Craig's Response to Newman

Reading Response

Short Story Writing by Jenny Newman

Jenny Newman outlines how novices can develop short stories in her chapter “Short Story Writing” in The Writer’s Workbook. Newman guides readers on how to create characters, points of view, dialogue, plot, beginning and ending. She breaks down each section to give simple tips on these characteristics to make a successful short story.

She recommends to invent characters that are divergent from ordinary life. As Albert Camus called “defamiliarisation, or making ordinary people seem strange. When develop a character Newman stresses being precise. I agree completely with her that key minimal phrase can reveal the identity of a character better than a long drawn out description. You should guide the reader in imagining the character.

Newman proposes several options for point of view of a character-narrator. She suggests plainly using a character or a narrator with limited or omniscient views to guide the story. Ernest Hemingway was great at using his main character, Thomas Hudson, in Islands in the Stream as the first person narrator. I like the use of a narrator that has a limited point of view too, thus making all characters and narrator seem more human and connect better with reader.

Newman’s view on plot development is her most open-ended and complex suggestion on short story writing. As she states, contemporary short stories are a lot more experimental in plot development than they have been in the past. She suggests using a variety of authors that appeal to the new writer to provide examples of how to create an interesting plot. I am glad she is more open to divergent solutions in develop plots than she is in the rest of her guidance of short story writing.

I think Newman tries to overly simplify the process of creating a contemporary short story. I agree that short stories should not be complex investigations of characters or plot, but I think that experimental ideas in development of characters, narrator, plot and points of view can be refreshing from the formulaic concepts of creating short stories.