Tuesday, April 22, 2014

A Not So Great Short Story Template

Last semester, as per the 109H English required course, I found myself in a class that focused exclusively on satire.  We read Brave New World and watched Dr. Strangelove or: How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the Bomb.  We wrote our own creative satire pieces.  In that class, we also found a variety of online sources that utilized satire to serve their purposes--one of which was McSweeney's Internet Tendencies.  I had never been a bit fan of satire before--having read works such as Gulliver's Travels and Voltaire at an age when I was too young to appreciate much beyond the literal--but that class really turned me around.  In any case, I was browsing McSweeney's when I was bored in one of my classes the other day, and came across this article that I thought some of you might appreciate:

http://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/short-story-template

It's funny cause I've definitely seen a lot of those tropes and elements used in quite a few of the short stories I've read before, and they certainly seem to make up the stereotypic short story.  Hope you give it a read!

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