Today is Friday! That used to seem a lot more significant to me when I "worked for a living." Of course, now I still work, but the work is private until some editor decides it's worthy of publication. Last night we had Week 5 of Short Story I. This class has been worthwhile from the theoretical standpoint, but has been a lot less fun overall than the "Writing the Horror Story" class. It's not Nancy's fault--she puts a lot of effort into making the class work. But the students, for the most part, seem to be a lot less passionate about their work, and it shows in the kinds of stories they turn in. Mostly, these are introspective, pseudo-memoirs, of the dry, literary sort.

For example, there's the little old Jewish lady whose story starts out, "Sally wondered how she ended up lost on the top of a Greek island." Apparently it's based on a real-life adventure she had in 1968, but the adventure has mostly been stripped from the story. Then there was the one about the mother at a school PTA-type meeting. *yawns* Or the one about the girl whose car was stolen. Or the one by the loudmouthed psychologist in the group, who apparently has a problem with an absentee father (the kid in the story goes wandering around Mexico City by himself and discovers his long-lost dad).

Last night's stories were a bit better. One, called "Boy," centered around a young runaway, who took care of horses on Mr. Dougherty's ranch. It was told in first-person, in a hick dialect of indeterminate origin. Another story was drawn straight from "Wonder Years," about a kid who has to face down a bully. The last one, called "Funeral Homes," was the weakest. All three stories were told in first person, but the "I" of "Homes" was indistinct. We, the readers, never even got to know his name.

My story will be anything but bland and will shake things up a bit. I only hope Nancy doesn't blow the reading! Meanwhile, here's the essay I did on Conrad's "Heart of Darkness" for the class:

Plotting in Conrad's "Heart of Darkness"

"Heart of Darkness" is a novella, and as such has a plot structure a bit more complex than most short stories. The action doesn't boil down to "a single incident that happened once," but it rather an episodic and epic journey from the Nellie on the placid Thames, to Belgium, and deep into the Belgian Congo. The return trip, as traced by Marlow in his frame narrative, proceeds back up the Congo River, through the jungle, to that "Sepulchral City" (Brussels) and back onto the Nellie. Each waypoint incident on this journey into darkness is like an island in the vast and flowing stream of the narrative.

There are aspects to the story's construction that, while hardly innovative, might seem so to a novice reader (or writer). One is the frame narrative, invented by the Arabs, honed by Chaucer and Bocaccio, and used often in contemporary films and novels. Screenwriters call this technique "bookending," where a narrator starts the story in some kind of "present," but reminisces of some past incident, then returns to the "present" at the end of the story. This technique was used in Amadeus, for example.

Each island of narrative in "Heart of Darkness" builds on the tension of the previous one, until Kurtz's climactic "The horror. The horror." A plot diagram of Conrad's story might look more like the "death spiral" of a moth auguring into a candle flame than the classic, if oversimplified, "rising and falling action." The depth of this work has impressed me more and more since I first read it in the 8th grade, and I would take away from it, as a lesson in plotting, not to fear depth and complexity, even when attempting a work of commercial accessibility.