The biggest mistake that students make when writing a short story is to select a conflict that is too big to reasonably solve in 3-5 pages. They always want to write epic battles between good and evil, or long romances that cover everything from meeting as 8th-grade sweethearts through 28 year old honeymooners. They want to write about the 50 years of horror that caused a haunted house to be infamous. Today, we'll start with a Peardeck-enhanced slideshow that will offer writing samples that are appropriately developed, versus writing samples that are underdeveloped, and also conflict options that are too big, too small, and just "write." Hahaha. Writing pun intended. Afterwards, students will be asked to submit an idea for a conflict they want to solve during their short story. 

This week is all about the plot! Students today will use what we call a plot structure "mix-n-match" tool to build some possible story ideas and to reaffirm the importance of a story centering around a strong, central conflict. Once they've built some stories, they'll jump over to Jamboard, where they'll organize a series of post-it notes onto a plot structure chart to practice the prerequisite skills necessary before writing a story of their own.

Over the last few short story units, I've realized that writing down our story plans on our plot structure charts caused some problems, because students wanted to copy and paste those ideas into a story like they could with our essay connection tools.  

Today, students will learn how to weaponize their settings. Everyone loves starting stories with something like, "it was midnight in a graveyard," which gives us some indication about what will happen, but there are much more effective ways to use setting by interconnecting it to all the other elements of effective literature. Students will look at some examples, non-examples, and they'll brainstorm some ways that they can use setting in their new short story. 

If there's one thing missing from student stories, it's suspense, and suspense usually happens one way: purposeful repetition. Whether that repetition is a series of icy turns, waiting for the car to slip off the road, or a series of try out exercises, waiting to see if you make the team, suspense, and manipulating your audience's questions, all comes down to managing just the right amount of purposeful repetition. Today, students will read about purposeful repetition, and look at a series of advice, before creating some examples and non examples of effective suspense through purposeful repetition. 

Students tend to simplify rising action into just WHAT happens in the story, without realizing that the rising action can be the vehicle for setting, and characterization, and conflict, and even love. Today, we'll look at how to merge the necessary events that occur during the rising action of a story, with the concept of using "showing" details versus "telling" details. 

Dramatic irony is awesome. Basically, it's when the audience keeps track of which characters know what, and more importantly, which characters don't know. Today, we'll learn how to build in drama and suspense by manipulating the flow of knowledge between characters and audience. As with all things literary, there are effective and ineffective ways to utilize dramatic irony in a story. Today, we'll learn to use the former, while avoiding the latter. 

During today's lesson, we're going to work on the exact mechanics of punctuating dialogue. It's just the, "you have to know these facts," lesson before we practice applying the rules to actual dialogue. It shouldn't take long, just a quick Slides presentation sharing the information, and then a quick Forms assignment to ensure students read the Slides and learned the dialogue rules.  

Today, we'll take the rules we learned yesterday and apply them to actual dialogue. Using the form to the right, students will read dialogue, and work through a series of scaffolded activities to learn how the rules learned yesterday fit into actual dialogue you might read in an actual story. 

Appropriately-punctuated dialogue is just the first step towards effectively incorporating dialogue into a story. Effective dialogue tags are the next step. In this lesson, we'll look at a Slides presentation about how to write effective dialogue tags, and then use another Form to submit some effective dialogue tags of our own. I've allowed two days for this lesson because it will take some time and effort to graduate out of the, "he said," "she said," dialogue tags that students are used to writing.