s not much in this story
Dialogue - You can consider this its own element, rather than an aspect of character
Thoughts - None!
Behavior
Point of View - Third-person objective
Mood - We didn’t discuss mood directly, but it’s what we were after when we asked what we were feeling
Theme - “Every person’s true nature is unknowable to others.” Or something like that.
In addition to those elements of fiction that we considered in this Story Course, there are others that are present and relevant to varying degrees in most fiction (they’re in Until This Is Over, too, but we didn’t talk about them much). Spend some time thinking about these when you read:
Setting - The time and place in which the story occurs
Style
Diction
Syntax
Symbolism
Metaphor
And then we came to the end.
I hope you enjoyed this Story Course and the story itself. Early on I acknowledged — warned — that close reading, especially bit by bit, is an unnatural way to read a story, and there’s no denying it can diminish the pure pleasure of simply settling into your comfortable chair with a cappuccino or cup of cocoa and losing yourself in a story.
Maybe we can snatch back some of that joy on a second reading, so here are my gifts to you: a link to the full story, uninterrupted, as well as a recording of me reading a slightly abridged version of this story for a live audience.
Thanks again for your kind attention and insightful comments throughout the course.