WRITING SHORT STORIES: A COURSE ON CREATIVE WRITING.

JOSÉ ENDOENÇA MARTINS

SHORT STORIES

Let’s say that short stories present these aspects: problem, complication and resolution. Let’s also say that these three aspects are visible in three characters’ actions. The protagonist acts to fulfill his wish; the antagonist acts to prevent the protagonist from fulfilling the wish he has; and the helper acts to mediate the conflict that exists between the protagonist and antagonist. These characters’ actions make these three aspects visible: problem, complication and resolution. We may say that problem is associated with the protagonist, complication with the antagonist, and resolution with the helper.
A brief definition of a short story comes in Franklin’s (1986) words. In his writing, “a story consists of a sequence of actions that occur when a sympathetic character encounters a complicating situation that he confronts and solves” (FRANKLIN, 1986: p. 71). The sympathetic character is the protagonist, who confronts a complicating situation proposed by the antagonist, by means of which he prevents the protagonist from fulfilling his desire. In order to overcome the complicating situation the protagonist acts with the support of the helper. Thus, the resolution takes place.

Complication

Complication puts the protagonist and the antagonist in opposite sides. They fight in order to accomplish what they are looking for. That is why complication always comes from the outside, is external, caused by the antagonist. However, it causes internal effects in the character also. A complication is always a threat to what he wishes to achieve. A consequence of the battle involving the protagonist and antagonist, and the conflicts they bring to the story, is TENSION, or suspense. Franklin (1986) explains that TENSION “raises a question in the reader’s mind as to how the outcome will be solved, and what the outcome will mean to (and tell about) the character” (FRANKLIN, 1986: p. 74). The characters act because the conflict must end, and complication be solved.
Complication must have literary value. Franklin (1986) explains about the literary value of complication, saying, “to be of literary values a complication must, first of all, be basic” (…) and be “also significant to the human” (FRANKLIN, 1986: p. 75). When love, hate, pain, death, are present in complication, they tend to involve the characters in dramatic events. Thus complication becomes basic, human, and possesses literary value.

Resolution

Any change in the characters situation taking complication to an end is resolution. Either physical, or psychological, internal or external, resolution accomplishes one thing only, that is, it eliminates TENSION or suspense. Franklin (1986) explains the ties that connect complication to resolution: ”what makes resolution so valuable is that while a majority of complications don’t have resolution, resolutions almost always have complication” (FRANKLIN, 1986:p. 78).
Resolution of complication helps the reader learn something new. The new lesson comes through his appreciation of the characters’ efforts to take their conflicts to an end. For Franklin (1986), resolutions with literary value are those that are “products of the characters’ own efforts” (FRANKLIN, 1986: p. 82).

Action

In stories possessing literary value, complication and resolution depend on action. Action involves movement that combines physical and psychological efforts. For Franklin (1986), “to be of much value to the writer, action has to require expenditure of significant and/or physical energy. The more energy expended, the more powerful the story” (FANKLIN, 1986: p. 83). Action leads the characters from complication to resolution. Action moves two ways: in one, the characters do something; in the other, something is done to them.

Characters.

As characters act, their actions can help the reader understand them. Franklin (1986) defines a character as “the human being whose life the complication complicates. It is he who acts, and is acted upon. It is he who reaches equilibrium when the resolution finally occurs” (FRANKLIN, 1986: p. 86). A good character must be unique, and his uniqueness will make your story also unique. The quality of a character depends on the way he views complication. He must understand the complication he faces. A look at his past will tell much about the way he deals with complication. A fear at the present moment may be associated with a fear in the past. His action moves between his past and present life. Franklin (1986) argues that

In the best stories, the odyssey from complication to resolution changes the character profoundly. In fact, the resolution often results not directly from the action but from a growing enlightenment – often a sudden flash of insight – as the character finally realizes what he has to do to solve his problem (FRANKLIN, 1986: p. 89).

The reader tends to identify with the character’s problem and actions. The reader’s satisfaction comes when he learns with the character’s story. The story teaches the reader to become a better and wiser person, without moralizing him.

