Short Stories
The assignment here was to “write the worst, horriblest story” I could. I’m sure it could’ve been worse, but I wanted to be somewhat readable. Though I’m sure I missed a few, I tried to break every rule I could think of, including (but not limited to) grammar, spelling, coherency, decency, and blasphemy. How many can <i>you</i> find?
This is a short story about two men in the middle of the Iraq war from each person's perspective. One is American and the other is Iraqi. I messed up this assignment because it was supposed to have three perspectives, which threw my creative writing class off. They were confused as to who was speaking. To compensate for that problem, I color-coded the text. But it took away from the point of the exercise. And we can’t expect people to print stories in color. That’s called a comic book. Anyway, I decided to keep the two speakers in two different fonts because I wanted it to be <i>immediately</i> obvious that there were two different narrators.
I originally started writing a story where the author torments the main character by putting him in various weird situations. I set it aside for a long time until I was told to write a metafiction story. I pulled out the sections that did not fit my new story and wrote the rest months later. This was actually enjoyable to do because it allowed me to do something with a piece that I have had a hard time finishing. There are so many things you can do with the seed idea that I just left it alone because it was so open-ended. This, however, is a relatively satisfying way to compress a book into a short story.
I don’t remember what the assignment was here, but I know I wrote it for a class. It could’ve been a really vague assignment like “write a 1500 word story with first-person dialogue.” I really don’t know. All I do know is that it was inspired by events going on at the time. 9/11 occurred just a few years before this was written, and we’d only been in Iraq for a year or two. One of my classmates that reviewed the story felt it was a completely unrealistic story, and I’m sure they are right. But cautionary tales aren’t supposed to be warm, fuzzy, and realistic. They’re supposed to be terrifying. It should also be noted that I wrote this two years before World War Z was published, so the “human ramp” idea was my own. Not to say that Max Brooks took the idea from me, but I just want to be clear that I didn’t steal it from him.
This short story focuses on the experiences of one man that finds himself unwilling to deal with the rest of humanity and his decision to leave society. After a time, strange things begin to happen in the skies above him, and he eventually finds himself wanting to reconnect with the people he had once abandoned. It was originally published in the inaugural issue of the Texas Texas University Honor's College journal in 2003.
This is the first complete short story I wrote in college. It was for one of my first English classes and no particular directive.
