Schedule Changes

Just a reminder: the schedule I gave you at the beginning of the semester has been changed. Please refer to either this online schedule or the one that's in the class Dropbox.

CH

A Story A Day

 

This exercise is to get you generating a lot of possibilities for your short stories this semester and to get you familiar with the process of writing every day.  If I could have my way, I would require you to write 250-500 words a day, 7 days a week, for the entire semester.  Think of the writer you’d be after that!  You’d have the beginnings of a collection!  But, since I can’t do that, I will start the semester out by having you write every day for a week.

So, here’s the assignment:  Tuesday. 9-17 (yes, I have changed the due date to give you more time) you must bring in between 5-7 stories (hence, a story a day) that could be the seeds of your stories this semester.  The typical published short story is 15 pages long.  If you can manage to write a 15 page story every day for a week, more power to you.  But for the sake of your sanity, I will require only that you produce 1-2 pages per each story (250-500 words).  That “story” could be an opening scene or two, or it could be looser piece of writing where you try to pin down the story as a whole.  I only ask that it be intelligible enough for me to understand, as I will be reading these and advising you on which would make the best stories for you to pursue, and that it be an earnest attempt at creating a short story for a real audience.

Of course you are allowed to make use of the exercises you've done so far, and I will load even more exercises to your Dropbox file, if you need something to go on.  Use them or don’t—it doesn’t matter to me.  All that matters is that you write, write, write!

I am eager to see what you come up with! 

