Short Story Topics in Record Time

Fictional Narratives are a major writing standard in grades 9-10.  It is also the only genre my students are relatively adept at.  They spend a lot of time with this type of writing in the earlier grades.  Expository writing is a completely different story.  Although I have seen a huge improvement in my student's narrative writing in the last few years, there are still a few steps that trip them up.

The first obstacle is always coming up with a character and topic they can develop into a whole story with all the elements a short story needs to include.  I have tried a lot of different strategies for helping students come up with topics, but I've never been completely happy with any of them.  Then I stumbled upon this site when doing research on archetypes for my seniors:

http://archetypewriting.com/muse/idea_generators.htm

I added this link to my daily agenda:

Archetype's Plot Scenario Generator

and showed my students how to click refresh to randomly generate a new topic.  I love that the topics give them a protagonist, a situation, and a secondary character who brings their own complications.  Each topic has plenty of information to give the students a good starting point.

I had 120 freshman decide on topics and start developing the details for their protagonist within 10 minutes.  I also heard a lot of really interesting conversations about where they could go with their stories, so I am excited to see how these stories turn out.