Genres

Stories develop in association with narrative genres. Many genres are available to writers. Genres like adventure, gothic, biographical science fiction, mystery, literary, kid and adult story, thriller and detective, fantasy, horror and romance offer good chances for a writer to enlarge his writing ability.

METAPHORS

Characters like protagonist, antagonist and helper can be associated with these three metaphors: Ariel, Caliban, and Esu. These metaphors represent people’s identities. Ariel is the metaphor for the person who denies his own culture in order to assimilate foreign values. He possesses an assimilationist identity. Unlike Ariel, Caliban becomes the metaphor for the person who lives his own culture and hates somebody else’s values. He has a nationalist identity. Unlike both Ariel and Caliban, Esu combines his own culture with the culture of the others. He creates a catalyst identity for himself.

Ariel-like Behavior: Protagonist

A Brazilian character possessing an Ariel-like behavior assimilates the American cultural value, let’s say The Statue of Liberty. He admires it, he loves it, he does anything to possess it. In a word, he assimilates it. As he assimilates the foreign value, he also refuses his own cultural value. He thinks it is ugly, inferior, thus he despises it, and replaces it for the American one. In short, this Brazilian character becomes an assimilationist Ariel.
Who is Ariel, anyway?
Ariel is not only the spirit character in Shakespeare’s The Tempest, but also the young intellectual in Uruguayan Rodo’s (1900) essay Ariel. In both the play and the essay, Ariel is the individual who builds his own identity while he identifies, and establishes alliances, with the values of other cultures, external to his own. In the island, in Shakespeare’s play, Ariel adheres to Prospero’s power as the only source of his freedom and emancipation. The dialogue that goes between him and Prospero illuminates the ties of submission that connects the islander’s spirit to the foreigner usurper of the island:

Ariel: All hail, great master, grave sir, hail: I come
To answer thy best pleasure; be’t to fly,
To swim, to dive into the fire, to ride
On the curled clouds, [alighting and bowing] to thy
Strong bidding task
Ariel, and all his quality (SHAKESPEARE, 1994: p. 12).

Later on, Ariel reminds Prospero of the agreement they make, by means of which Ariel will be given his freedom in reward for the work he did to the European. “My liberty. I prithee” (SHAKESPEARE, 1994: p.15), Ariel demands. When Prospero threatens Ariel, for the spirit reminds the master of the master’s faithfulness to the mutual agreement they share, Ariel’s reaction is full obedience. “Pardon, master. I will be correspondent to command, And do my spiriting gently (SHAKESPEARE, 1994: p. 17), Ariel promises complete obedience. Prospero regains his position as Duke of Milan, with Ariel’s full participations in the master’s plot against his enemies.
In the essay Ariel, Rodó (2004) examines the alliances that Ariel maintains with Prospero. In the Uruguayan’s article, Ariel represents the Latin American youth, who will make of the continent a transplanted image of the European ideals of morality, rationality, beauty and good taste. Taking the Greek civilization as his model of civilization, Rodó portrays Ariel as the best symbol of the social, political and cultural life that will lead Latin Americans in the 20th Century to develop progress and emancipation. “Athens knows how to exalt both the ideal and the real, reason and instinct, the forces of the spirit and those of the body” (RODÓ, 2006: p. 43), writes the Uruguayan.
Rodó also argues that these Greek ideals of Athens, if, and when, effectively practiced by Latin Americans, will become the antidote against the US utilitarianism and material prosperity represented by Caliban, the monster-like creature of Shakespeare’s (1994) The Tempest. Therefore, in Rodó’s view, the challenge put before the new generations of the Latin Americans resides in the struggle between the ideal, associated with Ariel and Europe, and the utilitarian, related to Caliban and The United States. “A civilization acquires its character not from a display of prosperity or material supremacy, but from the grandeur of thought and feeling possible within it” (RODÓ, 2006: p. 60). Rodó suggests that “if it is said that “utilitarianism” is the word for the spirit of the English, then the United States can be considered the embodiment of the word” (RODÓ, 2006: p. 71).
The result of Ariel’s campaign in the play and in the essay is similar: Prospero gives him freedom in The Tempest; Rodó offers him the status of the metaphor of reason and rationality in Latin America. As for Caliban, his end is the worst possible: defeat and rendition before Prospero; the metaphor of the lowest utilitarianism, in Rodó’s essay. Regarding the European ideality that he wants for Latin Americans, Rodó’s words are meaningful. “We Latin American have a heritage of race, a great ethnic tradition, to maintain, a sacred place in the pages of history that depends upon us for its continuation” (RODÓ, 2006: p. 73), writes the Uruguayan. Therefore, his definition of Ariel fits in his political agenda for the creation of a new identity for Latin American peoples. He writes:

Shakespeare’s ethereal Ariel symbolizes the noble, soaring aspect of the human spirit. He represents the superiority of reason and feeling over the base impulses of irrationality. He is generous enthusiasm, elevated and unselfish motivation in all actions, spirituality in culture, vivacity and grace in intelligence. Ariel is the ideal toward which human selection ascends, the force that wields life’s eternal chisel, effacing from aspiring mankind the clinging vestiges of Caliban, the play’s symbol of brutal sensuality (RODÓ, 2006: p. 31).

Caliban-Like Behavior: Antagonist

Caliban is not Ariel. In both Shakespeare’s (1994) The Tempest and Retamar’s (2003) Caliban, Caliban walks on a cultural route that is different from that taken by Ariel. While Ariel allies himself with Prospero’s project to dominate the island, Caliban not only opposes his oppressor’s wish to be the lord of the island, but also makes efforts to dethrone him from power. Caliban’s efforts to take power from Prospero’s hands begin with his strong statement that the island belongs to him. “This island’s mine, by Sycorax my mother, which thou tak’st from me,” (SHAKESPEARE, 1994; p.18), Caliban says to Prospero. In his efforts, Caliban includes other actions: first, his attempt to rape Miranda, Prospero’s daughter, whom the European brought to the island with him. When Prospero accuses him of such a vile deed Caliban reacts saying that he “[would] have peopled else this isle with Calibans” (SHAKESPEARE, 1994: p. 19); second, his curse of Prospero in Prospero’s own language. “You taught me language, and my profit on’t is, I know how to curse: the red-plague rid you, for learning me your language” (SHAKESPEARE, 1994: p. 19), Caliban says. He goes on with his curses:

All the infections that the sun sucks up
From frogs, fens, flats, on Prosper fall, and make him
By inch-meal a disease! [Lightning] His spirits hear me,
And yet I need must curse… (SHAKESPEARE, 1994: p. 36).

Finally, Caliban makes alliance with two Europeans, Trinculo and Stephano. With such an alliance, he expects to get free from oppression, but different from Ariel who believes Prospero will set him free after he fulfills his boss’s orders, Caliban requests the help from Prospero’s enemies. He tells them what they must do: first, to destroy Prospero’s books, from which Caliban believes Prospero’s magic power comes; then, to kill Prospero while he sleeps. “there thou mayst brain him (…) or with a log batter his skull, or paunch him with a stake, or cut his wezand with thy knife…(SHAKESPEARE, 1994, p. 50), Caliban instructs them.
In his essay Caliban, Retamar (2003) elaborates his appropriation of the revolutionary agenda that Caliban proposes in Shakespeare’s play. Retamar does so in order to oppose his Caliban to both Rodó’s Ariel and Rodó’s ideas concerning the formation of leadership for a Twentieth-Century Latin America. While the Uruguayan intellectual proposes Ariel as the symbol of the leader that our continent needs, Retamar uses Caliban as a metaphor for Latin America’s nationalist leadership. “Our symbol then is not Ariel, as Rodó thought, but rather Caliban” (RETAMAR, 2005: p. 14), the Cuban author writes. He, then, justifies his refusal to take Ariel as the ideal symbol for an effective and challenging leadership in Latin America. He writes:

This is something that we, the mestizo inhabitants of these same isles where Caliban lived, see with particular clarity: Prospero invaded the islands, killed our ancestors, enslaved Caliban, and taught him his language to make himself understood. What else can Caliban do but use that same language – today he has no other – to curse him, to wish that the “red plague” would fall on him. I know no other metaphor more expressive of our cultural situation, of our reality (RETAMAR, 2005: p. 14).

