Olin College of Engineering
DigitalCommons@Olin
2011 AHS Capstone Projects
AHS Capstone Projects
10-1-2011
Apathy, the Zombie Apocalypse, and the Single
Effect
Ashley Lloyd
Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering, [email protected]
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Lloyd, Ashley, "Apathy, the Zombie Apocalypse, and the Single Effect" (2011). 2011 AHS Capstone Projects. Paper 5.
http://digitalcommons.olin.edu/ahs_capstone_2011/5
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Ashley Lloyd
AHS Capstone Disciplinary Deliverable
Reflective Analysis of “Dusk” and “Reawakening”
In 1846, Edgar Allan Poe wrote an essay entitled “The Philosophy of Composition”, his
comprehensive dissertation on not only his philosophy of writing, but on what, according to him, was
the best way to write. In this essay, Poe makes one main point that I agree with, and that I believe is the
basis of writing an excellent short story: single effect. Poe states,
“I prefer commencing with the consideration of an effect. Keeping originality always in
view- for he is false to himself who ventures to dispense with so obvious and so easily
attainable a source of interest- I say to myself, in the first place, ‘Of the innumerable effects,
or impressions, of which the heart, the intellect, or (more generally) the soul is susceptible,
what one shall I, on the present occasion, select?’ Having chosen a novel, first, and secondly
a vivid effect, I consider whether it can be best wrought by incident or tone- whether by
ordinary incidents and peculiar tone, or the converse, or by peculiarity both of incident and
tone- afterward looking about me (or rather within) for such combinations of event, or tone,
as shall best aid me in the construction of the effect.”
-Edgar Allan Poe, “Philosophy of Composition”
To put it simply, a single effect is a single, unifying purpose of a short story, something that is unique to
the short story genre. It is the single, uninterrupted, intense emotional feeling that comes from reading
a powerful story through to the conclusion within a single sitting. In a longer work of fiction, such as a
novel, the reader might read the work over a long period of time—a series of hour-long breaks over the
span of a week. Every time the reader gets up, closing the book, they allow the author’s spells and
charms to be broken. Even the perfectly crafted climactic buildup can’t survive the harsh ringing of a
cell phone alarm, or a quick trip to the bank. A short story, however, is short. It is encapsulated. Within
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one sitting, a reader goes through an entire range of emotions, sees the characters change and grow
and make decisions that will change lives. Thus, during that one sitting, the author has complete
freedom to create an effect within the reader. This effect is any strong, singular emotion or feeling. An
effect can be the wistful longing that comes with getting older, or the sorrow and grief of losing a lover,
or the deep, paralyzing fear of failure that can kill all motive force. While the theme or intellectual
message of a story may make the reader think, and they may remember it, a strong effect can viscerally,
physically stay with them all day. Therefore, like Poe, I believe stories should start with a single effect,
and that every single word and sentence in the story should help contribute to this effect’s purpose.
Then, a theme and plot can be selected that come naturally from the strength of the effect produced in
the reader.
This semester, I chose to focus on an effect that has been prevalent in my own life. Throughout
high school, I had always been an extremely insecure person—not insecure in my body, but insecure in
my ability to make decisions. In fact, insecure was too light of a word. I was afraid. I was afraid of the
unknown, afraid of being wrong, desperately afraid of making a mistake and having everything come
crashing down around my shoulders. What if I chose wrong, what if I said the wrong thing, what if I
made a mistake and everything was worse than before. What if by trying, I not only looked stupid, but
also ruined something that hadn’t been that bad in the first place. Besides, there was really nothing I
could do about any of it. Of course not. I was powerless, any decision I made would just lead to failure.
My response was simply not to move, not to act, not to decide. It was better to be frozen, paralyzed by
my fear, than to risk being wrong. It was only later in my life that I finally learned to overcome this fear,
and to be confident in my own decisions.