The Robert Owen Butler story

JEALOUS HUSBAND RETURNS IN FORM OF PARROT

Robert Olen Butler

(from the collection of stories Tabloid Dreams (Henry Holt & Co., 1996); first appeared in The New Yorker, May 22, 1995)       I never can quite say as much as I know. I look at other parrots and I wonder if it's the same for them, if somebody is trapped in each of them paying some kind of price for living their life in a certain way. For instance, "Hello," I say, and I'm sitting on a perch in a pet store in Houston and what I'm really thinking is Holy shit. It's you. And what's happened is I'm looking at my wife.       "Hello," she says, and she comes over to me and I can't believe how beautiful she is. Those great brown eyes, almost as dark as the center of mine. And her nose--I don't remember her for her nose but its beauty is clear to me now. Her nose is a little too long, but it's redeemed by the faint hook to it.       She scratches the back of my neck.       Her touch makes my tail flare. I feel the stretch and rustle of me back there. I bend my head to her and she whispers, "Pretty bird."       For a moment I think she knows it's me. But she doesn't, of course. I say "Hello" again and I will eventually pick up "pretty bird." I can tell that as soon as she says it, but for now I can only give her another hello. Her fingertips move through my feathers and she seems to know about birds. She knows that to pet a bird you don't smooth his feathers down, you ruffle them.       But of course she did that in my human life, as well. It's all the same for her. Not that I was complaining, even to myself, at that moment in the pet shop when she found me like I presume she was supposed to. She said it again, "Pretty bird," and this brain that works like it does now could feel that tiny little voice of mine ready to shape itself around these sounds. But before I could get them out of my beak there was this guy at my wife's shoulder and all my feathers went slick flat like to make me small enough not to be seen and I backed away. The pupils of my eyes pinned and dilated and pinned again.       He circled around her. A guy that looked like a meat packer, big in the chest and thick with hair, the kind of guy that I always sensed her eyes moving to when I was alive. I had a bare chest and I'd look for little black hairs on the sheets when I'd come home on a day with the whiff of somebody else in the air. She was still in the same goddam rut.       A “hello” wouldn't do and I'd recently learned “good night” but it was the wrong suggestion altogether, so I said nothing and the guy circled her and he was looking at me with a smug little smile and I fluffed up all my feathers, made myself about twice as big, so big he'd see he couldn't mess with me. I waited for him to draw close enough for me to take off the tip of his finger.       But she intervened. Those nut-brown eyes were before me and she said, "I want him."       And that's how I ended up in my own house once again. She bought me a large black wrought-iron cage, very large, convinced by some young guy who clerked in the bird department and who took her aside and made his voice go much too soft when he was doing the selling job. The meat packer didn't like it. I didn't either. I'd missed a lot of chances to take a bite out of this clerk in my stay at the shop and I regretted that suddenly.       But I got my giant cage and I guess I'm happy enough about that. I can pace as much as I want. I can hang upside down. It's full of bird toys. That dangling thing over there with knots and strips of rawhide and a bell at the bottom needs a good thrashing a couple of times a day and I'm the bird to do it. I look at the very dangle of it and the thing is rough, the rawhide and the knotted rope, and I get this restlessness back in my tail, a burning thrashing feeling, and it's like all the times when I was sure there was a man naked with my wife. Then I go to this thing that feels so familiar and I bite and bite and it's very good.       I could have used the thing the last day I went out of this house as a man. I'd found the address of the new guy at my wife's office. He'd been there a month in the shipping department and three times she'd mentioned him. She didn't even have to work with him and three times I heard about him, just dropped into the conversation. "Oh," she'd say when a car commercial came on the television, "that car there is like the one the new man in shipping owns. Just like it." Hey, I'm not stupid. She said another thing about him and then another and right after the third one I locked myself in the bathroom because I couldn't rage about this anymore. I felt like a damn fool whenever I actually said anything about this kind of feeling and she looked at me like she could start hating me real easy and so I was working on saying nothing, even if it meant locking myself up. My goal was to hold my tongue about half the time. That would be a good start.       But this guy from shipping. I found out his name and his address and it was one of her typical Saturday afternoons of vague shopping. So I went to his house, and his car that was just like the commercial was outside. Nobody was around in the neighborhood and there was this big tree in the back of the house going up to a second floor window that was making funny little sounds. I went up. The shade was drawn but not quite all the way. I was holding on to a limb with arms and legs wrapped around it like it was her in those times when I could forget the others for a little while. But the crack in the shade was just out of view and I crawled on along till there was no limb left and I fell on my head. Thinking about that now, my wings flap and I feel myself lift up and it all seems so avoidable. Though I know I'm different now. I'm a bird.       Except I'm not. That's what's confusing. It's like those times when she would tell me she loved me and I actually believed her and maybe it was true and we clung to each other in bed and at times like that I was different. I was the man in her life. I was whole with her. Except even at that moment, holding her sweetly, there was this other creature inside me who knew a lot more about it and couldn't quite put all the evidence together to speak.       My cage sits in the den. My pool table is gone and the cage is sitting in that space and if I come all the way down to one end of my perch I can see through the door and down the back hallway to the master bedroom. When she keeps the bedroom door open I can see the space at the foot of the bed but not the bed itself. That I can sense to the left, just out of sight. I watch the men go in and I hear the sounds but I can't quite see. And they drive me crazy.       I flap my wings and I squawk and I fluff up and I slick down and I throw seed and I attack that dangly toy as if it was the guy's balls, but it does no good. It never did any good in the other life either, the thrashing around I did by myself. In that other life I'd have given anything to be standing in this den with her doing this thing with some other guy just down the hall and all I had to do was walk down there and turn the corner and she couldn't deny it any more.       But now all I can do is try to let it go. I sidestep down to the opposite end of the cage and I look out the big sliding glass doors to the back yard. It's a pretty yard. There are great placid maple trees with good places to roost. There's a blue sky that plucks at the feathers on my chest. There are clouds. Other birds. Fly away. I could just fly away.       I tried once and I learned a lesson. She forgot and left the door to my cage open and I climbed beak and foot, beak and foot, along the bars and curled around to stretch sideways out the door and the vast scene of peace was there at the other end of the room. I flew.       