With these words, discarding Ariel as the appropriate representation of our leadership, Retamar introduces Caliban as a more instigating model. He justifies his decision arguing that Ariel suggests that a 20th century Latin American leadership will mirror itself in the European models of elevated culture, civilization, beauty and rationality. Different from Ariel, Caliban symbolizes the Latin American native forces. Therefore, both the Uruguayan thinker and the Cuban author reject The United States as a possible leadership model in the continent. Retamar recognizes Rodó’s rejection of The United States, saying “he was able to point with clarity to the greatest enemy of our culture in his time – and in ours – and that is enormously important” (RETAMAR, 2005: p. 14), that is to say, “Rodó’s essential position against North American penetration” (RETAMAR, 2005: p. 15).
Despite his decision to create an innovating metaphor for a new leadership in Latin America, Retamar does not reject the Ariel-like feelings we may keep inside ourselves, because our real enemy is not Ariel, but Prospero. He explains

There is no real Ariel-Caliban polarity: both are slaves in the hands of Prospero, the foreign magician. But Caliban is the rude and unconquerable master of the island, while Ariel, a creature of the air, although also a child of the isle, is the intellectual – as both Ponce and Césaire have seen (RETAMAR, 2005: p. 16).

Retamar’s words make the opposition between Caliban and Ariel a little bit more visible. This is not a difference that will not be overcome, when and if necessary. In fact, the two symbols complement – or supplement – each other. With Ariel and Caliban, Rodó and Retamar wish to offer the best picture of Latin America. The Uruguayan wishes to see developed in the continent an identity that finds its sources in the European culture, civilization, ideals, beauty and rationality. The Cuban believes that the continent is able to provide an indigenous leadership, due to its own cultural matrix. As a result, we do not need alien models, because the native culture of our Latin America is all what we need.
He explains that

That culture – like every living culture, especially at its dawn – is on the move. It has, of course, its own distinguishing characteristics, even though it was born – like every culture, although in this case in a particularly planetary way – of a synthesis. An it does not limit itself in the least to a mere repetition of the elements that formed it (RETAMAR, 2003: p.83).

He concludes: “our culture is – and can only be – the child of revolution, of our multisecular rejection of all colonialisms” (RETAMAR, 2005: p. 38).

