paired with “Gun Bubbles”

Inviting students to explore the effects of different language choices in writing, this activity could be used as an extended writing prompt in or out of the classroom.

Introduction

ET: In our discussions on “Gun Bubbles,” we first wondered how to get past the prominent role of several controversial topics: mass shootings, domestic terrorism, reproductive rights, and motherhood. These topics feature so prominently in the piece that seeing other dynamics in the essay meant finding subtleties in what seems, at first glance, an unambiguous essay.

Because this essay is organized as a collage of eleven sections that revolve around a shooting near a Planned Parenthood and the author’s contemplation of her potential motherhood, it’s understandable that thematic resonances across sections hold the essay together. Since these topics cross over her body and the language for such impactful life events, the essay waffles back and forth between being more immersive in a bodily way and being more distantly contemplative. Sometimes Thors hypothetically talks to the shooter, trying to reason with traumatic experience. Other times she provides hyper-focused sensory details on a shooting or an intimate but also clinical reflection on her medical conditions. For readers, this means we get several different emotional registers displayed in different styles of writing despite a persistent use of past tense and first-person narration. Sometimes it makes you feel, and other times it makes you think. Sometimes readers feel far from the action, and other times very close. Sometimes it supposes or hypothesizes, while other times, it recounts explicit events.

Looking at these stylistic choices across different emotional registers can help students see how much flexibility there is in the affective impact of their writing depending on how they decide to approach writing the same scene.

Guide

Close Read: Immersion and Distance

• Compare the writing style in these paragraphs, the first from the second section of the essay and the second from the fourth section of the essay. How does Thors make you feel emotionally connected to the story in each moment? What makes it feel far or close to you? Some things to consider are point of view, tense, passive voice, dialogue, the length and rhythm of sentences, connotation, or the subject of the sentence.

1. 1. Rounding a pillar, I saw the silver hood of my parents’ sedan and sprinted. Bullets kept popping, sounding fake, childlike–gun bubbles. I veered toward the car and lunged to get inside. But this wasn’t our rental; it was one just like it. My parents were a few spaces down. “Get on the fucking ground.” This time I listened. I splayed myself flat on the frozen asphalt, bubbles all around. “Stay down!” the voice ordered, as if it could sense me scheming. I had made up my mind. I could see the bent license plate on the front of my parents’ car. I bolted.
   2. The shoot-out lasted five hours. As my parents and I walked through airport security for our flight home, customers in the grocery store were just being released from lockdown. Details about the incident were still coming together. In the end, three people died, and nine were severely injured.
      As it turned out, the store was very close to a Planned Parenthood clinic. On this particular day, Black Friday, a middle-aged man had woken up and decided to take a stand against fetus deletion by gunning adults down.

Write: Generating Various Emotive Registers

With your notes and reflections on these two passages (and those two sections more generally), let’s try out several versions of one story to try out the effects of some differing language choices. We’ll start with a base version and then vary the passage from there. Give yourself 4-5 minutes to write each version.

1. Describe a discrete moment where you came to an important realization. Write it in the past tense.
2. Now rewrite that moment as an immersive scene. Use the present tense this time and focus on sensory details and use connotative language.
3. Rewrite that moment again, but this time be brief, general, and neutral as though you only need to report the facts. Imagine you’re farther away from the action.
4. Create another version of the moment where now you’re inside of your head recounting your thinking in that moment. Try using some subjective and conditional moods.
5. You’ve probably been writing in the first person so far. Try writing out that moment again using the second or third person instead. If you’ve tried out a few points of view already, try recounting that moment from a different person’s perspective from your own.
6. Rewrite that moment using only dialogue.

Now reread and think about these six versions of a moment and consider which emotive register best works for your purposes in recounting this moment.