And a pain flared through my head and I fell straight down and the room whirled around and the only good thing was she held me. She put her hands under my wings and lifted me and clutched me to her breast and I wish there hadn't been bees in my head at the time so I could have enjoyed that, but she put me back in the cage and wept awhile. That touched me, her tears. And I looked back to the wall of sky and trees. There was something invisible there between me and that dream of peace. I remembered, eventually, about glass, and I knew I'd been lucky, I knew that for the little fragile-boned skull I was doing all this thinking in, it meant death.       She wept that day but by the night she had another man. A guy with a thick Georgia truck-stop accent and pale white skin and an Adam's apple big as my seed ball. This guy has been around for a few weeks and he makes a whooping sound down the hallway, just out of my sight. At times like that I want to fly against the bars of the cage, but I don't. I have to remember how the world has changed.       She's single now, of course. Her husband, the man that I was, is dead to her. She does not understand all that is behind my "hello." I know many words, for a parrot. I am a yellow-nape Amazon, a handsome bird, I think, green with a splash of yellow at the back of my neck. I talk pretty well, but none of my words are adequate. I can't make her understand.       And what would I say if I could? I was jealous in life. I admit it. I would admit it to her. But it was because of my connection to her. I would explain that. When we held each other, I had no past at all, no present but her body, no future but to lie there and not let her go. I was an egg hatched beneath her crouching body, I entered as a chick into her wet sky of a body, and all that I wished was to sit on her shoulder and fluff my feathers and lay my head against her cheek, my neck exposed to her hand. And so the glances that I could see in her troubled me deeply, the movement of her eyes in public to other men, the laughs sent across a room, the tracking of her mind behind her blank eyes, pursuing images of others, her distraction even in our bed, the ghosts that were there of men who'd touched her, perhaps even that very day. I was not part of all those other men who were part of her. I didn't want to connect to all that. It was only her that I would fluff for but these others were there also and I couldn't put them aside. I sensed them inside her and so they were inside me. If I had the words, these are the things I would say.       But half an hour ago there was a moment that thrilled me. A word, a word we all knew in the pet shop, was just the right word after all. This guy with his cowboy belt buckle and rattlesnake boots and his pasty face and his twanging words of love trailed after my wife through the den, past my cage, and I said, "Cracker." He even flipped his head back a little at this in surprise. He'd been called that before to his face, I realized. I said it again, "Cracker." But to him I was a bird and he let it pass. "Cracker," I said. "Hello, cracker." That was even better. They were out of sight through the hall doorway and I hustled along the perch and I caught a glimpse of them before they made the turn to the bed and I said, "Hello, cracker," and he shot me one last glance.       It made me hopeful. I eased away from that end of the cage, moved toward the scene of peace beyond the far wall. The sky is chalky blue today, blue like the brow of the blue-front Amazon who was on the perch next to me for about a week at the store. She was very sweet, but I watched her carefully for a day or two when she first came in. And it wasn't long before she nuzzled up to a cockatoo named Gordo and I knew she'd break my heart. But her color now in the sky is sweet, really. I left all those feelings behind me when my wife showed up. I am a faithful man, for all my suspicions. Too faithful, maybe. I am ready to give too much and maybe that's the problem.       The whooping began down the hall and I focussed on a tree out there. A crow flapped down, his mouth open, his throat throbbing, though I could not hear his sound. I was feeling very odd. At least I'd made my point to the guy in the other room. "Pretty bird," I said, referring to myself. She called me “pretty bird” and I believed her and I told myself again, "Pretty bird."       But then something new happened, something very difficult for me. She appeared in the den naked. I have not seen her naked since I fell from the tree and had no wings to fly. She always had a certain tidiness in things. She was naked in the bedroom, clothed in the den. But now she appears from the hallway and I look at her and she is still slim and she is beautiful, I think--at least I clearly remember that as her husband I found her beautiful in this state. Now, though, she seems too naked. Plucked. I find that a sad thing. I am sorry for her and she goes by me and she disappears into the kitchen. I want to pluck some of my own feathers, the feathers from my chest, and give them to her. I love her more in that moment, seeing her terrible nakedness, than I ever have before.       And since I've had success in the last few minutes with words, when she comes back I am moved to speak. "Hello," I say, meaning, You are still connected to me, I still want only you. "Hello," I say again. Please listen to this tiny heart that beats fast at all times for you.       And she does indeed stop and she comes to me and bends to me. "Pretty bird," I say and I am saying, You are beautiful, my wife, and your beauty cries out for protection. "Pretty." I want to cover you with my own nakedness. "Bad bird," I say. If there are others in your life, even in your mind, then there is nothing I can do. "Bad." Your nakedness is touched from inside by the others. "Open," I say. How can we be whole together if you are not empty in the place that I am to fill?       She smiles at this and she opens the door to my cage. "Up," I say, meaning, Is there no place for me in this world where I can be free of this terrible sense of others?       She reaches in now and offers her hand and I climb onto it and I tremble and she says, "Poor baby."       "Poor baby," I say. You have yearned for wholeness too and somehow I failed you. I was not enough. "Bad bird," I say. I'm sorry.       And then the cracker comes around the corner. He wears only his rattlesnake boots. I take one look at his miserable, featherless body and shake my head. We keep our sexual parts hidden, we parrots, and this man is a pitiful sight. "Peanut," I say. I presume that my wife simply has not noticed. But that's foolish, of course. This is, in fact, what she wants. Not me. And she scrapes me off her hand onto the open cage door and she turns her naked back to me and embraces this man and they laugh and stagger in their embrace around the corner.       For a moment I still think I've been eloquent. What I've said only needs repeating for it to have its transforming effect. "Hello," I say. "Hello. Pretty bird. Pretty. Bad bird. Bad. Open. Up. Poor baby. Bad bird." And I am beginning to hear myself as I really sound to her. "Peanut." I can never say what is in my heart to her. Never.       I stand on my cage door now and my wings stir. I look at the corner to the hallway and down at the end the whooping has begun again. I can fly there and think of things to do about all this.       But I do not. I turn instead and I look at the trees moving just beyond the other end of the room. I look at the sky the color of the brow of a blue-front Amazon. A shadow of birds spanks across the lawn. And I spread my wings. I will fly now. Even though I know there is something between me and that place where I can be free of all these feelings, I will fly. I will throw myself there again and again. Pretty bird. Bad bird. Good night.

