Challenging Realism Story (the Nontraditional Story) Final

Write a story that challenges or makes us rethink the conventions of realism.

As Martone and Hemley note in the introduction to their anthology Extreme Fiction, stories which challenge our expectations about realism do so in a variety of ways. Two of the main challengers are Formalists or Fabulists. In your story, you may take the Formalist approach, providing basically realistic content through a form that challenges the accepted conventions of realism, or the Fabulist approach providing patently unrealistic content by using those accepted norms, or you may combine them.

Fabulist approaches would include fantasy, science fiction, and taking what seems to be a completely ordinary situation or series of events and transforming them, over the course of your story, into something totally unreal. This approach uses all the techniques of realism but some aspect(s) of the content of your story are unreal.

Formalist approaches would include collage, hermit crab stories, extremely heightened attention to language, playing with how the text looks on the page, and incorporating myths or fairy tales. In this approach, the content is realistic but the formal aspects of the story constantly remind the reader that they are reading and don’t allow for immersion or the suspension of disbelief.

Or you may combine the two approaches.

You may be freer with your approach to formatting on this story, as long as your choices support the story's goals. However, the story should

• be 10-12 pages double spaced (2500-3600 words)
• include your name, a title, and a note about which approach you are taking on the first page
• include page numbers
• be submitted as a Word doc. If you absolutely can't do that, talk to me.