{"id":3488,"date":"2018-01-31T10:42:00","date_gmt":"2018-01-31T15:42:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/brackety-ack.pages.roanoke.edu\/?p=3488"},"modified":"2018-01-31T10:42:00","modified_gmt":"2018-01-31T15:42:00","slug":"stakes-not-high-enough","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brackety-ack.com\/?p=3488","title":{"rendered":"Stakes Not High Enough in Intro Fiction Story"},"content":{"rendered":"

Written by Joe Krzyston<\/em><\/p>\n

The uneasiness was palpable in a Miller Hall classroom today as Bailey Mann\u2019s short story was analyzed and picked apart for incongruities in form and theme. The conclusion of his peers? The stakes were simply not high enough. Other critiques were delivered as well, with some students finding his setting (a fire escape behind a venue where a band had just played a show) alternatingly too boring or hard to believe, but it was this, the charge that the characters, should they fall, might not tumble very far, that brought the mounting tension to a head.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/span> \u201cIt\u2019s not that I don\u2019t like it,\u201d said one student, a creative writing major with a double minor in ego and pretension, \u201cbut I just didn\u2019t think the stakes were high enough. Like, why should I care about the characters, you know? What might happen? I just had a really hard time getting into the characters. I didn\u2019t feel like I knew them.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/span> Mr. Mann delivered a spirited rebuttal, saying that the stakes \u201c\u2026didn\u2019t necessarily need to be high. Can\u2019t fiction explore the everyday? The things we all live with? The things we all feel?\u201d His sparring partner was not backing down, however, and pressed the offensive.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/span> \u201cI get what you\u2019re saying, but I feel that you owe it to the reader to make me care, you know?\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/span> After a while, Mr. Mann slipped into a numb fog, half-listening to the only person in the class who\u2019d bothered to read his story at all tear it apart on entirely subjective grounds. Responding indirectly to a broader trend in literary studies of smug superiority of the reader to the text, Mr. Mann sighed, saying,<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cLook man, I\u2019m just trying to get some feedback, and if you\u2019re not into it you\u2019re not into it. But I just heard the same thing fifty-eight times, and I\u2019m about one more vague critique away from rolling my own cigarettes, wearing a lot of black, talking about writing more frequently than I actually write, and just generally turning into a caricature of an English major.\u201d <\/span><\/p>\n

The students responsible for the critique were, at the end of class, vaguely satisfied with the deconstruction they\u2019d performed, but they had a hard time articulating in full a reason for their satisfaction. When asked to provide a constructive alternative in the wake of their withering criticism, they told the Brackety-Ack they\u2019d be in touch soon. That was a month ago. <\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Written by Joe Krzyston The uneasiness was palpable in a Miller Hall classroom today as Bailey Mann\u2019s short story was analyzed and picked apart for incongruities in form and theme. The conclusion of his peers? The stakes were simply not high enough. Other critiques were delivered as well, with some students finding his setting (a…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":3489,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3488","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-opinion"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/brackety-ack.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/01\/Thumbs-up-down.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brackety-ack.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3488","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brackety-ack.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brackety-ack.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brackety-ack.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brackety-ack.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3488"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/brackety-ack.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3488\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brackety-ack.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/3489"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brackety-ack.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3488"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brackety-ack.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3488"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brackety-ack.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3488"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}