Things you can learn from high school stoytellers

Sorry about the hiatuses (hiati? hiatrioli? hiatoxen?) of late. I have plenty to say, just not enough time to write it down.

I graded short stories yesterday. These kids had some terrific ideas but they all made the same four basic mistakes in telling them.

1) They didn't show me, they told me. They told me two characters were best friends. They told me a boy and girl were in love, they told me a boy's mom was a whore. I gave them examples of how you can add a scene into a story to show the relationship in a way that's much more effective at getting me into the story.

2) They didn't get in late and leave early. I sat through a lot of conversations that went like this:

Victor called Angie on the phone to ask her if they were still going out.
"Hi," Victor said.
"Hey," said Angie.
"Are we still going out tonight?" Victor asked.
"Yes," said Angie.
"What time you want me pick you up?" said Victor.
"Seven," said Angie.
"Okay, I'll be there."
"Okay, I'll see you later."
"Bye, Angie," said Victor.
"Bye Victor," said Angie.
At Seven, Victor pulled up to Angie's house. And Ms. Blake shot herself in the head because she was too bored to go on living.

So I told the kids about getting in just before the action gets going and getting out when the gettin's good.

3) The conflict was pretty weak in a lot of stories. One girl fell in love, got married and then got pregnant. When she got pregnant her husband didn't believe the baby was his - not for any particular reason - and decided to leave her. Nine months later the baby was born, he looked at it, realized it was his and they got back together. The time when they were apart? About four sentences. The entire nine months of pregnancy was not in the story. All the conflict was gone.

One kid wrote about a boy who's mom is a whore, so the boy tells his father and the father goes off and kills himself. The boy is so angry he vows revenge and swears he will kill his mother, so he stabs his aunt to death. The boy never even had a conversation with his mother through the entire story.

I wrote a story once in college where a girl goes to her estranged father's funeral and her grandmother keeps wanting to talk to her, but the girl avoids the grandmother and at the end manages to avoid that confrontation. The professor said, "You don't want to talk to your grandmother, do you?"

He knew that I didn't want to make this girl talk to her grandmother because I didn't want to talk to my grandmother. I have a feeling this boy has some rage issues at his mom but isn't ready to confront them, so he didn't have the guts to make his fictional boy confront them either.

4) I couldn't identify with the protagonists. One kid wrote a great zombie story where this couple ended up running from the zombies together until she was bitten and he had to kill her. Great potential for conflict. Only I never really got why these two people were in love because there were no scenes of them alone together. The story moved too fast; it never took a moment to let me see these two people form a bond.

These are the problems my high school students had with their stories, but I took into account that for most of them this was the first story they'd ever written and all things considered, they did an awesome job. We might have some future writers here once they figure all this out.