Esu-Like Behavior: Helper

I have already suggested that, due to his naïve alliance with the seductive forces of the European cultural values of physical and intellectual beauty, Ariel does not encompass the most interesting behavior a Latin American can assume. In Shakespeare’s (1994) The Tempest, Ariel’s identification with Prospero, the European who steals his island, limits his possibility of signification. In Rodó’s (2004) Ariel, Ariel’s embodiment of a Latin American type of leadership, wishing to replace the continental indigenous culture for the European civilization, debilitates his meaning and political chances. As he turns his backs to what is typical in the island and in Latin American continent, Ariel takes a route that moves him away from his own people.
What about Caliban?
Like Ariel, he cannot be taken as a sustainable model of interracial alliance for different reasons. In Shakespeare’s (1994) play, the kind of opposition he establishes to the presence of Prospero in the island places himself and Ariel in opposite sides. Likewise, in Retamar’s (2003) Caliban, Caliban’s experiences conflict with those of Ariel’s. Caliban fights to defend Latin American culture, symbolized in the cultural production of the Indian and the Negro, the indigenous people of the continent. Using his energies and intents to resist to any foreign participation in the construction of his own culture, Caliban deliberately distances himself from what is foreign and from what may contaminate his genuine roots.
The extremist positions of both Ariel’s and Caliban’s cultural proposals are counter-balanced by Esu, who represents cultural duality and integration. His capability to fuse different cultures makes it possible for him to live in the crossroads, thus making room for unexpected ways of living. Having one foot on the divine realm and the other on the human world, Esu makes the gods and the humans to keep mutual conversation going on. In his book The Signifying Monkey, specially the first chapter named Esu-Elegbara and the Signifying Monkey, Gates (1988) describes Esu as a deity whose “legs are of different lengths because he keeps one anchored in the realm of the gods while the other rests in this, our human world” (GATES, 1988: p.6). Gates sees as strategically important Esu’s ability to connect different worlds, represented by the world of the gods and the world of the humans. He plays the role of the interpreter “who interprets the will of the gods to man; who carries the desires of man to the gods” (GATES, 1988: p. 6).
His role as interpreter and messenger – one that lives in two different worlds – characterizes him as the metaphor for the intercultural encounter, in which the interlocutors’ autonomy makes the conversation effective. Different from both Ariel and Caliban, Esu does not turn his back to none of two worlds involved in the dialogue. He keeps oppression, submission and indifference outside the encounter. Besides, the oppressor-oppressed opposition, present in the intercultural experiences mediated by Ariel and Caliban, does not find space in the kind of intercultural mediation that Esu creates. Mediated by Esu, the interlocutors in the conversation keep their individual autonomy and independence intact.
Originally, Esu is the metaphor for the encounter of the Africans with the New World peoples. When they Africans are enslaved the American countries, they manage to keep the characteristics of their culture. In slavery, they make their cultures to interact with the cultures of the countries where they are enslaved. For Gates (1988) these characteristics are the “aspects of their cultures that were meaningful, that could not be obliterated, and that they chose, by acts of will, not to forget” (GATES, 1988: p.4). These cultural elements, according to Gates, are:

Their music, their myths, their expressive institutional structures, their metaphysical systems of order, and their forms of performance. If “the Dixie Pike,” as Jean Toomer put the matter in Cane, “has grown from a goat path in Africa,” then the black vernacular tradition stands as its signpost, at that liminal crossroads of culture contact and ensuing difference at which Africa meets Afro-America (GATES, 1988: p.4).

Like Esu, who interprets the gods’ and the humans’ messages, and delivers them, the Africans slaves interpret “the new environment within a received framework of meaning and belief” (GATES, 1988: p. 4). For Gates slavery presents two aspects: (1) it brings separated Black African cultures together, because it “did serve to create a dynamic of exchange and revision among numerous previously isolated Black African cultures on a scale unprecedented in African History” (GATES, 1988: p. 4). As a result of these cultural fusion, occurs “a truly Pan-African culture fashioned as a colorful weave of linguistic, institutional, metaphysical, and formal threads” (GATES, 1988: p. 4); (2) slavery also allows for the building of an African-American culture, generated in the encounters that this Pan-African culture keeps with the European cultures. Gates explains that:

What survived this fascinating process was the most useful and the most compelling of the fragments at hand. Afro-American culture is an African culture with a difference as signified by the catalysts of English, Dutch, French, Portuguese, or Spanish languages and cultures, which informed the precise structures that each discrete New World Pan-African culture assumed (GATES, 1988: p. 4).

As an intercultural metaphoric phenomenon, Esu becomes a mediating force, having the potential ability to connect the two ways of the crossroads: he fuses the truth and the understanding, the sacred and the profane, the texts and the interpretation, the subject and the predicate. Mediation and combination of two opposing aspects of life lead to a third form of life. Esu brings complexity to the intercultural experience, thus allowing options and mutability to take place. Gates makes a list of Esu’s intercultural qualities:

A partial list of these qualities might include individuality, satire, parody, irony, magic, indeterminacy, open-endedness, ambiguity, sexuality, chance, uncertainty, disruption and reconciliation, betrayal and loyalty, closure and disclosure, encasement and rupture. But it is a mistake to focus on one of these qualities as predominant. Esu possesses all of these characteristics, plus a plethora of others (GATES, 1988; p. 6).

