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What My Students Write About: A List

9/24/2016

Tropes Themes Things Stuff

A pile of stories

At the end of Fall Semester 2015 I was reading student creative writing portfolios when I noticed a surge—a spate—of stories about young people getting engaged.

The stories were all pretty much the same—girl and guy out for dinner, then they take a walk around the neighborhood, and then the guy suddenly drops to his knees and offers the girl a ring, and the girl cries. The end. There were six of them out of one class.

I realized I had noticed similar spates of stories over the years, and so I was inspired to start keeping track of what I was reading. Just a simple list of whatever the writer appears to think is important to their story. And—I love it. All of it—all of the stuff my students write about, good or bad or whatever. Some of what I notice is thematic (boring engagment stories), and some of it is just stuff—things—that gets repeated in multiple stories. I’m aware that it’s a highly subjective list, that a different reader might well notice different things, or classify the things differently. Yet I just find the list fascinating and wonderful. I wish I had been keeping records like this for the past 15 years or so…..

Anyway—here is the list, based on approximately 251 stories my students have written this last year….

(Listed as (ranking): (thing) | (number of examples))

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Out of Context Excerpt 11

9/3/2016

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Good gosh. It's September and school is back and I get to work with a bunch of new students, (mostly) all optimistic and cheerful and energetic. So. What better way to combat their youthful optimism than to get all gloomy about the end of the world?

Here is a nice section from That Demon Life. End of the world and grackles, too. Enjoy!

The great-tailed grackle had adapted very well to city life and was the most common bird in the city, able to live on bugs or garbage or almost anything. They were large birds with black, iridescent feathers and bright evil yellow eyes, and the males were larger than the females and carried an impressive fan-shaped tail: they fought for the best position in the highest branches of trees or the loftiest arch of a streetlight and they posed there, bills pointed toward the sky, gasping and croaking and hissing, shitting on anything that happened to be beneath them. Quincy Whittaker thought that was just like—life.

Quincy’s cab was parked outside the office shack of a big towing company on the south side. The cab’s meter was up to $64 25 now, and still running, clicking up another quarter every forty seconds or so. He could see the crazy woman through the shack’s window, waving her arms and jabbering about something. Behind the shack was a fence enclosing a vast field of cars and trucks, mostly dead and partially disassembled, rotting under the hard harsh sun. In front of the shack, by a ditch, stood a giant lone sycamore, filled with grackles. Quincy was parked in the tree’s shade, enduring a steady rain of grackle shit—just like life.

This is how it will all end, he thought, the World will come to a damn end while I sit in a car getting shit on. This is how it is.

For months Quincy had been anticipating the end of the world. There was a psychic who came on the radio late at night when Quincy was sitting alone in his dark, quiet cab, and every night the psychic seemed a little more worked up about the end times. He had a vision of a fungus that was going to kill all the planet’s plant life, leaving no food for humans or domestic animals—no food at all. There was going to be an explosion of x-rays from the sun that would fry whatever side of the Earth was facing the sun at the time. The U.S. economy would collapse because of a mystery illness that would leave millions of people too ill to go to work. The dark star would swing in through the solar system, Nibiru or Marduk or whatever it was called—Planet X!—setting off a vast cataclysm of floods, winds, earthquakes, volcanoes—the end of the world, the end of the world, at last, and it was all tied in, somehow, to the Third Secret of Fatima, which was somehow connected to the Book of Revelations. Quincy was back on familiar ground, there, in Revelations. It was his favorite book of the Bible. He loved the part where the angels floated around streaming tears, crying “Woe! Woe! Woe, to all the inhabiters of Earth!” Sitting in the dark Quincy fondly imagined the skeletons of trees left leafless by the fungus, with great clouds of dirt and dust—no longer held fast by grass—blowing through the air, settling in dunes among the cars abandoned along the highways, Escalades, Navigators, Range Rovers, great huge SUVs like dead dinosaurs, bleached bones of the drivers behind the wheels, corpses cluttering the streets, food for the grackles. Then Marduk would loom on the horizon and there’d be an earthquake or two, a typhoon, a tidal wave, and the Earth would be washed clean. Woe to all mankind! Woe, you motherfuckers! Woe! Day and night, driving his battered cab through the streets of the city, Quincy pondered the end of the world—there were signs everywhere, he could see it coming, looking off at the expressways and strip malls teeming with rude goddamn rich people, thoughtless bastards worried more about their taxes than their souls, preening, cocky, ignorant of their fate, shitting on everyone below them—just like the damn grackles. Just like life. The end of the world! Quincy wanted it to happen. He couldn’t wait.

Linda came out of the shack. “This is the wrong place,” she said. “They don’t have my truck.”

“I was lookin’ at those cars,” Quincy said. “Those trucks over there.” He pointed with his chin across the fence at the endless field of broken down dead vehicles.

“Yeah?”

“Those were all peoples’ lives, once. You know what I’m saying? People were proud to have those cars then, new cars, drive ‘em all day, happy. Now they all a bunch of junk—worthless, nothing, dead. That’s how we’re all going to end up, you know?”

“Yeah?” Linda asked.

Quincy nodded. “Soon, too.”

Linda looked out the window. She’d barely noticed the piles of dead cars, but now that Quincy pointed them out—hard afternoon sun glaring off the broken glass and twisted metal of the vehicles as they slowly returned to their base elements—they were, really, terribly oppressive. Junk. Lost dreams. Lost youth. Death. Linda flopped back in the seat, suddenly depressed.

“Good Lord,” she said. “Take me someplace to get a drink.”

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Ordinary Horrors

What My Students Write About: A List

Tropes Themes Things Stuff

Out of Context Excerpt 11

Lowell Mick White

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