Instructions
For this assignment, you will write a complete short story of between 1,000 and 5,000 words. The story may be realistic, speculative, historical, humorous, suspenseful, romantic, or written in another genre, but it must be grounded in some meaningful way in your own background.
That grounding might come from your identity, family history, culture, region, community, language, interests, education, work, hobbies, or lived experience. You are not required to write an autobiographical story or to reproduce something that actually happened. Instead, use what you know to give the fictional world specificity, credibility, and emotional weight.
For example, you might draw upon:
- A place or community you know well
- A family, cultural, or regional tradition
- A language, dialect, or way of speaking familiar to you
- A profession, hobby, subculture, or field of knowledge
- An emotion, conflict, relationship, or experience you understand
- A subject you have studied closely or care deeply about
The goal is not simply to “write about yourself.” The goal is to recognize that your experiences, interests, and ways of seeing the world can provide rich material for fiction.
THE STORY
Your story should present a character—or group of characters—facing a meaningful situation, desire, conflict, or change. It should feel complete within the assigned length, even if the ending leaves some questions unresolved.
As you draft, consider the following:
- What does the central character want?
- What stands in the character’s way?
- Why does the story begin at this particular moment?
- What changes, is revealed, or becomes unavoidable?
- What specific details make the setting and characters believable?
- What choices of point of view, structure, dialogue, imagery, and pacing best serve the story?
Your work may be inspired by real people or events, but the submitted piece should function as fiction rather than memoir or personal essay.
Evaluation Criteria
Your story will be evaluated in the following areas:
COMPELLING VOICE
The writing should possess a distinctive and engaging presence. Voice may emerge through the narrator’s personality, the character’s perspective, the story’s language, or the writer’s handling of tone.
A compelling voice does not have to be flashy or unusual. It should feel intentional, consistent, and appropriate to the story being told.
VERISIMILITUDE AND ANCHOREDNESS
The story should feel convincingly rooted in a particular world. Characters, places, relationships, and events should be supported by concrete and credible details.
Even an entirely fantastical story needs verisimilitude: an internal sense of truth and consistency. The reader should feel that the writer understands the story’s setting, people, and circumstances.
Strong anchoredness may come from sensory description, cultural or regional specificity, convincing dialogue, accurate knowledge, or carefully imagined social and physical environments. Details should deepen the story rather than merely decorate it.
CRAFT COMPETENCY
The story should demonstrate an emerging command of the basic elements of fiction, including:
- Characterization and motivation
- Conflict, tension, or narrative movement
- Setting and atmosphere
- Point of view
- Scene and summary
- Dialogue
- Pacing and structure
- Imagery and descriptive detail
- An effective opening and ending
Not every successful story will emphasize these elements equally. Your craft choices should support the particular effect you want the story to have.
REVISION AND PRESENTATION
The final version should show meaningful development beyond the workshop draft. The manuscript should be carefully edited, readable, and formatted consistently. Sentence-level errors should not interfere with the reader’s experience.
A Note on “Writing What You Know”
Writing what you know does not mean limiting your imagination. You may write about another century, another planet, a supernatural event, or a character very different from yourself.
The challenge is to build outward from something you know deeply.
You may not know what it is like to encounter a ghost, but you may know what it is like to grieve. You may not have lived through a revolution, but you may understand family conflict, divided loyalties, or fear of losing one’s home. You may invent a city, but give it the heat, traffic, food, speech, music, architecture, or social tensions of places you have experienced.
Use the familiar not as a boundary, but as a foundation for invention.