INTRODUCTION

Fiction writers often adopt narrative personas (or masks) that give the events of a story an emotional impact. One of the classic ways of creating narrative personas is to let a story unfold solely through the letters between two characters, with each character writing half the story. How can writing from within a narrative persona advance students' storytelling and prose skills? What can they discover, in this process, about narrative structure and the conventions of fiction writing?

PROJECT OVERVIEW

In this project, students work in pairs to write short stories that are told through a series of iCards, or Internet "postcards." Each pair begins by defining the parameters of its story (who, what, where, when, and why) and creating a chronology of events. Each student in the pair then takes on the role of one of the characters, and the two write the story by sending iCards to each other. After all the stories have been written, they are set up as mPOWER presentations on computers for the class to view and comment on.

Phase 1: Exploring letters in fiction

Introduce the epistolary (or "letter-based") form of fiction by inviting students to read aloud selections from different examples, such as the visual novel Griffin & Sabine: An Extraordinary Correspondence, the epistolary plays Dear Liar or Love Letters, or the classic novels Pamela (1740) or Clarissa (1748), by Samuel Richardson. Lead the class in discussion of the selections.

Phase 2: Tracing the arc of the story

Working in pairs, students brainstorm ideas for stories that focus on the lives of two interconnected characters who tell their story by writing postcards to each other. Pairs establish provisional answers to the basic questions: Who are the two main characters who write to each other? What is happening to them? Where are they? When does the story take place? Why are they apart and writing postcards to each other?

Next, each pair uses Inspiration to map the entire story from beginning to end, listing each key point.

Phase 3: Writing the story in pairs

Each writing pair reviews its story map and selects 8 to 12 key points to use to tell the story. Then each student in the pair takes on the role of one of the main characters, and together they decide which key points in the story each character will narrate.

Pairs begin writing their stories by starting their iCard correspondence. They work directly on the iCards templates, sending them back and forth to each other's email addresses as they are completed, as they would in a real correspondence. For guidance in writing each iCard, students draw on the story parameters and the story map created in Phase 2.

Phase 4: Sharing the stories

Each corresponding pair of students brings its story to a close. Then they convert their set of iCards into an mPOWER presentation so that their "epistolary" story can be shared with other students. They place each iCard on an mPOWER slide, save the mPOWER presentation, and make it available for other students to view.

Students rotate among the computers on which the postcard story presentations are set up, viewing each set of postcards and leaving comments for the authors in an AppleWorks word-processing document set up for this purpose.

After pairs have had a chance to review the comments they receive, convene a class discussion about the experience of writing fiction in postcard form, touching on what students learned about storytelling, narrative, and economical writing.