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Up At A Villa by Helen Simpson Short Story Analysis
“Up At A Villa” is a short story by Helen Simpson, opening her 2011 collection In-flight Entertainment. This is a lyrical short story full of symbolism. Cover copy tells us to expect work a la Alice Munro. Of all the stories here, the images in “Up At A Villa” are most reminiscent of Munro —…
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Two Types Of Short Stories
Length aside, short stories are not like other works. There is something just… different about them. This difference is not about length; it’s about function. However, some stories function no differently from a novel. They’re simply… shorter. This post is an exploration of the qualitative differences between what we might call The Literary Short Story…
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How to identify an inciting incident?
The term ‘inciting incident’ is one of those writing words which means different things to different people. Some writers don’t think in terms of inciting incident. To others it is key to a good story beginning. Some authors have easily identifiable inciting incidents, and one big event to set off a chain of events seems…
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The Ideology Of Wealth In Stories
Wealth brings out the worst in people. This is the overriding message we get from stories in general, be they for children or adults. However, sometimes by working hard a hero can become rich. In a Cinderella story goodness leads naturally to riches. This is thought to be Cinderella’s rightful place — after all, Cinderella…
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In-flight Entertainment by Helen Simpson Analysis
“In-flight Entertainment” is a short story by Helen Simpson, published in her 2010 collection of the same name.
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Something Childish But Very Natural by Katherine Mansfield Short Story Analysis
“Something Childish But Very Natural” is a short story by Katherine Mansfield, published 1913, 1924. The story is named after a poem Harry reads in the book-stall. The poem is by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. This poem provides Mansfield’s re-visioning with a nutshell emotional arc:
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How To Write Like Alice Munro
**UPDATE LATE 2024** After Alice Munro died, we learned about the real ‘open secrets’ (not so open to those of us not in the loop) which dominated the author’s life. We must now find a way to live with the reality that Munro’s work reads very differently after knowing certain decisions she made when faced…
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Tricks by Alice Munro Short Story Analysis
I have a soft spot for short stories about spinsters about town, enjoying their passions in solitary fashion. “Tricks” by Alice Munro calls to mind Katherine Mansfield’s “Miss Brill”, especially after mention of the symbolic scarf: Miss Brill, you may recall, wears a fur. Robin of Munro’s story “Tricks” does not; she is instead disturbed…
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Writing Activity: Describe Medical Rooms and Hospitals
Medical rooms and hospitals are safe, infantalising, dangerous, creepy, life-saving, traumatising places, and I offer them here as examples of what Foucault called ‘heterotopia‘. The hospital’s ambiguous relationship to everyday social space has long been a central theme of hospital ethnography. Often, hospitals are presented either as isolated “islands’ defined by biomedical regulation of space…
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Powers by Alice Munro Short Story Analysis
“Powers” is the final story in the Runaway collection by Alice Munro, published 2004. I find this story the most challenging of the lot — as in, what in holy heck was that all about? I’m going to have to write about “Powers” in order to understand it. Here goes my best shot. What can…
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The Tale of Tom Kitten by Beatrix Potter Analysis
The Tale of Tom Kitten was created soon after Beatrix Potter had moved into her farm in the Lake District, which she’d bought with the proceeds earned from The Tale of Peter Rabbit. The illustrations are recognisably of Hill Top and of the farmstead’s surrounding village. The cats of the illustrations were real cats who…
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Pictures by Katherine Mansfield Short Story Analysis
“Pictures” is a short story by Katherine Mansfield, published 1919. The London Evening Standard said of the story ‘it is stark realism from first word to last and yet it gives an impression of infinite understanding and pity’. The character Ada Moss was inspired by a woman Mansfield met three years earlier. They had sat…
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Trespasses by Alice Munro Short Story Analysis
“Trespasses” is a short story by Canadian author Alice Munro, included in the collection Runaway, published 2006. This piece might challenge everything you’ve learned about how to structure a story. All the parts are there, but not as you’d expect. If Alice Munro had anonymously joined one of my writing critique groups over the years,…
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Which computer would your character use?
ON TV, EVERYONE OWNS A MAC: one of the most glaring tropes in modern fiction. The more I notice it, the more I notice it. Despite the prevalence of PCs in real life, most fictional characters — in novels as well as on TV and movies — are banging away on an Apple Mac. It’s completely…
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The Tale of Mrs Tittlemouse by Beatrix Potter Analysis
Which mouse are you? Fight, flight, freeze or appease? Beatrix Potter’s Mrs. Tittlemouse (1910) is inclined to appease, as perhaps you must, if you are small and vulnerable. Except every mouse I have ever met is a bolshy, ‘sit on this and swivel’ type. In winter they hang out behind the dishwasher and will hurtle…