Abstract:
The thirty annotations included in my creative project represent a survey I conducted to familiarize myself with the short fiction available to adolescent and young adult readers. I read and typed annotations for short stories from a variety of sources. Some of these stories represent traditional favorites that have been included in school textbooks for many years; some were found in popular magazines for children and teenagers; and some were taken from collections of contemporary short fiction written especially for young adult readers. Because I am a public school teacher, I have written these annotations in the form that will be most useful for reference in teaching literature in a formal classroom situation. After reading approximately seventy short stories I selected thirty stories that I felt would represent the wide variety of material available. Some of the stories I read were very short so they could be easily contained in a magazine. Other stories I read were longer and would be most suitable for the advanced reader. After writing the annotations, I felt I was ready to try my hand in creating fictional characters in imaginary situations. The concerns and interests of adolescent or young adult readers are different than the concerns of the adult reader which was something I had to remind myself of several times. Writing for adolescents and young adults requires research; they way teenagers sound today is different from the way my friends and I sounded when we were teenagers. The slang terminology, styles of clothing, the music, the fads, and the concerns of teenagers is constantly changing. Teaching English to seventh and eleventh grade students provided a window to their world. However, I discovered that writing for this age group was not easy. It sounds deceivingly simple in a short story written for adolescents. It is far more difficult to capture glimpses of their thinking and their world in writing. I wrote one longer short story and three short stories as an exploration in creative writing for adolescents and young adults.