“No Word Allowed” PowerPoint Stories and the Teaching of Prose
Fiction
Steven Hayward, English Department
Introduction
The most substantive shift in my pedagogy over the past year has been the inclusion of a
week in which students experiment with the creative opportunities presented to writers
by recent developments in social and new media. Inspired by Pulitzer-winner Jennifer
Egan’s work (there is a power point story in her book A Visit from the Goon Squad)
students were given multiple opportunities to experiment with social and new media,
including getting students to write “twiction”—stories that are one hundred and forty
characters long and can be inserted into a Twitter feed. The most provocative assignment
was one that required students to write stories in Power Point Music, images, and sound
effects could be incorporated, but students would not be allowed to stand up and present
their Power Point constructions; these were texts, in other words, that were required to
possess the same autonomy as the short fiction they were writing in the rest of the course.
When framing the assignment I made the further choice to not inform them of the
existence of Jennifer Egan’s work. I have now experimented with this new and social
media module a number of times, and have a few preliminary thoughts about the learning
outcomes that result from the exercise.
Storytelling, Lack, and the Impossibility of Perfect
Timing
One of the big questions any author of a Power Point story must consider is the question
of the rate at which the slides should advance. I observed to students, there are two
options available to the writer of a Power Point story: either you a) move through them
too quickly, or b) you move through them too slowly. The one thing the author knows for
certain is that moving through the slides at exactly the right rate for all audiences is
impossible.
What it means: it is better to move through the slides more quickly, to present the reader
with a certain degree of difficulty and in so doing, turn him or her into a producer of the
text as much as possible. Traditional fiction raises the same kind of problem: a good novel
or short story is one that involves the reader as producer; a good writer knows when (and
how) to trust his or her reader.
The Importance of Research
The Definition of the Literary
How does one identify the literary? Is there a difference between using technology to
communicate and using it to produce art? A key thing students discovered, in the process
of using Power Point to write a story, that there is a difference between using it
functionally and using it artistically. Like language, technology pervades our lives,
something we use, without thought every day; using technology makes its boundaries—
limitations, presuppositions—visible.
What it means: Using Power Point to make art teaches us something important about
language, because it is a kind of language. Just because you can write a sentence doesn’t
mean you can write the sort of sentence that will move a reader.
This is a more pedestrian point, but a significant one. The two times I have done this
exercise with classes, not a single student discovered the Egan story that had won the
Pulitzer Prize—or, indeed, any of the Power Point stories that are readily available on the
web and locatable through even the most rudimentary Google search.
What it means: it is simply not a matter of their being bad researchers (indeed, as I point
out to students, you will find these stories even if you spell Power Point incorrectly); their
ignorance about the history of Power Point art reflects how they understand the
relationship between tradition and the individual talent. You are part of an existent corpus
when you write in Power Point just as you are in conflict and conversation with literary
tradition when you write a novel. One of the resources to the writer is that tradition. When
I understood that I was writing a baseball novel, I point out, I read all the baseball novels I
could get my hands on. This is how we should approach Creative Writing, I suggest, with
as much rigor and curiosity as we would an essay on Hamlet.