This feeling of paralyzing uncertainty and fear that I had to overcome was the single effect that I
chose to unite two interconnected short stories. For this effect, writing two stories that are
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interconnected allowed me to make a much stronger statement than two unrelated stories, or just a
single story, would be able to. As the overall theme of the piece, I wanted to show both sides of what
can happen to someone in the face of overwhelming fear, paralysis, and helplessness. By using two
separate character studies, I could show two opposing outcomes, making a stronger piece overall.
Where one character would give in to the fear, another would be able to find a way to combat that
feeling, to find hope and motivation.
With this goal in mind, I just needed a plot that would seamlessly flow from the effect I
envisioned. Immediately, I knew that I wanted to symbolically represent the fear of the unknown in
some physical way, and in a way that would not be able to be related immediately back to normal life.
The concept that immediately came to mind was the zombie story. Traditionally, zombies in literature
represent death. They are slow but persistent, so characters are able to run, but eventually they all
succumb to the forces of nature. The zombies I envisioned, however, would represent something else
entirely. Rather than ambling slowly to actively seek out the protagonist, these zombies would be
completely motionless. They are frightening and unknown, but not immediately deadly. They are
therefore able to represent the fear of the unknown, the feeling of being powerless, and the inability to
move or think. Their ability to serve as a symbol in this set of stories is helped by the fact that zombies
do not exist in real life. As the only unreal element in an otherwise realistic story, the zombies
immediately stand out as something to take note of. Also, unlike many real-life dangers, there is no way
to protect yourself adequately against a zombie apocalypse, therefore making the fear and danger that
the zombies represent meet the requirements of my chosen theme. With these zombies in mind, I
designed two plots to highlight the two paths that could result from the feeling of fear that was my
single effect.
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In the world of the two interconnected short stories “Dusk” and “Reawakening”, this zombie
disease has ravaged humanity, leaving much of the world’s population seemingly lifeless, unable to
exert the force of will to accomplish anything. It zombie disease spreads not by any physical means of
infection, but by thought. In “Dusk”, the protagonist Maria has confined herself in her house. In denial
about having caused the zombification of her three daughters, she is paralyzed with fear of the
unknown, uncontrollable force that exists outside her front door. She feels powerless and unable to act,
afraid that she’ll make the same mistake again, and that in trying to find freedom she would only doom
herself to the same demise as her neighbors. In her fear of failure, she surrenders to the disease. In
contrast, the protagonist of “Reawakening”, Joe, is trapped not by voluntary choice, but by his physical
condition and the will of others. A resident in an assisted care facility, Joe feels completely
disempowered, unable to do even the simplest things. He, like Maria, is afraid of making a mistake, or
of making a decision that others will find foolish. Over the course of the second story, however, Joe is
able to find a new purposes and meaning to his life, through his own recognition of his power and
usefulness. Thus, using two interconnected short stories in this piece allowed for a unique
representation of my single effect and theme that would not be possible in just one story.
With a single effect and a plot chosen, the next question was one of technique. In an excellent
short story, every sentence will have a purpose that adds to the effect. This is much easier said than
done, however, and there are a variety of different writing techniques to help accomplish this. In my
own philosophy of writing, the best goal to accomplish good writing can be summed up with the phrase
“show, don’t tell.” As Janet Burroway writes in her guide to fiction, “simply labeling a character’s
emotion as love or hatred will have little effect, for such abstraction operates solely on a vague,
intellectual level; rather emotion is the body’s physical reaction to information the senses receive.”
(Burroway, 2011, pg. 31) To be truly effective, writing should operate on a sensory level. I believe that
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Anton Chekhov expressed the sentiment best when he said “Don't tell me the moon is shining; show me
the glint of light on broken glass.”
The effectiveness of using sensory information for conveying emotions has its roots in human
psychology. The way we see the world— the way a washing machine sounds, or a rose smells, or even
the soft white billows of fog rolling into a harbor— can often seem to us like a trivial and objective thing.
