Category: Fiction

A short dialogue that isn’t about the breakup.

A young woman goes on a journey to the inner planets of our solar system and becomes a participant in one of the most unprecedented events in human history.

This is a collection of ten short stories that were intended to bemuse, berate, and bewilder.

For this assignment, we were supposed to have a three-person dialogue about video games without using quotes or identifying markers. I kind of cheated here by adding color, but I’m sure no one will really care either way.

The purpose of this assignment was to help us construct the smallest story without having to write an introduction, and to concentrate on developing the story and characters in what was implied rather than said. In case you’re wondering, they are not on ecstasy.

The assignment was to write about a serial killer doing something mundane, like shopping. I’m sorry but I just can’t help but think in the future. The main character in this story was originally named Mr. Rivus, but I had to use that name somewhere more important.

This assignment was to write a dialogue between two people without using identifying markers like, “he said,” and “said Kari.” I don’t remember what the content requirements were, but I would guess there weren’t any. My professors are good about that.

The assignment here was to “write the worst, horriblest story” I could. I’m sure it could’ve been worse, but I wanted to be somewhat readable. Though I’m sure I missed a few, I tried to break every rule I could think of, including (but not limited to) grammar, spelling, coherency, decency, and blasphemy. How many can you find?

This is a short story about two men in the middle of the Iraq war from each person’s perspective. One is American and the other is Iraqi. I messed up this assignment because it was supposed to have three perspectives, which threw my creative writing class off. They were confused as to who was speaking. To compensate for that problem, I color-coded the text. But it took away from the point of the exercise. And we can’t expect people to print stories in color. That’s called a comic book. Anyway, I decided to keep the two speakers in two different fonts because I wanted it to be immediately obvious that there were two different narrators.

The assignment was to write from the perspective of someone who is wearing two different shoes and suddenly realizes it. They were supposed to think that everyone noticed and (I guess) freak out about it. My only fear with this story (besides how insufferably lame it is) is that someone might completely miss the irony. Dude, I swear I’m not, like, represented in that story. Like, you know, dude?

I originally started writing a story where the author torments the main character by putting him in various weird situations. I set it aside for a long time until I was told to write a metafiction story. I pulled out the sections that did not fit my new story and wrote the rest months later.

This was actually enjoyable to do because it allowed me to do something with a piece that I have had a hard time finishing. There are so many things you can do with the seed idea that I just left it alone because it was so open-ended. This, however, is a relatively satisfying way to compress a book into a short story.

This was an assignment where I was supposed to read T. Coraghessan Boyle’s “The Hit Man” and rewrite it using any other profession. It is intended to be a humorous piece about the life of a drug dealer. Special thanks to Boyle for not suing me (yet) for “borrowing” the idea. Try not to take this piece too seriously. There are a lot of half-jokes and wordplay here that is supposed to mimic the original. It actually got a few good laughs when they read it in class. Maybe you’ll laugh, too.

I don’t remember what the assignment was here, but I know I wrote it for a class. It could’ve been a really vague assignment like “write a 1500 word story with first-person dialogue.” I really don’t know. All I do know is that it was inspired by events going on at the time. 9/11 occurred just a few years before this was written, and we’d only been in Iraq for a year or two. One of my classmates that reviewed the story felt it was a completely unrealistic story, and I’m sure they are right. But cautionary tales aren’t supposed to be warm, fuzzy, and realistic. They’re supposed to be terrifying. It should also be noted that I wrote this two years before World War Z was published, so the “human ramp” idea was my own. Not to say that Max Brooks took the idea from me, but I just want to be clear that I didn’t steal it from him.

This short story focuses on the experiences of one man that finds himself unwilling to deal with the rest of humanity and his decision to leave society. After a time, strange things begin to happen in the skies above him, and he eventually finds himself wanting to reconnect with the people he had once abandoned. It was originally published in the inaugural issue of the Texas Texas University Honor’s College journal in 2003.

This is the first complete short story I wrote in college. It was for one of my first English classes and no particular directive.

This is the first short story I ever wrote. It is, unfortunately, based on an entirely true story. I got tired of telling over and over again.