Rust Hills

Please click on the link here and read the obituary for Rust Hills that was published in the New York Times after he passed away in August of 2008.

I know that when I read this, it subtly changed my reading of WIG for me, especially in how he perceived "new writers" and how he was initially trying to take "quality" fiction back from the adventure stories that were big when he began at Esquire.

What stood out to you in the obituary?

Famous Rejection Letter #1

I thought I would start a series of posts for this class about rejection letters that were received by famous and successful writers, in order to remind you that it's tough for everybody and rejection is part of the publishing game. You're going to need a pretty thick skin.

First up: Ernest Hemingway

Those of you who have heard me rant about how much I hate The Sun Also Rises (but have learned more from the study of that novel than from any of EH's others) will understand why I felt a little twinge of sympathy and a simultaneous ping of happiness reading this. For many reasons, I suppose.

So, here it is:

75 Wiley Street
New York, N.Y.
U.S.A.

June 14th, 1925.

Dear Mr. Hemingway:

Thank you for sending us your manuscript, The Sun Also Rises. I regret to inform you that we will not be offering you publication at this time.

If I may be frank, Mr. Hemingway -- you certainly are in your prose -- I found your efforts to be both tedious and offensive. You really are a man's man, aren't you? I wouldn't be surprised to hear that you had penned this entire story locked up at the club, ink in one hand, brandy in the other. Your bombastic, dipsomaniac, where-to-now characters had me reaching for my own glass of brandy -- something to liven up 250 pages of men who are constantly stopping to sleep off the drink. What Peacock & Peacock is looking for, in a manuscript, is innovation and heart. I'm afraid that what you have produced here does not fit that description.

A great story, Mr. Hemingway, is built on a foundation of great characters. I had trouble telling yours apart. Remind me, which is the broken-hearted bachelor who travels aimlessly across Europe? Ah, yes! They all do! As I understand it, Jake Barnes is intended to be your hero. A hero, Mr. Hemingway, is a person the reader can care about, root for. Jake Barnes is too detached, too ineffective; I doubt he'd have the energy to turn the page and find out what happened to himself. I take exception, also, to your portrayal of Mike. There is nothing less appealing than a character who sits blithely by while his wife sleeps with half of the continent. I have not yet said anything about Brett, your only prominent female character. As a woman, was I intended to identify with this flighty girl who takes in men the way the others take in after-supper coffees? Let me tell you, Mr. Hemingway, I did not. Your languid characters deserve each other, really, each one is more hollow than the next.

Of course, I doubt it's possible to create a three-dimensional character with such two-dimensional language. Have you never heard of crafted prose? Style? Complexity of diction? It's hard to believe an entire novel's worth of pages could be filled up with the sort of short, stunted sentences you employ here. Let me be specific: at the start of the novel, you sum up a key character, Robert Cohn, with just five short words, "I was his tennis friend." This tells us nothing. Later, when Jake is looking out on the Seine -- the beautiful, historic, poetic Seine -- you write, the river looked nice. Nice? The river looked nice? I dare say my young son could do better!

