Students have been spending the last two days working on how we can use plot and setting to analyze a short story. Each day’s classes came up with slightly different results.

Our first step was to explicate the plot and setting of our story:

We determined that the real heart of the story, and thus of the conflict, was the fact that the protagonist unknowingly kills his brother as he tries to escape from being pinned down on the roof. This is what gives the story its power; this is the heart of the story that cannot be tampered with.

We then began asking whether we could change various elements of the plot. We determined that it doesn’t have to be on a roof; it just has to be somewhere the protagonist can be trapped. We decided that it doesn’t have to be Dublin, though a historian of the Irish Civil War might tell us that snipers were only active in Dublin. (I have no idea if this is the case. I used it as an example.) At first, everyone thought it couldn’t be moved from Ireland because it’s set in the Irish Civil War, but we soon figured out that it simply has to be in a setting where a brother could kill a brother without knowing it. Civil war and gang warfare are the most logical locations.

From there, it was fairly easy to create a working TS for our paragraph. We added some CDs before we decided that we had them in the wrong order: CD2 was our first CD so we would actually reverse the order if we were to write this paragraph. Finally, once all the CM was completed, we saw that our TS was a little out of alignment with our chunks, so we gave it a whack to knock it over a bit, adding “In order for the surprise ending to work” at the beginning of the paragraph.

At this point, the majority of the work is done. We still have actually to write out everything, but the hardest part is behind us.