Sci-Fi Short Story Write-Up Template
Your Name
Mr. Juhl
Sci Fi Period __
Date Month 2016
“Short Story Title” by Author Name
“Short Story Title” is set on (WHERE, the place: Earth, or another planet, or in space), in
(WHEN, the time period: either in the past, the present, an alternate time-line past or
present, or the future, or some combination of these, like the distant past and the future
for a time-travel story about people from the future traveling to the past, for example).
The protagonist (main character) is or the protagonists (main characters) are (here type
the name of the main character or main characters), and (here write a summary of the
plot of the story, what happens in it, including the ending).
It’s told in the (first person or third person; only one short story in the entire curriculum
includes second person point-of-view, and that’s “Sundance” which is told in all three
points of view: first, second, and third person, but every other story in the curriculum is
either told in first person, where a character is telling you his or her or its own story using
pronouns like “I” and “me” and “myself” etc. to refer to himself, herself, or itself, or is
told in third person point-of-view, where an objective narrator who is NOT a character in
the story and does NOT directly participate in the events of the story tells the story from a
sort of “god-like” perspective and uses the characters’ names and refers to them with
pronouns like “he,” “she,” “they,” and so on) point-of-view.
The theme is: (here write the theme as a complete sentence, in the form of “Someone or
something is/does something”). Here write a lead-in, called context-before-quotation, and
then a quotation from the story itself, with an accurate page number at the end; even if the
story is only one page long you would still need to put the numeral 1 in parentheses at the
end of the quotation.
Here, in one or more sentences, write your analysis of what effect the author using that
particular point of view (or points of view) has on the short story. Answer the question:
what does it allow the reader to know and/or what does it conceal from the reader, or
mislead the reader about? (For example, a first-person view limits the reader to knowing
only what the character-narrator knows, so if the character was misled, the reader will
also probably be deceived, so if something happens that comes as a surprise to the
character-narrator, it’s going to surprise the reader, too; or if the first-person narrator is an
unreliable narrator for other reasons, perhaps because she or he or it experiences mental
illness, or gets drunk or uses drugs, or chooses to lie to the reader, then the reader can
never fully trust the narrator, which is very different from a third-person, objective,
omniscient or “god-like” perspective where everything the narrator tells the reader can be
trusted as objectively accurate within the context of the fictional story … the third-person
omniscient view will tell the reader what is really supposed to be actually happening
within the made-up story, and first-person narration does not always necessarily do that).
(Here write why you liked or disliked the story, and if you can make a connection
between it and another text of some kind, such as another short story, or to a book, or a
television show, or a movie, or a video game, then do so, and explain why you felt there
is a connection or similarity there, why this short story reminded you of that other text).
Checklist (please underline and/or highlight these in your write-up to make it quick/easy for me to grade):
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Write when and where the story takes place (the setting)
Identify the main character/s (by name, if the story states the name/s of the character/s)
Write a summary of the story’s plot (including the end of the story)
Identify the story’s point(s) of view (first-person, where a character in the story tells his
or her or its own story, “I did this,” or second-person, where YOU, the reader, ARE the
main character, “You see this,” or third-person, where the narrator is outside of the
story’s events and is not a character in the story, “He, she, they did that”)
Identify at least one theme of the story (a theme must be written as a complete sentence)
Write whether or not you liked the story, and why you liked it or why you disliked it
Quote from the story at least once (with accurate page number or page numbers)