Your stories --- go read them!

Thanks for a great class, for giving it a go, for believing in the magic of narrative storytelling. So here are your final projects. Read them. See what your classmates have been up to. And feel free to offer comments on this post.

Beauty Pageant at Jamestown Mall

Josiah

Comic Con

Moving Forward

Life Isn't Over

The Coffin He Built For His Mother

This is the end

"If you want to write about man, write about a man."

 - E.B. White

Chris Jones says

Not All Smurfs and Sunshine

Fatal distraction, annotated

Fatal Distraction

On copying

What other writers can teach us, Imitation, reverberation and inspiration

Reading for next class

The Things That Carried Him

Fatal Distraction

And the Pulitzer goes to ....

The Pulitzer Prizes, journalism's top honor, were announced yesterday. A full list is here, with links to the winning entries. And you might notice something, too:

Say what?

There was plenty of shock about this.

This isn't the first time this has happened. No award was given in this category back in 2004.

Many theories, but I think it comes down to how subjective good feature writing is. Other categories don't rely so heavily on just a good story -- remember the laws of importance and the laws of interesting? Well, feature writing basically rests on "law of interesting" alone, while the others all benefit from having some kind of importance attached to them. And folks can more readily agree on what's important rather than interesting. NSA secrets? Important. Abuses by big corporations? Important.

Supporting this idea is that the Pulitzer for fiction (yes, they do arts and letters, too) has not gone to any work seven times over the years. And again, fiction is a pretty subjective field.