Summer SAVY 2016 (Session 2, Day 3) – The Art of Fiction

Posted by hallep on Wednesday, June 22, 2016 in Grade 5, Grade 6, SAVY.

We started today’s class with a freewriting session and then broke up into small groups to discuss memorable characters. We made a list of the traits we found in memorable characters, which included characters who change in interesting ways, characters with a sense of adventure and a sense of humor, and characters who surprise us with their observations. Next we read Edgar Allen Poe’s “A Tell-Tale Heart” and discussed whether or not we trusted its protagonist. We used the story to learn more about unreliable narrators and retrospective narrators (we also tried to figure out what was going on with that vulture-eye obsession). Obsession, we concluded, is a motivating force in fiction. For a story to have energy and a propulsive drive, we decided that it was best if one of the characters was obsessed with something–not just with an object, but with emotional intangible qualities, such as a sense of belonging.

  We then took our in-progress stories and went to the computer lab to begin typing these stories up. At the end of the day, we began to read each other’s work, which we will discuss together in greater detail tomorrow.