Randy Nelson Is Building Bridges—and I'm Burning Them

Glimmer Train Stories, #57
Randy F. Nelson; Bruce McAllister; Yosefa Raz; Aaron Gwyn; M. Allen Cunningham; Susan Jackson Rodgers; Paul Mandelbaum; Catherine Ryan Hyde; Silas Zobal; Dalia Azim

So I've spent part of my morning trying to decide whether this is a good way to begin teaching a story writing class:
Charlotte Observer | 12/11/2005 | He wants his short prose to challenge: When Davidson College professor Randy Nelson begins his course on Short Prose Fiction, he gives each student a box of 250 toothpicks, a 2.5-ounce tube of glue and 36 inches of string.
Build a bridge, he tells them. One-foot long. At least two toothpicks high. Sturdy enough to hold a brick.
Ideally, he says, the students will come up with “an elegant solution” -- one that is “simple, beautiful, strong and stunningly original” and uses “every inch of string, every drop of glue and clicks into place with the 250th toothpick.”
And so it is with stories, Nelson tells his classes.
How much of a part of my morning did I spend considering it? Okay, I admit it. Not very long. Because though it's flashy, and looks like something you might want to teach somebody... in the end, a short story is not a bridge... and if it is a bridge, I much prefer the rickety, understated, poorly glued, magical sort of bridges. If I am teaching story writing, I might rather say that I want the story to take you across the river (or creek or lake or pond), but I might just as easily want the reader to wallow through the muck, or fight against the current, as I want them to travel safely across a bridge. I think what I'm trying to say is that short story writing ain't engineering. I admit, I don't know much else about Mr. Nelson's class, so I'm not actually being critical of him or his teaching methods... just hoping nobody reads this and thinks that perfect bridgebuilding is the be-all metaphor of the short story. This kind of lazy thinking is what ends up making story writing workshops so incredibly boring... and ends up making them churn out well-girdered but ultimately tedious fiction--oversimplification. Stories can be messy and still be amazing. And when they are, I'm always grateful. What think you? Which sort of story do you prefer? The messy or the tidy? Do you want to feel as if your bridge is invisible or rickety or invisible?

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