Invitation to the Exercise

Take the following three premises as a starting place: 

• Premise 1: Every story is a prompt.
• Premise 2: Every piece of writing is a piece of rewriting.
• Premise 3: Every piece of writing can be imitated, and imitation is one way of studying literary production and gaining tools for your process.

To try out these three premises, we are going to use one story as a prompt, as an opportunity for imitation, and as a chance to explore how writing is rewriting.

As a class, choose a story to imitate. Everyone should imitate the same story. We'll respond to each other's work with the following two questions. The story that imitates most closely but in a most unexpected way will win this fun, low-stakes competition. 

Questions to Guide Your Reading of Your Peers' Work

• Question 1: How does this story imitate the craft of the assigned story? How do the craft choices in the imitation compare to the original?
• Question 2: What in the story demonstrates creative thinking? What is unexpected about this story? What surprised you? How did this author “make it new”?

We'll end this exercise by returning to a discussion of the three premises listed at the top of the page. 

“WE GET OUR VOICES FROM THE VOICES OF OTHERS.”
—CALUM MCCANN