Teaching Journalistic Cogency with 55-Word Short Stories

Novelists and other dramatists have long extolled practice of nonfiction writing-specifically journalism-as a way of gaining worldly experience, learning information-gathering techniques, and tightening one's prose style. Describing this idealized career path nearly thirty years ago in Journalism, journalist turned novelist Tom Wolfe writes: The idea was to get a job on a newspaper, keep body and soul together, pay rent, get to know 'the world,' accumulate 'experience,' perhaps work some of fat off your style-then, at some point, quit cold, say good-bye to journalism, move into a shack somewhere, work night and day for six months, and light up sky with final triumph. final triumph was known as Novel. (p. 5) Of course, as Wolfe contends in his now famous thesis, it was ironically New Journalist who, by borrowing stylistic techniques of novelist, became reigning literary figure starting in mid-1960s. Still, acts of writing fiction and nonfiction have always shared symbiotic learning outcomes. Is it all that odd, then, to suggest that practice of fictive storytelling-hardly a pedagogical staple of journalism instruction-could serve as effective tool for training student journalists? To be sure, practice of fictive storytelling is certainly no substitute for solid, traditional training in newsgathering and newswriting; but storytelling, beyond functioning as good pedagogy for learning larger craft of fulllength fiction writing (and introducing many of techniques that literary journalists now use), can be exciting and productive exercise for teaching journalism students how to write cogently. More specifically, I submit that one way of learning art of concise, tightly-structured, focused prose is through composing of 55-word stories. What comprises 55-word storytelling, and how can its practice improve journalistic writing? History and structure 55-word story belongs to a category of brief ranging in length from 55 words to 1,750 words, that has been called various names, including short shorts, short sudden fiction, flash fiction, micro fiction, and fast fiction. Such says Jerome Stern in his 1996 edited volume Micro Fiction, is an ancient and honorable form, deeply rooted in human psyche and in history of human communities, whose earlier predecessors include anecdotes, jokes, fables, and parables (pp. 17-18). Although variations of brief fiction have been around forever, impetus for contemporary efforts, according to Robert Shapard and James Thomas, who edited 1986 anthology Sudden Fiction, can be traced to the spirit of experiment and wordplay of 1960s (p. xiv). It was then, recalls Stern, that writers like Russel Edson and Enrique Anderson Imbert started writing stories only a few lines long, as if to pose question `Can a story be too to be a story?' (p. 18). Thus far, it would appear that 55 words is minimum. Compared to its longer counterparts, 55-word story may offer less chance to develop dramatic technique (which, fortunately, is not our objective here), while allowing more opportunity to learn about language use and sentence structure: because form is so brief its successful completion mandates writer's scrutiny of every word used, as well as one's questioning and analysis of sentence function. To understand nature and structure of a 55-word story is to realize first what it is not. It is not familiar soundbite or contracted argument that now floods our airways. Nor is it simply observation, reflection, perspective, or philosophy on life; all could be found in any story, but none by itself constitutes storytelling. Simply put, a 55-word story is a very story having a beginning, middle, and end. But it is more. In World's Shortest Stories, a 1995 collection of 55-word efforts, editor Steve Moss reminds us that all stories, regardless of length, must contain four elements: characters, setting, conflict, and resolution. …