It is so simple to think that everyone views the world in the same way. However, our perceptions are
not “a direct reflection of the real world, but rather a computed interpretation, a constructed and
integrative process.” (King, 2008, pg. 160) As a reflection of how we see the world, writing is therefore
directly affected by how we integrate and interpret everything we see. According to King, there are two
different routes by which physical stimuli can be processed— they take either the bottom-up or topdown route. Bottom-up processing starts from sensory inputs and slowly builds a view of the world by
adding together information from all of the senses, whereas top-down processing starts with a single
overarching idea, using that idea as a framework in which to place all the new sensory information.
Where top-down processing is used by the brain when encountering a familiar situation or stimulus,
bottom-up processing is used when encountering something totally new. In bottom-up, a new
framework for viewing the world is being created from scratch. This new framework and viewpoint then
has the potential to teach us something new, to give us a new deeper meaning.
With rich sensory inputs, lush sensuous descriptions of everyday objects, the writer can actually
force the reader to actively go through the process of bottom-up processing while they are reading.
Tolstoy was especially skilled with use of imagery. As Viktor Shklovsky said of him,
“After we see an object several times, we begin to recognize it. The object is in front of us
and we know about it, but we do not see it-hence we cannot say anything, significant about
it. Art removes objects from the automatism of perception in several ways.[ …] Tolstoy
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makes the familiar seem strange by not naming the familiar object. He describes an object
as if he were seeing it for the first time, an event as if it were happening for the first time.”
-Viktor Shklovsky, “Art as Technique”
By showing the reader directly rather than telling, the story and the single effect are both made more
meaningful.
In my own writing, this desire to show rather than tell was a guiding force, both in the original
writing and in the editing process. I made several key decisions about each of the two interconnected
short stories with my end goals in mind.
In “Dusk”, the first decision that I made based on these principles was the point of view of the
story. I chose to write this story from a third person limited viewpoint, with frequent forays into the
protagonist’s thoughts, sometimes straying toward stream of consciousness. This viewpoint allows for
both observations about Maria’s surroundings, and direct sensory information from her mind. In this
way, the reader can be fully immersed in Maria’s experience. The following passage from the story
illustrates this point.
“The hall stretched in front of her, dark. The doors on both sides were closed, dark stained
wood against the white walls. Maria suppressed a shudder. “Ok, just need to get the
paints. That’s all. The paints.” She took a step forward. The hallway wasn’t even really all
that long. All she had to do was walk 20 feet forward, past the closed doors. Past the doors
with no light pouring from underneath. Just dark, dead, wooden doors.”
The reader in this case is not told that Maria is afraid to walk down the hallway. This would be
unconvincing, and not very powerful in terms of effect. To really make the reader begin to feel Maria’s
fear, they see what she sees. They see the contrast of the dark wood against white walls, the darkness
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underneath them, and Maria’s reluctance to move forward while attempting to convince herself that
there is nothing to be afraid of. Thus, the third person limited point of view is extremely suitable for
conveying the effect that I wanted.
Also, in a more direct sense, I employed the use of vivid imagery to create more of an allencompassing experience. For instance, in the passage
“The echoes of her laugh died away, leaving a chasm of sound behind them. Not quite
silent though. No. If she listened hard enough in the silence, Maria could hear them.
Breathing. Their lungs moving out of a reflex, steadily pumping oxygen to their defunct
brains, to their dangling limbs, to their staring dead eyes.”
There are direct visual and auditory sensory stimuli. The reader is able to hear the echoing laughs, see
the dangling limbs and dead eyes. This technique of multiple sensory stimuli is used throughout the
story. Then, for the climax of the story, I chose to put the protagonist into a state of sensory deprivation
in a dark attic. There is nothing that breeds claustrophobic, panicking fear as much as sensory
deprivation. This was also a useful technique, because as the writer, I had precise control over every
single image that I gave to the reader.
“Each inch forward added at least a pound of weight, blocks of iron belted around her
ankles, pulling her into the floor. Her hands felt wood, carved with painstaking detail, yarn
and flaking paint. A rocking horse. She allowed her mind to skip forward like an old CD.
