Write a story populated by characters from a number of different fairy tales. For example, after their house of sticks gets blown down, the three little pigs choose to hide, not in the house made of bricks, but in the candy house found by Hansel and Gretel.

Assignment Details
Your assignment is to write a short story of 750 – 2,500 words about one character or several characters in a specific setting with a well-developed plot, conflict, climax, and resolution.
Remember to answer the 5 W + H questions (who? what? when? where? why? and how?) as you write your story.
You can choose the type of narration–first or third person–as well as the type of narrator (unreliable/reliable). You can be in the story, or be an observer of the action, or be a “fly on the wall,” simply recounting what takes place. You can describe the thoughts of one character, or several.
Although much of the story can and should be told without dialogue, please include dialogue in the story at some point. You don’t need a “pat” ending, but there should be some sense of closure for your readers.
Topic:
I dont want to limit your creativity; thus, Ive left the topic open. Although you may choose any topic that interests you, some students have expressed an interest in perusing some assignment topics Ive used in past sections of creative writing. The following are a few story starters.
Option # 1: Fairy Tale Confusion
Write a story populated by characters from a number of different fairy tales. For example, after their house of sticks gets blown down, the three little pigs choose to hide, not in the house made of bricks, but in the candy house found by Hansel and Gretel. Although the wolf is not able to blow the house down, another nasty shock awaits the pigs!
Option # 2: You are part of a “reality-based” T.V. show called “Solitary Confinement”.
You will be staying alone in a house for one year, and not be allowed outside for any length of time. You have one day to prepare for your ordeal, and to stock the house with what you need to last a year without going crazy. Except for furniture and appliances, the house is empty. The only things that will be delivered to your house (and that you do not have to stock yourself) is food and drink, and other necessities such as medicine and toilet paper.
Option # 3: Lucifer Leaves Hell
Lucifer Morning Star (Satan) has decided that hes bored and is going to give up the keys to Hell. To seek excitement, he returns to his old playground the human world.
Option # 4: Pick a Nonhuman Subject.
Pick a nonhuman subject an animal, flower, place, planet, vehicle, toy and spend some time taking notes on it. Write a story from the point of view of this subject. Use Jealous Husband Returns in Form of Parrot as a model.
Option # 5: Start your story with one of the following famous first lines from literary history.

o Towers of Trebizond by Rose Macaulay: “‘Take my camel, dear,’ said my Aunt Dot, as she climbed down from this animal on her return from High Mass.”
o The Last Good Kiss by James Crumley: “When I finally caught up with Abraham Trahearne, he was drinking beer with an alcoholic bulldog named Fireball Roberts in a ramshackle joint just outside of Sonoma, California, drinking the heart right out of a fine spring afternoon.”
o The Debut by Anita Brookner: “Dr. Weiss, at forty, knew that her life had been ruined by literature.”
o Uncivil Seasons by Michael Malone: “We don’t get much snow, and we hardly ever murder one another. Suicide is more our style…”
o Nervous Conditions by Tsitsi Dangarembga: “I was not sorry when my brother died.”
o The Go-Between by L.P. Hartley: “The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there.”
o The Autumn of the Patriarch by Gabriel Garcia Marquez: “Over the weekend the vultures got into the presidential palace by pecking through the screens on the balcony windows and the flapping of their wings stirred up the stagnant time inside, and at dawn on Monday the city awoke out of its lethargy of centuries with the warm, soft breeze of a great man dead and rotting grandeur.”
o One Hundred Years of Solitude, also by Gabriel Garcia Marquez: “Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.”
o Ahab’s Wife by Sena Jeter Naslund: “Captain Ahab was neither my first husband nor my last.”
o The Key to Rebecca by Ken Follett: “The last camel collapsed at noon.”
o The Miracle Life of Edgar Mint by Brady Udall: “If I could tell you one thing about my life it would be this: when I was seven years old the mailman ran over my head.”
o The Paperboy by Pete Dexter: “My brother Ward was once a famous man.”
o After Life by Rhian Ellis: “First I had to get his body into the boat.”
o I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith: “I write this sitting in the kitchen sink.”
o A Primate’s Memoir by Robert Sapolsky: “I joined the baboon troop during my twenty-first year. I had never planned to become a savanna baboon when I grew up; instead I had always assumed I would become a mountain gorilla.”
o The Man in the Window Jon Cohen: “Atlas Malone saw the angel again, this time down by the horse chestnut tree.”
o No One Thinks of Greenland by John Griesemer: “‘You’ll want to scratch,’ said the nurse. ‘Don’t,’ said the orderly.”
o The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams: Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun.
o Watership Down by Richard Adams: The primroses were over.
o Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen: It is truth universally acknowledge, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.
o Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury: It was a pleasure to burn.
o Divine Comedy, Inferno by Dante Alighieri: Midway in our lifes journey, I went astray from the straight road and woke to find myself alone in a dark wood.
o A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens: It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received , for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.
o Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky: On an exceptionally hot evening early in July a young man came out of the garret in which he lodged in S. Place and walked slowly, as though in hesitation, towards K. bridge.
o The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald: In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that Ive been turning over in my mind ever since. Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone, he told me, just remember that all the people in this world havent had the advantages that youve had.
Option # 6: Look to the National Enquirer.
While on line waiting to pay at the grocery store, I’m sure you’ve perused the wacky article titles of magazines like the National Enquirer. Choose one such title and use it as the focus of your story.
Option # 7: Death
In Neil Gaiman’s highly acclaimed series Sandman, Death is an attractive, cheerful young woman who wears an anch and carries an umbrella. She’s known for saying such things as “Peachy.” What would your DEATH look like? Use Death as the main character of a story.

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