Due to his intercultural duality and multiplicity, Esu creates a double-voiced discourse, which makes of him the interpreter and translator of Ifa’s sacred texts. Esu translates, explains and liberates Ifa’s knowledge. As a result, he can affirm or condemn the messages in the texts. He also teaches how these texts should be read.
In his trip to the New World, Esu survives from the waters, flowing over them until he finds a safe place. Gates argues that Esu’s safety is a positive aspect of his intercultural interpretation and translation, especially the one the Africans develop when they first step on the New World ground. Gates (1988) writes that

We may take this sort of perpetual, or wandering, signification as an emblem of the process of cultural transmission and translation that recurred with startling frequency when African cultures encountered New World-European cultures and yielded a novel blend (GATES, 1988: p. 19).

Besides his role as interpreter and translator, who makes different and opposite cultures to join together, Esu is furthermore the one who can dance. From dance gets his most important aspect, regarding interculturality: his capacity to signify through the movement that he generates, creates and translates.
Esu’s intercultural signification is not denotative, but connotative. His connotation is always ambiguous because he uses a figurative language. Through ambiguity, his behavior allows many aspects to be included in the signification. His openness to many aspects of the cultural experience gives him the status of a metaphor for uncertain and multiple explanations.
Esu’s presence in the crossroads allows him to exercise many aspects of his duality. One is his capacity to mix the feminine and the masculine in order to generate the son. Esu generates “the third principle, making himself – neither male nor female, neither this nor that – but both, a compound morphology” (GATES, 1988: p. 29). Gates finds out, in some studies, the explication that Esu carries the characteristics of his male and female ancestors, and that these qualities together make him to walk between the two genders with freedom.
Esu’s ability to mix opposite aspects – the male and the female, the moon and the sun, the night and the day – transforms him in a mediator and interpreter. Therefore he becomes the interpreter who “governs meaning because he determines our understanding of the text” (GATES, 1988; p. 24), sacred or cultural. Gates believes that every text needs interpretation because it never has a fixed meaning, but a moveable one. He argues that a text

Consists of the dynamic and indeterminate relationship between truth on one hand and understanding on the other. (…) The relationship between truth and understanding yields our sense of meaning (…) Indeterminacy functions as a bar separating understanding and truth (…) Esu dwells in this bar. Indeed, he, like indeterminacy , is the bar (…) We can say that Esu is the indeterminacy of the interpretation of writing, and his traditional dwelling place at the crossroads, for the critic, is the crossroads of understanding and truth (GATES, 1988: p. 25).

In the cultural field, Esu needs a variable and moving cultural text in order to turn his mediation and interpretation into an intercultural metaphor. When this happens, the cultural text becomes open, similar to Esu who is also an open deity, who by knowing all the languages is able to make his mediation in many different ways. Gates argues that Esu carries in himself “the principle of fluidity, of uncertainty, of indeterminacy even of one’s inscribed fate” (GATES, 1988; p. 28). Gates continues establishing Esu’s interpretative capacity, saying that “the various figures of Esu provide endless, fascinating references to the critic’s role in interpretation and to the nature of interpretation itself” (GATES, 1988: 29).
Esu’s other crucial aspect as intercultural mediator, translator, interpreter, and critic is his capacity to represent wholeness, a whole which does not close, but opens. This is a round whole, whose two faces cover and show each other. The two faces are present in a process that allows one to succeed the other, but also permits that one becomes the other. This quality, important to the notion of interculturality, explains how those who encounter new cultures behave. That is, a person who shares different cultures follows a process of intercultural simultaneity. Living in a similar situation, Gates sees that “Esu is a figure of doubled duality, of unreconciled opposites, living in harmony” (GATES, 1988; p. 30).
As a dialectical principle, Esu’s duality opens itself to a third element: the synthesis of the two previous aspects. That is, the encounter of one’s culture with of the other’s culture cause a third culture to appear. Gates (1988) argues that “the 3 represents synthesis (…) Esu, in other words, signifies the synthesis of the number three” (GATES, 1988: p. 38), the element that results from the encounter of the two previous ones. For example, when a woman and a man get united they do that in order to give birth to a third element. Gates argues that this third element “represents the transcendence of the binary opposition, of contradiction” (GATES, 1988: p, 38). We can accept the idea that “anybody who does not have an Esu in his body cannot exist, even to know that he is alive” (GATES, 1988: p. 37).
Both the ordinary human being and the intercultural actor must give room for his Esu to work with freedom, and help him with the development of interculturality. Gates explains how Esu’s help occurs:

Esu, in other words, represents power in terms of agency of the will. But this ultimate power, of which even the will is a derivative, is the power of sheer plurality or multiplicity; the myths that account for his capacity to reproduce himself ad infinitum figure to the plurality of meanings that Esu represents in the process of Ifa [writing] divination (GATES, 1988: p.37).

The idea that each person possesses his/her Esu invites us to think of how different people, from different cultures, can get together. Gates argues, “Esu is the sum of the parts, as well as that which connects to parts” (GATES, 1988: p. 37). Besides, as Esu is the messenger and the god of communication he unites “the past, the present, and the unborn. Esu represents these stages, and makes their simultaneous existence possible” (GATES, 1988: p.37).
Esu is the mediator of texts, that is, he develops intercultural mediation. Gates (1988) summarizes Esu’s intercultural and intertextual mediating capacity with the idea that “Esu rules understanding of truth, a relationship that yields an individual’s meaning. Esu’s role in the critical process is to make that process possible: Esu is the process of interpretation” (GATES, 1988: p. 39). From this perspective, He becomes the collective mouth, that which can speak for the gods and for the human being as well, that which can get the different united. Esu is the mouth that speaks for all and to all, whose words make togetherness to appear, not separation, develop communion not disunion, create understanding, not misunderstanding, among things that are different. Working in this fashion, Esu does not turn himself into the cessation of textual, discursive, and cultural differences. On the contrary, he becomes the process by means of which the differences can speak to each other, without fearing that one of them will have the others under its control.

THE COURSE.

This course on creative writing is organized to relate the elements of the short stories – problem and protagonist, complication and antagonist, resolution and helper – with the metaphors for Ariel, Caliban and Esu.

Theoretical Background

This includes the reading and classroom discussion of several texts about short stories, short-story genres, and the metaphors.

Writing Tasks

They include tasks for the reading and discussion of the texts together with the tasks for the production of three different texts: a paper covering the theoretical texts (2000 words); a short story (2000 words), which relates the elements of the short story to the three metaphors; an essay, which associates the paper with the short story.

Evaluation

1. Individual Reading, and teacher-student classroom discussion: 10%.
2. Trio-group writing of the paper: 25%
3. Trio-group writing of the short story: 25%
4. Individual writing of the essay: 40%

The Texts

1. Stalking the True Short Story, by Jon Franklin.
2. The Philosophy of the Plot, by James N. Frey.
3. The Plot Thicken, by Monica Wood.
4. Creating four-Dimensional Characters, by Stephanie Kay Bendel.
5. The Tempest, by William Shakespeare.
6. Ariel, by José Enrique Rodó
7. Caliban, by Roberto Fernándes Retamar.
8. Esu, by Henry Louis Gates.

REFERENCES

FRANKLIN, j. Writing for Story: Craft Secrets of Dramatic Nonfiction by a two-time Pulitzer Prize Winner. New York: A Plume Book, 1986.
GATES, H. L. The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 1988.
LEDDER, M., HEFFRON, J. The Complete Handbook of Novel Writing. Cincinnatti: Writer’s Digest Books, 2002.
RETAMAR, R. F. Caliban and Other Essays. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005.
RODÓ, J. E. Ariel. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006.
SHAKESPEARE, W. The Tempest. Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions Limited, 1994.