Please be sure that you have read the short story Tickits by Paul Milenski before watching this video. One way to read like a writer involves identifying the traditional elements found in that form or genre, and then examining how that particular writer makes use of those elements. We'll use this approach of genre study or genre awareness when looking at the short story tickets. This being a short story, that genre is fiction. We might start by asking students, what do you expect to find when you read a short story? Characters, certainly. Usually those characters are human and we can pick out one of them as the main character. These would be general expectations and on one value here is that we can compare the actual story to the expectations. A given story might have more than one main character, for instance, or its characters might not be human. We expect plot or event. We expect something to happen. Usually there are a series of events that are connected in some causal way that build toward something. We can also look at this element in terms of structure, how the story unfolds. Stories have settings. They have a particular point of view. They have voice and style, they have pace. They use a variety of techniques to present the material, narration, description, dialogue, exposition, and internal. Almost all stories have one or more scenes, a moment or moments grounded in a particular time and place in which time moves forward. In fact, you might say that's scene is the core of fiction, just as image might be called the core of poetry. Stories also have tension. Many stories have character change, but some do not, and so one way to think of where a story builds to, is to think in terms of a moment of illumination. That moment of illumination could come on the part of a character, or it could come on the part of the reader or both. The difference here is that the character doesn't have to change for it to be a story. There are many stories where the reader understands more than the main character does about what has happened for its effect. In Tickits, there are three characters of significance. Obviously, Toby Heckler is one, and Toby is the main character, and another character is officer McVee, and then the final character, we have to go all the way down here, is Toby's mother. Toby is clearly the main character, and it's interesting to think about what Toby is like, how you might picture him. Some students might say the Toby is a child, while others might suggest that he's not a child, but he's childlike. This is a great opportunity to help students learn to read the text and see what the text gives them. Why do you think that? Is the question here. What in the text leads you to conclude that? Some of the evidence to suggest that Toby is childlike, but not a child, we're told he writes in a childish looking hand. Officer McVee, this would be McVee, talks to Toby in a way that you wouldn't expect him to talk to a child. In fact, no one seems concerned that Toby is out on his own. If he were 11 or 12, there might be that concern. There's an interesting mixture in the story of a hometown feel, but not a small-town feel. My guess is that, it's set in a smallish city. But that's not made completely clear. What matters most is what things in the story students point to as backing up their conclusion. If you think it's a small town, what is it in the story that makes you think that? Point of view is an important element in fiction. Depending on how experienced your students are in point of view, you could use a term like third person limited point of view, but it's not necessary to get that technical. The key is that we seem to follow Toby, and we aren't told the thoughts or perspectives of anyone else in the story. However, we never really get inside Toby's head either. We watch him from the outside through what he says and does and how others treat him. The point of view is focused on Toby, but it's not intimate. We never really know what Toby is thinking beyond what he's writing on his tickits. We can only infer by those words and his deeds. Structure is another element to look at. Structure can involve a number of things. How much time the story covers, where it starts and ends, how it moves. This story is a linear narrative in that it starts at one point in time, right here. It moves steadily forward. We start in the middle of things in the sense that this doesn't seem to be the first Tickit that Toby has ever written, and it's probably not even the first one that he's written that day. We follow him for anywhere from an hour, a half hour to several hours, going through here, through the afternoon to where he ends up at home. The story seems to unfold nearly all in real-time in a sense, because we follow Toby so closely through time. But there's one paragraph that begins, "Before the rains came," that seems to move forward more quickly, and in this paragraph and the next two, we don't really know how much time passes. Could be a few minutes, could be an hour or more. So "before the rains came," but we don't know how long between that and when the rains come. He walks into the YMCA and goes on here, but we don't know how long that takes, we don't know where those things are located to each other, and then he gets back to Main and South, again by the time, but we don't know how much time is there. In this particular part of the story, time speeds up. This connects to the element of pacing. The story moves at a fairly even pace, right up to that paragraph before the rain came. Then time moves forward quickly for a couple of paragraphs before it returns to it's previous pace, when he finally gets home. A good question here is, why? Why might the author have wanted those sped up paragraphs? A simple answer would be that he wanted to give a sense of the passage of time, that Toby had been out a while, but there wasn't enough of consequence happening during that period for him to show it all step-by-step, so he summarizes. There are a number of other techniques that might be discussed. Most stories have dialogue, for instance, but in this story, the only one who has dialog is Officer McVee, and then Toby's mother. Toby never speaks. Although again, you might say and your students might say that he does speak through his Tickits. The other key element to look at in the story is the style of the writing itself. There's a certain clipped style to the probes, often caused by lack of conjunctions. Note in the second paragraph, both the first and the second sentence contain a series of actions. "As Toby passed Thom McAn, he looked in the window, caught the reflection of his sneakers, looked down at them, moved his toes inside. He straightened the pen on his ear, patted the pad of yellow paper in his pocket, moved along." These are both lists, listing a series of things that he does, and usually, at the end of a list before you get to that last action, you put in the conjunction, I can't write very well with this, and but there's no conjunction. He doesn't say, Toby past Thom McAn and moved his toes inside; there's no end. Now, because this is a published story, we could assume that this style was used intentionally by the author. The question would be, why? What effect does he get by writing it in this way? This is one way to help students learn to read a text closely and to read like a writer, and also teach some of the main elements of the genre at the same time. Later on when looking at student's own writing, you might have occasion to remind them of that paragraph near the middle of tickits, where the author moves time forward quickly, for instance. That might be a technique that would be a benefit of students too slow moving story. This approach can also be helpful when looking at the ways that traditional elements might be stretched or even upended. Look at stories that purposely go against some of the more accepted conventions as a way of learning not just what those conventions are, but the idea that if you have good reasons, boundaries can be broken. Finally, although we're doing this with fiction, you can use this approach of genre awareness with any type of writing. You want to look at what are the conventions of the form that you're studying, and then look at the particular writing to see how that writing deals with those conventions.
