“Genre Research” Annotated Bibliography

 

Ballard, J.G., “Billennium.” New York: Experimenter Publishing 1962 Amazing Stories. Web. 28 September 2018.

 

This is an example of a dystopian short story. In this dystopian society, the world is overpopulated. The government only allows people to have a 4 square meters living space. The main character, John, finds a living space bigger than that allowed and shares it with a friend. John and his friend Henry let more and more people stay with them, which then becomes the overpopulated living space they were trying to escape from. This short story was helpful for me to create my own dystopian short story because it gave me a model as to how to structure my introduction. In “Billennium,” it was important for the author to give a thorough introduction so that the reader understood the context of society. Without this context, the plot would mean nothing. The reader needed to know what type of world the author was writing about, since dystopian worlds are foreign to the readers. Ballard did this by describing and giving a great deal of details.

 

Flynn, Gillian, 1971- author. Gone Girl : a Novel. New York :Crown, 2012. Print.

 

This story helped me think about what I wanted the voice to be throughout my piece. I admire Flynn’s character development, as well as her style-choice of making characters ambiguous. You think you know a character, and then you realize you might not. This is also because Flynn plays with reader—she doesn’t tell you who the reliable source is. Flynn writes with a dark tone that I was trying to mimic. It was difficult to create a dark tone in such a short piece. Additionally, Flynn’s main characters in Gone Girl are adults and mine is a teenager, which made using her dark tone more difficult.

 

Pitlor, Heidi. “What Makes A Good Short Story.” The Huffington Post, TheHuffingtonPost.com, 7 Dec. 2013.

 

I have never written or even attempted to write a short story before. I chose to write one for an experiment to challenge myself, and then decided to further challenge myself by making it my fully-realized piece. Writing a short story is a very daunting task. I like writing academic papers, maybe because that is what I am used to and feel confident about. I realized that I not only needed to analyze examples of great short stories, but I needed to learn the basics as well. In this article Pitlor mainly discusses what he doesn’t like to see in short stories. Pitlor also sums up what he thinks makes a good story: a good story tells you something interesting about someone, things happen, and people reveal who they are. He says that this is done with “ease of language and some amount of voice” and “not much else.” Each page and sentence matters, so everything said needs to serve a purpose and advance the story. While I ended up not writing a short story, this advice helped me when writing my open letter too because they are both short pieces of work.

 

Vaughn, Carrie, “Amaryllis.” Colorado: Carrie Vaughn 2010. Web. 30 September 2018.

 

This example of a dystopian short story is a useful model for creating my short story because it is told from the first-person point of view like mine. This story takes place in a dystopian world where everything—including people—is limited by a government mandated quota. The main character, Marie, was an illegal child. Since Marie was not approved by the government, her mother hid the pregnancy and caused the breakup of her family. Vaughn mainly uses dialogue as the diction in her short story. It is important to note though that the dialogue is not in block quotes, but rather precise lines back and forth between characters. This is a key aspect of short stories because since they are short, the dialogue must be short, yet meaningful. There are also no long paragraphs for this same reason. These stylistic aspects in this short story served as a good model when writing my once short story, but now open letter. Since my open letter was even shorter than this short story, I had to pay close attention to what dialogue I thought was important to include.

 

Vonnegut, Kurt, “Harrison Bergeron.” New Jersey: Mercury Press Inc. 1961 The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Web 30 September 2018.

 

In this dystopian short story by Kurt Vonnegut, all Americans are equal. No one is smarter, better looking, or stronger than anyone else. Harrison, an exceptional fourteen-year-old, is taken away from his parents by the government because he is smarter than all other Americans. This short story helped me model my open letter/short story piece because the introduction in this story is exemplary. Like my piece, Vonnegut had to describe a dystopian world in which no one reading the story is familiar. Vonnegut does an incredible job of describing this world in an effective, yet precise way. He sets up his world in only a short three paragraphs. I tried to used Vonnegut’s short and effective writing style when creating my introduction and describing the society I am writing about. I think these three paragraphs by Vonnegut worked so well because right away he started describing the characters in his short story—he wasted no time. He was able to introduce his society he created while at the same time introducing his characters.

 

“Content Research” Annotated Bibliography

 

DeSilver, Drew. “U.S. Trails Most Developed Countries in Voter Turnout.” Pew Research Center, Pew Research Center, 21 May 2018.

 

This article discusses how by international standards, U.S. voter turnout low. Only 56% of those eligible to vote in the 2016 presidential election actually voted. Most Americans say high turnout in presidential elections is very important. However, while most Americans believe this, a large percentage of them do not engage in their civic duty of voting in the presidential election. The United States’ voting turnout is behind most of its peers in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). This fact is important to note because I used this idea of low voting turnout to spark my short story. This seemingly scary statistic led me to create a dystopian world where because people did not vote, the democratic system that we know came to an end.

 

Vasquez, Everett. “Importance Of Voting: Why Should Every Citizen Vote?” Polling Place Photo Project, 6 Nov. 2017.

 

This article discusses why voting is important. The author claims that “voting is a basic process that keeps a nation’s governmental system working.” This system enables citizens to choose their own government. This source was important when writing my short story because this concept is what led me to write about a society in which people do not vote, leading to society not being able to choose their own form of government. Without participating in the democratic process of voting in my dystopian world, voting is no longer allowed and the rich elite have taken over. This source shows that this reality might be closer than it seems.