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Description

This is an interdisciplinary assignment designed to allow students a creative break from their major fields of study even while they continue to engage those fields of study. That is, in addition to gaining practice as literary artists, students will “write to learn” about their chosen disciplines and/or the world of work. They will gain perspectives not otherwise available in university curricula, while at the same time learning to write a good story. 

Write a short story which in some way involves a real profession or job.  Your protagonist might be someone who works in that particular field, for instance, and your setting might be the actual workplace. You might do “a day in the life” of a particular person, the struggles of a character just entering or just exiting a profession, or even the struggles of someone who is failing at a profession. Your plot and themes might involve real debates, major or minor, which are current in a particular workplace, and the ways those debates connect to the culture at large. (Render such debates dramatically by showing two characters in conversation, for example, but avoid mere allegory; ideas should be integral and not just “stuck on” to the story.) Or your plot and themes might involve personal debates and struggles which are current in your own mind regarding your major field of study.  (You might do a first-person or third-limited piece about someone undergoing a life/career/education crisis, for example.) Your story’s parameters are open—just be sure that some important element is discipline-specific.

Another option would be an historical or futuristic story. That is, write a piece set in the past about a real historical figure and with real details, OR a piece set in the future with details reasonably extrapolated from research and your own imagination.

• Read some model fiction. (See below.)
  
  
• Do some intensive field research. Whatever you discover can only enrich your story. If you don’t know much about what worklife will be like in your future job, now is the time to find out by talking with advisors, teachers, and real people in the workplace. Go hang out, listen in, invite someone to coffee…Pay special attention to how people speak and interact, to their body language and dress, to specific, concrete workplace elements as well as ambiance. (Scientists: include in your story authentic details of lab work. Artists: integrate real particulars from the gallery, studio, or stage. Etc.) Good stories need lots of vivid, credible detail. Carry around a notepad or voice recorder. |
  
  
• Do some library and internet research into a particular job. Look for training manuals, college programs, personal testimonies/memoirs, case studies, job advertisements, vocational guides, and real-world work documents of all kinds.

• Borrow, when possible and as appropriate, on any content you’ve already been learning in your major field of study: information, skills, ideas, procedures.

• Get factual information right. This is important for making your story convincing (especially for readers actually in the profession), as well as vivid. As David Gates says, “I remember my father, a master auto mechanic, souring The Grapes of Wrath for me by demonstrating that Steinbeck is faking it when he has a character repair a broken-down car.” You might even have your story fact-checked by a teacher or teaching assistant in the field in question. (I'd give you some extra credit for this.) Where and how you take liberties with facts will ultimately be up to your own judgment—your aim is a good story—but for this project I recommend as much verisimilitude as possible.

• Try to integrate at least one real, discipline-specific genre into your story. This means memos, letters, reports, financial transactions, etc. Try to make the appearance of this item as natural and integral to the story as possible, and try, if possible, to heed any discipline-specific conventions for writing such an item. (It might be interesting to center your story on such a document, making it as a key item in the plot or even using it as a structural device.)

• Use this opportunity to explore your own feelings about your possible future livelihood, about livelihoods that are simply exotic or interesting to you, or even about ones that you think would be downright awful. Imagine your way into a real place of work and the mind of a real worker/professional; the grind, the hopelessness, and the creep of the clock; the challenges and real satisfactions; the lunchbreak errand and the weekend drunk; the regrets and anxieties; the social lunacy, misery, enrichments, and cheer.

• Your story should be more about people at work than about a discipline or work itself. That is, what always drives any interesting story is good, distinctive, complex characters. Character development is almost always neglected in student stories, so this will receive extra attention during scoring.

• To practice writing stories in a variety of modes and with a variety of settings; to expand the creative writer’s “canvas” by exploring the world of work and the content of specific disciplines. (Learn to write.)
  
  
• To practice literary writing as a means of imaginatively engaging with and learning about various kinds of labor, major fields of study, and future professions, including the actual content of particular disciplines. (Write to learn.)

First and foremost: any well-read person interested in original, engaging, fine-arts fiction. Second: any member of the profession in question.

To write a story suitable for a literary magazine, a professional journal which includes quality creative work alongside its typically technical fare, or possibly an anthology of short stories focusing on work of all kinds or a particular profession.

An additional place of publication might be a college or department disciplinary newsletter. Some of these very technical publications like to include occasional creative pieces, though the quality may be uneven.

Examples at NDSU:

o       Tabula Rasa (Communications Department)

o       Nursing News (College of Pharmacy)

o       It’s Our Business (College of Business)

o       The Source (College of Engineering)

NDSU’s Extension Services likewise produces many newsletters:

o       Dairy Connection (Ag and Applied Science)

o       Water Spouts (Ag and Natural Resources—Irrigation)

o       Crop and Pest Report (Plant Pathology, Soils, et al)

o       Parenting Newsletters (Human Development and Family Science)

Recommended Reading

·        David Gates, ed. Labor Days, An Anthology of Fiction about Work

·        William O’Rourke, ed. On The Job, Fiction About Work by Contemporary American Writers

·        Ann Reit, ed. The World Outside, Collected Short Fiction about Women at Work

·        Andrea Barrett, “The Littoral Zone,” The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction.

·        Herman Melville, “Bartleby, the Scrivener, A Story of Wall Street” Great Short Works of Herman Melville

DO’s:

Your story should show some meaningful connection (settings, themes, characters) to a profession of your choice. It should have a well-paced, character-driven plot, with fully-developed and delineated scenes. Its characters should be round and believable. Provide plenty of vivid, specific, engaging and credible detail. Explore your subject in a spirit of inquiry, intellectually, emotionally, and psychologically. That is, be open to discoveries and ways of looking at your subject which have not occurred to you before. As always, be sure to edit and proofread as suitable for audience and style. For this assignment in particular, be sure your facts are accurate.  

DON’TS:

• Avoid excessive or pat closure; let some information remain tacit.
  
• Avoid “trick” or otherwise cute, too-clever, or too-easy endings. No suicides!
  
• Avoid melodrama and sentimentality (unearned emotion or drama).
  
• Avoid lengthy openings or excessive, “throat-clearing” first scenes. Very short stories often do better when they open in medias res.

WAC:

1. To forge connections across discourses and disciplines.
2. To help connect creative writing and literature, in a very small way, to broader academic and social contexts. 
3. To experiment with hybrid discourses and voicings; to defamiliarize genres in the service of fresh imaginative literature as well as creative perspectives on the disciplines. Bakhtin: "The transfer of style from one genre to another not only alters the way a style sounds, under conditions of a genre unnatural to it, but also violates or renews the given genre” ("The Problems of Speech Genres" 66).
4. To engage with writing as a way to acquire (not just to demonstrate) knowledge.
5. To emphasize the importance of both writing and imagination to and in any discipline.
   

1. To communicate effectively in a variety of contexts and formats.
2. To comprehend intrapersonal and interpersonal dynamics.
3. To integrate knowledge and ideas in a coherent and meaningful manner.