Nothing to think about. The weights on her feet were twenty times heavier. More boxes of
clothes, dragged aside. A small easel, covered with the cakey feeling of dried finger paints.
She had passed this before. She was going in circles, in zig zags, repeating herself endlessly
as each step took more and more energy.”
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With only a sense of touch, each thing Maria feels is described in detail. The feeling of dragging her
heavy feet, of walking in circles, the feel of the cakey dried finger paint on her children’s toys—
everything could be precisely chosen for its dramatic effect.
In early drafts of “Dusk”, the single effect of the story was less clear. Throughout the revision
process, there were three main changes that took place in the process of clarifying the story’s effect and
theme. In the first draft of the story, Maria’s three daughters were alive and well at the beginning. My
original conception had been to start with their ill-fated attempt to leave the house. This, however, was
detrimental to the sense of fear and helplessness that I wanted to be the final effect of the story. While
Maria’s daughters were alive, she was less afraid, and was able to take action to try to save them. Their
interactions were happy and loving, and it allowed Maria an escape from thinking about the zombie
disease. Then, when her daughters died, it seemed like a radical shift. The fear was sudden and not
well defined. Thus, my first major edit was to streamline the story by starting it with Maria alone.
Loneliness contributed to the overall meaning of the story much more than the original plot. The
second major round of editing included clarifying the role of the zombies in this story. I had known from
the first draft that I wanted these zombies to symbolize something, but needed more clarity on what
exactly that was. With the shift to a story with a single character, the zombies easily came to represent
the unknown, the outside, and a force that Maria was powerless to stop. Thus, the second edit focused
on clarifying everything to do with the zombies. I reduced the information about how the disease was
spread, and its exact physical effects, as this clarification helped me realize that those things weren’t
important to the story. I also was able to clarify Maria’s feelings of fear for the zombies, and her
paranoia about them. Finally, the third major edit, still in progress, is a clarification of my single effect. I
had started with an effect in mind, but had not fully verbalized it or thought it out. My original single
effect was part paralyzing fear, but also part apathy and resignation. This secondary feeling of
emptiness and apathy were not really my main point, and only served to confuse the issue, muddying
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what exactly the point of the story was. By writing out my effect in full detail, I hope to be able to fully
clarify throughout the story exactly why Maria takes all of her seemingly irrational actions leading to her
eventual destruction.
“Reawakening” also included very deliberate choices that added to the effectiveness of the
single effect. The first deliberate choice in this story was simply the use of character and setting. This
story needed to have the opposite flow of the first; while in “Dusk” the protagonist started with some
amount of hope and slowly lost it, “Reawakening” is a story of gaining confidence and hope of success.
Thus, it needed to start in a place and with a character that would, in the course of their everyday life,
feel like they had no control. With this in mind, I chose a resident of an assisted living facility who still
had his faculty of mind, but had allowed himself to be convinced that he was helpless. From the
beginning, before he is even aware of the zombies, he doubts himself and his abilities to succeed on his
own.
“Joe could imagine the wind on his face, blowing through the few wisps that were left of his
hair. He loved the wind, had since he was a boy. The wind was like flying kites and riding
bicycles down steep hills and grabbing the world by the horns as his uncle would tell him.
Joe put one hand on the clasp that would open the window. It was cold and didn’t yield to
his initial fumblings. He took his hand back. The clasp was probably stuck, and Talia
wouldn’t want him to open the window anyway. It could make a mess of the pictures
hanging on his walls and she’d have to rehang them for him.”
As this passage from the first page shows, he is afraid of the disapproval of others, afraid of making a
mistake, and above all, afraid of discovering that he truly is as helpless as Talia and the others have
come to believe. This passage also illustrates that I again chose the third person limited point of view,
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for much the same reasons as in “Dusk”. Third person limited allows the reader to see the workings of
Joe’s mind, to hear his thoughts, while still being able to have some perspective.
