⚡Day 4. Beyond anecdotes.
Crowd-pleasers that resonate.
A great flash essay often comes to life through some element of surprise. This week, we’re focusing on exercises that will help us find unlikely details and fresh new ways of seeing our world. Monday focused on getting outside ourselves; Tuesday was all about weird discoveries; and yesterday we considered the gap between expectations and reality.
Today, we’re turning an anecdote into a story. Most of us have go-to crowd-pleasers we’ve told more than once because they reliably make listeners laugh or gasp or squirm. (For example, maybe you have a great story about the weirdest thing you ever found!) These are often anecdotes: that is, the surprise is kind of the whole point.
But there’s a deeper, more resonant and meaningful kind of surprise that writers can tap into, which can transform a mere anecdote into a proper story with unexpected power and nuance. For example,“The Muscle for Escape” by Jessica Handler and“Parable” by Matthew Harkins are both stories about the act of recounting specific anecdotes that become something more profound.
PROMPT #4
Tell your go-to “best” story.
Start off by telling it the way you’d tell it to a friend or a group of friends. As you free-write, consider the things you don’t usually include in the story: are there details you leave out because they seem too complicated or irrelevant, or places where you stretch the truth for the sake of the story? What would it feel like to add those back in? Where might the story take you, and what might it become? Write for 15-20 minutes.
Share: The first ~100 words of your story.
I never met my namesake, my uncle. He was Frank Tomkeyes Scott. I am named Frances Tomkeyes Scott. On a downtown shopping trip, his mother, my grandmother turned to witness her two-year-old son running into the main street. The trolley car didn’t have time to stop when the driver saw him on the tracks. The newspaper article describes the incident in gruesome detail. He was the first of my grandmother’s four sons to die tragically. Two died fighting in World War II. My father her only son who lived until her death. My father and I never talked about what it was like for him to be the surviving son while grieving his brothers.
The first paragraph of a ghost story anecdote:
I was returning home very late, closer to dawn than dusk. In memory the streetlights have halos, a street lined with angels, lighting my walk home. The houses in Stockbridge are set far apart, wide and deep pockets that could contain anything in their darkness. If I were a believer in the supernatural, I could imagine monsters, ghosts, werewolves lurking, waiting to pounce, but I’m basically a practical woman. At the young age of 22, I was filled with possibilities, as well as alcohol, and a bit of cocaine, but practical, nonetheless. I loved the possibilities the world presented, the ideas to be explored, the mysteries yet unacknowledged, the things yet uncreated by my hands and mind.