An alternative reality assignment asks students to imagine the world with one key difference and speculate on the results that difference would make. It can be a good way to ease students into creative writing, since it allows them to write largely based on what they already know and experience. Alternative reality assignments can range from the radical, such as life underground as a result of nuclear war fallout, to the personal, like imagining what your life would look like if you were the opposite gender.
In realistic fiction, the rules of the real world govern the way the fictional world works, but the story revolves around characters, events or places that do not actually exist. While alternative reality can help students envision their own lives in a new way, realistic fiction goes a step further by inviting them into the mind and life of another character. The assignment can define a conflict, like a new father losing his job, or offer a place, type of character, phrase or situation to include.
While science fiction, fantasy and other genre fiction have at times been derided as superficial or escapist, there is nothing in these genres that inherently forces them to be less meaningful than realistic fiction. In fact, the removal of certain constraints through the use of fictional technology, societies or magic can allow the writer to explore philosophical questions and ethical dilemmas that could not be illustrated in a realistic world, such as the ethics of omniscience or what life would be like if there were no outside left to live in.
Where genre fiction defines a fictional world with consistent rules that happen to be different than the real world’s, surrealism and its variants create worlds where the rules are either explicitly contradictory or seemingly broken without comment or explanation. These can be challenging types of fiction to write, but they can also provide the advanced student with an opportunity to express emotions and questions in much more direct and evocative ways. Stories like Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis” allow the student to present extremely vivid images without forcing them to contrive explanations that would be irrelevant or even diminish their story’s impact.