I also wanted to use sensory imagery in this story, and some of that can be seen in the above
passage. The wind isn’t described, Joe can feel it blowing through his hair, and the clasp of the window
is cold. Using this sensory information combined with the somewhat immersive third person limited
point of view allows the reader to become fully absorbed into the story.
While “Reawakening” does have some purposeful paragraphs and choices, much of the purpose
written into this story fades away after the first few pages. In future editing, there are several changes
that should be made to increase the effect of the mood throughout the entire piece. First, Joe’s
thoughts and voice should remain throughout the story, rather than fading as more characters are
introduced.
“Margaret was like living dead. She was gone so quickly. It was nothing like the slow,
graceful fade into sleep that he had seen so many times while living at Aspen Gardens. This
was sudden and abrupt. Yesterday Margaret had been vibrant and alive, now she was just
an empty shell of a person. Joe’s brain struggled to wrap around what he was seeing, and
suddenly was aware of Helen again, expending all of her energy clinging to Margaret’s
shoulders, shaking her, begging her to be awake.”
The language in this passage exemplifies the style of the language for much of the latter part of the
story. The point of view of the character has become generic, lost in the plot points. There is only vague
imagery, and Joe’s feelings are told to the reader, rather than shown, as in the sentence “Joe’s brain
struggled to wrap around what he was seeing”. A rewrite of this passage that included more purpose
and intention would look something like:
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“Margaret was like living dead. It had been so fast. Joe had seen plenty of people go,
slowly fading away, almost graceful. This was sudden, abrupt. Yesterday he had talked to
Margaret, her eyes had been warm, glowing, her voice rich like dark coffee. But now her
eyes were glazed, staring at nothing. Joe stared back. She couldn’t be gone, not really. Any
second now she would wake up, would blink, would smile, would laugh and tell them that
she had just been joking. A sudden motion made Joe aware of Helen again, expending all of
her energy clinging to Margaret’s shoulders, shaking her, begging her to be awake.”
This rewrite avoids simply telling the reader what is supposed to be happening, instead fleshing it out
and allowing the story to be an immersive experience.
Another large edit that is necessary for this story to become a highly polished piece is structural.
At the end of the story, the plot also loses focus, becoming rambling and drawn out, to the point where
the actions of the plot are getting in the way of the character development, and the reawakening of the
two main characters from their formerly apathetic state. Currently, near the end of the story, Joe and
Helen fall in love, break into the kitchen, find a lighter and fuel, make it to the back gate, light it on fire,
as escape the assisted living facility. To improve the focus of the story, the plot should focus more on a
smaller, more immediate goal. For instance, instead of escaping the facility, Joe and Helen might simply
get food for themselves and others, taking a step toward their independence.
Once the specified editing is complete for both “Dusk” and “Reawakening”, both stories will be
well-polished and purposeful pieces of writing that use full sensory immersion to create a strong single
effect.
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Bibliography
1. Bereiter, Carl, and Marlene Scardamalia. Preface. The Psychology of Written Composition.
Hillsdale, NJ: L. Erlbaum Associates, 1987.
2. Burroway, Janet, Elizabeth Stuckey-French, and Ned Stuckey-French. Writing Fiction: a Guide to
Narrative Craft. 7th ed. Boston: Longman, 2011. 31.
3. Hatcher, Jeffrey. The Art & Craft of Playwriting. Cincinnati (Ohio): Story, 2000.
4. King, Laura. The Science of Psychology, An Appreciative View. McGraw Hill, 2008.
5. Lamott, Anne. Bird by Bird. New York: Anchor, 1997.
6. Poe, Edgar Allan. “The Philosophy of Composition”, Graham’s Magazine, vol. XXVIII, no. 4, April
1846, 28:163-167.
7. Shklovsky, Victor. "Art as Technique": Literary Theory: An Anthology. Malden, MA: Blackwell
Pub, 2004. 15-21.
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