CEP817
Assignment 1: 55 Fiction Story
Barbara Bloemers
August 30, 2006
Doggone It!
“This is stupid. How does the professor expect
me to do this?” Oliver said to his mother the morning
his project was due.
“Quit procrastinating,” she said to him.
“But I don’t know how to wire a story in just
fifty-five words,” he whined returning to the dog bone
he was clutching in his paws.
Tracking of how you went about writing the story.
First I did a Google word search of “55 fiction” then visited various sites and read sample stories and award-winning stories.
How you came up with the idea.
After reading numerous stories, I realized that I needed some kind of a twist to the story. My dog Oliver, a Bearded Collie, seemed like a likely subject.
How your thoughts went
Since the main character, Oliver, acts as if he talks and is quite comical, I thought the I’d let him try solving my inspiration problem ofwriting a story.
What problems did you face?
Lack of creativity. The sample stories I read seemed as though they took a lot of thought and had some kind of hidden meaning.
When did you see a solution?
Never really saw a solution until I began writing the story and was amazed at how quickly 55 words were used up.
How did one idea lead to another?
I wanted to do something really creative, clever and cute. My mind just went from one idea to another.
What did the entire process feel like?
Thinking about a theme was the most difficult. I was really having “writers block”. Actually the writing came easier than developing a theme. I did have to go back and try to insert some intellectual sounding adjectives but found that I didn’t have much wiggle room with the low word count.
In the back of my mind I kept wondering what this assignment had to do with the class on technology.
Later in the day when I came back to the computer to work on this further, I did a Google Scholar search and got the 37 page paper on:
Designing learning from day one: A first day activity to foster design thinking about educational … - group of 3 »
S Author - punya.educ.msu.edu
... writing, could be the 55Fiction Assignment. In this assignment students are
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