Thursday, April 05, 2007

death! it's the thing to do!

I finished another round of conferences with my Creative Writing students this week. This time it was on their short stories. I would estimate that 90% of the stories involved some type of death. For example, death by:

  • blunt force trauma with crow bar, wielded by a suddenly-psychotic boyfriend
  • rare lung disease
  • car crash right before the guy is going to propose to the girl
  • another car crash, kills parents
  • cannibals
  • electric chair
  • good old-fashioned murder with a gun
  • suicide
  • alien attack
  • IED in Iraq
  • lightning

Is there nothing else to write about?

8 comments:

SGJ said...

but isn't death, considered as a fundamental datum, the means by which the taken-for-granted mundanity of the everyday may be transcended in the direction of, and so on?

I know what you mean, but I would take those any day over the happy happy prom queen story . . .

sarah said...

"We don't like it."

I suppose, but the remaining 10% were the happy happy prom queen ones. For example, in one story, the guy and girl meet and have a wonderful relationship. the end.
"what's the conflict or tension in the story?" I asked the student who wrote it.
She said, "well, I thought it was in that scene where his shirt was dirty from the spilled coffee?"

Bridget said...

Comforting or not, this sounds suspiciously like my middle school stories--only the death was by more ridiculous means like aliens and Tom Cruise suddenly showing up in a bedroom and making the hero eat bananas until he dies. My kids have a weird obsession with Tom Cruise.

Gabriel Florit said...

bonnie prince billy was right. death is what it's all about.

SGJ said...

Yes, the coffee stains can lead to high drama. I agree about the death. I am sorry. I think the problem is it's never real. It's all stylized and comes from movies, not from life, the same as the happy stuff. A girl is supposed to be mad at a coffee stain, so she is . . . I don't know. That's depressing. The death comes from movies, the love comes from sitcoms. Perhaps serve Crown Royal during the in-class writing and ask them to write with their eyes closed and their ears plugged?

Unknown said...

Hmm, have you seen grind house yet? Speaking of odd ways to die.

Andrea said...

I've noticed the same thing in 8th grade creative writing. I guess some things never change.

Margaret said...

my grade 10 girls are writing about infidelity. And suicide. Sigh.