Find a Container and Fill It—Using Found Forms to Hold Your Story Idea

Find a Container and Fill It—Using Found Forms to Hold Your Story IdeaCreating a short story inside a pre existing written form is a playful and powerful strategy for structuring an original short story. By examining stories in the form of a Multiple choice assignment, a How to Guide, a Workplace Orientation, a List, a Field Guide, a Drinking Game, a Joke and a Museum Audio Guide, writers will learn how best to make use of a valuable tool in their toolbox. Well draw on excerpts of stories by Margaret Atwood, Lorrie

Creating a short story inside a pre-existing written form is a playful and powerful strategy for structuring an original short story. By examining stories in the form of a Multiple-choice-assignment, a How-to Guide, a Workplace Orientation, a List, a Field Guide, a Drinking Game, a Joke and a Museum Audio Guide, writers will learn how best to make use of a valuable tool in their toolbox. We’ll draw on excerpts of stories by Margaret Atwood, Lorrie Moore, Daniel Orozco, Jamaica Kincaid, Sofia Samatar and Kristiana Kahakauwila to explore ways borrowed forms can provide just the right shape to approach what it is we are trying to say. Useful both for generating new material and for revising older work. 

Instructor: Lynn Schmeidler's fiction has appeared in Conjunctions, Georgia Review, KR Online, the Southern Review, and other publications, and she won the 2023 BOMB Fiction Contest for her short story "InventEd." She has been awarded residencies at Vermont Studio Center and Virginia Center for Creative Arts. She is the author of the poetry book History of Gone and two poetry chapbooks, Wrack Lines and Curiouser & Curiouser. She lives in the Hudson Valley. Follow her on Facebook and Instagram.