Teaching With ‘Tiny Love Stories’

Students in U.S. high schools can get free digital access to The New York Times until Sept. 1, 2021.

Lesson Overview

Featured Column: “Tiny Love Stories”

Tiny Love Stories began as a challenge from the editors of The New York Times’s popular Modern Love column: “What kind of love story can you share in two tweets, an Instagram caption or a Facebook post? Tell us a love story from your own life — happy or sad, capturing a moment or a lifetime — in no more than 100 words.”

Now they publish these sometimes funny, sometimes heartbreaking, miniature reader stories weekly. Even though they’re short, they have all the essential elements of great narrative storytelling: character, conflict, resolution and a universal message about love.

In this lesson, we invite you to read several tiny love stories of your choosing and then write your own and share it with us in the comments.

Ideas for Teachers: This activity is a bite-size way to begin exploring narrative writing. You might use it as an introductory activity to get your students familiar with narrative structure before diving into longer texts. You can find more helpful resources for teaching narrative writing with The New York Times in our Narrative Writing Unit Plan.

Warm Up

Who or what do you love?

Use the sentence starter below to write for a few minutes about whatever comes to mind. You will return to this writing in the “Going Further” section.

A relationship that has had a significant impact on my life is …

Keep in mind that this relationship can be with anyone or anything that is important to you: for example, your friends, your parents, your siblings, your grandparents, a romantic partner, a crush, a pet, your phone, a video game, a hobby, a team, a teacher, a country, a city or anything else. You might also consider those things that you once loved but left you heartbroken, like an old friend, a past love, a deceased pet or a sport you decided to quit.

Questions for Writing and Discussion

First, choose at least three of the 16 tiny love stories in this PDF to read. If none of these inspire you, you can find many more in the Modern Love column.

Then, as you read, annotate and take notes on what you notice about the way these pieces are written. Here are some questions to consider:

1. What do you notice about the types of relationships explored in the stories you read? In what ways are they all similar? In what ways are they different? How do they relate to the column’s theme of “modern love”?

2. Every narrative, no matter how short, has some kind of tension or conflict driving it. What is the conflict in one of the stories you read? See if you can identify a line that communicates the central problem.

3. Daniel Jones, the editor of Modern Love, suggests that stories, even ones as small as these, need to “unfold in a dramatic arc, with mystery and surprise.” Do the stories you read do this? Choose one and analyze how the author builds tension and suspense to keep you reading.

4. Take a look at the first lines of each of the stories you read. What do you notice about how these short essays begin? In what ways do they try to grab your attention as a reader?

5. Even though they are nonfiction, narratives often have “characters.” Who are the main characters in one of the stories you read? Circle or highlight words or lines that describe the characters. What do these tidbits reveal about their desires, hopes or fears? How does this information help drive the story forward?

6. Similarly, stories this short will often take place in a particular setting. What is the setting of one of the stories you read, if there is one? What role does the setting play in the story?

7. Which details stand out most to you in one of the stories you read? What did you find intriguing, funny, moving or meaningful about them? Underline or highlight your favorite line. Why did you love it?

8. Now, take a look at the last lines of each of the stories you read. What do you notice about how they end? How is the conflict or tension resolved? What message about love does each story convey?

9. Each of these writers has a different style of writing, or “writer’s voice.” Choose one story that you think has an interesting style. What do you appreciate about the way this author writes? What words, phrases, grammatical constructions or sentence structures help develop this writer’s unique voice?

10. Which “writer’s moves” from any of the stories that you read do you admire that you’d like to try in your own tiny love story?

Going Further

Now, it’s your turn: Write your own tiny love story of no more than 100 words. In the words of the Modern Love editors, it can be “happy or sad, capturing a moment or a lifetime.” But it must be true and about your own life.

You might choose to write about the relationship you focused on in the warm up, or you might come up with something completely different.

As you write, keep in mind the writer’s moves you noted during your annotations, and consider these tips from the editor of Modern Love:

• “Don’t underestimate the power of a reader’s curiosity, whether you’re writing a short story or a personal essay … It needs to unfold in a dramatic arc, with mystery and surprise.”

• “Without conflict, there’s no narrative.”

• “That said, sometimes the conflict is resolved in a ‘happy’ way … for me, a happy ending is when the writer understands something he or she didn’t understand before.”

• “A story can end sadly in that the storyteller doesn’t get what he or she wants, but those aren’t ‘depressing’ endings to me as long as the person learns and can express that beautifully.”

• “As part of your revision process, try starting your essay a little later, in the midst of dialogue or events. Sometimes it’s more intriguing for us to be dropped into the action than to receive all the background information up front.”

• “In many cases, the pretty good essay is stopped from being more by an ending that fails to boost it to another level. The ending is where a writer’s thinking and understanding and level of sophistication comes to full bloom. The ending is where the emotional impact remains flat or fizzles or soars. The ending, when done well, can feel simultaneously inevitable and surprising.”

When you are done, post your 100-word story in the comments. Or, if you like, submit it to the Modern Love column for a chance to be published.

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