In short, your efforts have saddened me, Mr. Hemingway. I was hopeful that by 1925, the brutes would have stopped sending me their offerings. We at Peacock & Peacock, are looking to publish novels that will inspire. God knows, it's what people need at this time. Certainly, what is not needed are treatises about bullfights and underemployed men who drink too much.

Sincerely,
Mrs Moberley Luger
Editor-in-Chief


Ouch. I bet he needed a drink after that. The good news is that rejections are rarely so harsh these days, and even though it was pretty mean, he still went on to publish that novel and build a career on it. So he got the last laugh.

What do you think? Leave a comment below.

Get to Work

A mistake that beginning writers often make is when they forget that their character must exist in a world that resembles our own: the character must eat and sleep, and must therefore have money to buy groceries and pay rent, and must therefore have a job.

Some amazing poems and stories have been built around a character's job, and that's what you should try for in your exercise today.

To start, make a quick list of jobs that you find interesting or jobs that you've done before. If you're having a hard time coming up with that, try going back to a newspaper site and looking at the classifieds, or typing in the words "most interesting jobs" or "jobs in (my home state)" or a similar term into a search engine, and see what pops out at you. When I do this exercise and go to the classifieds of my local paper, I get: dental assistant, short order cook, diesel mechanic in Antarctica???!! Whoa.

I'm not sure I'm qualified to write a story about a diesel mechanic in Antarctica without a whole lot of research, but it'd be fun to try. Or I could honestly start a story with any of those occupations.

Pick one. Next, make a list of details you know about that job. What kind of clothes does that person wear on the job? What hours do they keep? What's the pay like? How do you get that job? What kinds of skills does it require? This might take a little research, but you don't have to do a ton of research, just enough at this point that you can imagine the job.

Now make a list of things that could go wrong on this kind of job or a mistake that the person could make on the job. Remember how we've been talking about how conflict is what drives stories.

And finally, write a scene that opens with something going wrong at a character's job (i.e., the moment that the "moving" action of the story begins.

So maybe, in my scenario, I could write a scene that starts with a dental assistant who just erased a patient's entire file, or accidentally cut a patient's lip, or a patient groped her while she was cleaning his teeth--oh, that would be perfect and terrible, being groped by a patient, ack, and I'm sure it happens.

And now I have the seed for a story.

As you write this scene you'll have to fill in the details and ask questions: Has she worked on this patient before and noticed anything? Who else does she work with? Would someone come to her rescue or not? Is she the sort of person to exact revenge? What tools does she have at her disposal to do something about this problem? What will the consequences for her actions be?

You may find in writing that this scene feels like it will lead you off in another direction, with the work problem not really being a big deal, but allowing you access into a character's life. Or the work problem might be what the entire story is about. It could go either way.

Remember that you can also choose to continue the first line exercise, do the news story exercise if you haven't already, or try your hand at one of the generating exercises in the Dropbox file. Or, if you already have a story rolling, you could write a page to continue that story.

Whatever you choose, have fun with it, and I'll see you on Friday!

Writing Exercises

Hello y'all

I just uploaded a file called "Generating Exercises" into the Exercises section of our class Dropbox. For tomorrow's class, you can do one of these exercises or the one that I will write about below, take your pick. Try to write about 200-250 for the exercise (about 1 double spaced page) or more, if the muse clobbers you.

The generating exercises are based on the idea of imitation, the way an artist will study the brushstrokes of another painter in order to learn his art. So you basically imitate this other writer in their first sentence / paragraph, and then move forward on your own from there. I have written two published short stories that have started from exercises like this, and my take on it is that, more often than not, I end up revising out the imitated section, but it gave me the seed for the story that got the ball rolling.

The other option is to do my "Stories in the World" Exercise, which is one I typically give my intro students (so forgive me if some of what I say seems elementary here, and pay attention to the italics sections where I am addressing you, my 404 class, specifically):

Stories in the World

 

In her interview after her published short story "The Story of My Life," (which is one you've read if you had me for Intro, about a girl who has a famous activist mother) Kim Edwards discusses how a seed of the story started to grow in her mind after she read a news story about protesters who had their children lie down across the driveway of an abortion clinic. It was this detail of the story that resonated with Edwards, like a tiny shard of glass in her mind, an image that she returned to again and again.

The world is full of these kinds of details, and they are ripe for opportunities in good literary fiction. So for your writing exercise this week, let's look for details that strike us in a similar way.

Let's start with the news. Track down a good, old-fashioned newspaper, check a website like CNN.com, watch your local news hour on television, or check the websites for a local paper from your hometown or, if you like, from Malibu (this is the Malibu Times, click here). I often find the seeds for good stories in local news as opposed to national news, because those stories often deal with individuals from a setting that I'm familiar with, but national news will definitely yield results as well, so you might want to scour both types.

You're looking for a detail, something that strikes you emotionally or intellectually.

You don't have to go for the most dramatic or gratuitous or "newsworthy" thing. Just a detail, a moment that makes you stop to think. To wonder. To place yourself momentarily in the shoes of someone else, as Kim Edwards did in her story, wondering, "What if?" What would it be like to be one of those children who was forced to lie down in the driveway?

Take a few moments to jot down some of the details of this news story, especially whatever specifics you can find about the element of the story that resonates for you.

(In spite of my warning about not going with the most dramatic thing, most of my intro students will choose the story about the woman who drowned her children in a bathtub or the boy who was locked up by his family in a dog kennel for a year over the story about the woman who was sentenced to 40 days in jail because she stole $2700 from her boss at the Kwik Serve or about how the champion of the watermelon-eating contest at the state fair wept when he lost this year. Not that good literary fiction can't be written about all of these pieces of news, but writing literary fiction about big, graphic events is much trickier to do than writing about smaller interactions between characters.)

Then try to ask yourself, "what if?" Try to imagine a character who is part of this story--or a story like it--you don't have to stick with the exact story just as Kim Edwards doesn't reference the exact protest that she read about. How would that person interpret the events that occurred differently from the average person reading / watching the story unfold on the news?

Now write a scene.

A scene, to try to define it, is a set of actions or conversation that takes place in a single location, like a scene from a movie, only written in prose paragraphs. Scenes usually have dialogue (because characters talk to each other in scenes) and something of significance must happen in the scene, to move the story forward. "The Story of My Life," for example, starts with summary, not scene, where she throws in a tiny little what I would call demi-scene in: "You've got that wrong. You're thinking of my mother." Then she moves to a section where we see her mother on the evening news (which is not really about the main character, but a description of her mom), and finally, at the very bottom of 58 to the top of 60, we get an outright scene: Nichola and Sam watching her mother on television.

That's a scene.

(Sorry you have to do this without the context of the story, but you get the idea, right?)

You can construct your scene however you like. You can start your story with a bit of summary instead of a scene, as Edwards does, or a description, like Edwards' second section, or simply leap right into a scene, which is where the majority of short stories begin. You can imitate Edwards in a way, if you like, as a beginning painter might imitate the brush strokes of Van Gogh. You could structure your story so that your main character feels defined by the life and "newsworthiness" of someone else. You could even start with the line: "You'd know me if you saw me." You can try out the first person present tense, which will make the reader feel as if they are watching the actions as they unfold: "We are sitting together on the sofa, drinking Coca Cola and eating animal crackers."

Or you can take the story in an entirely different voice and an entirely different direction.

Just make it your own. Try to get down 200-250 words, which is about a page, double spaced.

A couple of warnings, before I turn you loose:

Edwards is successful in writing a story that deals with the topic of abortion and protests because she always keep the camera focused solely on the characters and their development, rather than try to get preachy or judgmental of the characters, which tends to turn off your reader. As readers of fiction, we like to come to our own conclusions about things, so any attempt to try to write to a specific theme in literary fiction is quite likely doomed to fail.

If your news story implies a kind of judgment or will by its nature ask the reader to take a side, take your cues from Edwards. Tread lightly. Focus on the characters, not on the issues.

Stories that are very dramatic, like a murder, for instance, are likewise difficult to get right in literary fiction, because our tendency can be to sensationalize the details. It's not off limits, but again I say: Tread lightly. We are trying to write literary fiction, and that is going to be character-based. It will not look like a horror movie.

Have fun with it. Don't get too stressed or spend too much time trying to think it through. Imagine a character and start writing. The story can present itself to you as you go.

Email me or text me if you have questions, as usual. Or leave your thoughts in the comments for the whole class to weigh in on.

Now get writing!

So, to boil it down for you 404 students, find a news story and write a scene that is based in some way on the story. Bring in a printed copy of your page (or a page from the Generating Exercises) to class on Tuesday.

I'll see you then!