Analyze the impact of an author's choices about setting, the order of action, characters, beginnings, endings and resolution in The Scion Wood

Learning goal: Analyze the impact of the author's choices regarding how to develop and relate elements of a story (where a story is set, how the action is ordered, how the characters are introduced and developed). Analyze how an author's choices concerning how to structure specific parts of a text, such as the choice of where to begin or end a story or the choice to provide a comedic or tragic resolution, contribute to its overall structure and meaning as well as its aesthetic impact. Support every claim with strong and thorough textual evidence.

The story is reprinted from the previous lesson so that this lesson can be read on its own.

Original story — The Scion Wood

1. The knife was colder than Nell remembered, and smaller. Her grandfather had set it on the workbench beside a bundle of pencil-thin sticks wrapped in damp newspaper, and he did not look up when she came into the barn. It was the second week of March. The orchard outside was still bare, the ground gray with old snow, and the forty trees in the north block stood in their rows like people waiting to be told something.

"You cut toward yourself, you bleed," Teodor said. "You cut away, you learn."

"You told me that when I was nine."

"And you still have ten fingers." He handed her a stick. "Scion wood. Last year's growth, taken while the tree sleeps. Tell me what it is."

She turned it over. The bark was reddish, the buds small and tight. "A Ruth."

He nodded, as if she had passed something.

2. Her cousin Dale had called her at school three weeks earlier. The solar company had made an offer on the north block, a twenty-five-year lease, better money than apples had brought in a decade. "He's signing," Dale said. "He told Mom at Christmas. He just hasn't told you, because you'll make a face." Nell had asked whether Grandpa had actually said the word signing. Dale had said, "He said he was tired. Same thing."

She had not made a face on the phone. She had driven home the first weekend she could, and she had not asked about the lease, and neither had he. The envelope from the company sat on the kitchen table under the salt shaker. It had been opened. It had been there since she arrived.

3. The Ruth apple was named for her grandmother, who had died when Nell was four. Teodor said the first tree had come up as a seedling beside the lane in the year he married, from a core somebody had thrown out a truck window. An apple seed, he had told Nell more than once, never grows into its parent; every seed is a new variety, and almost all of them are bad. This one was not. It was small and yellow with a red flush on one side, it kept in the cellar until April, and it tasted, Teodor said, like a thing that had decided to be sweet.

When Nell was fifteen she had looked for the Ruth in a nursery catalog and then in an online list of heritage varieties and had found nothing. "It isn't anywhere," she had told him.

"It's here," he had said.

Mrs. Oyelaran from the next farm had once told Nell, over a fence, that she did not remember any seedling by the lane, and that Teodor had grafted his first Ruths onto the rootstock the year after the old Baldwin tree came down. She said it kindly. She said it as though it did not matter which story was true.

4. "Rootstock," Teodor said now, and set a rooted stick the thickness of a finger on the bench. "The roots decide how big. The scion decides what fruit. Neither one is the tree by itself."

He showed her the cut again: a long slanting face on the scion, the same on the rootstock, then a second shallow cut into each face so they would lock together like two hands. "The green line under the bark," he said, "that is the only part alive enough to join. Line it up on one side at least. Miss it and you have two dead sticks tied together."

Her first cut wandered. Her second was better. On the fourth she felt the two pieces click, and he wrapped the join with tape, tight, and wrote on a paper tag: RUTH / M.111 / NELL.

"Why am I on the tag?"

"So we know whose fault."

She laughed. He did not, but his mouth moved.

5. They made thirty grafts that afternoon. At dusk Teodor bundled them into a crate of damp sawdust for the cellar. "In April they go in the nursery row," he said. "In three years, apples. Four, if the deer are hungry."

"Where does the nursery row go," Nell said, "if the north block is panels?"

It was the closest either of them had come.

He brushed sawdust from his sleeve. "The nursery row is by the lane," he said. "The lane is not in the north block."

"That isn't an answer."

"It is a fact. You asked where."

She waited. The barn light buzzed. Somewhere in the house the furnace came on.

"Your grandmother," he said at last, "wanted to see the ocean. Once. We said next year for thirty-one years." He looked at the crate, not at her. "Trees are very good at next year."

6. On Sunday she packed the car. The envelope was still under the salt shaker. She moved the shaker and read the first page, which was a letter, and the second, which was a lease with a line for a signature. The line was blank. On the back of the last page, in pencil, in her grandfather's square hand, was a list: Ruth, 30. Baldwin, 6. Nell—M.111 or M.7? and below it, crossed out so hard the pencil had torn the paper, a word she could not read.

She put the pages back in the order she had found them and set the shaker on top.

Teodor walked her to the car carrying something wrapped in a dish towel. It was the knife.

"You'll need your own," he said. "Scion wood keeps. You cut it in March, it waits in the cold until you're ready. Six weeks. Eight, if you're careful."

"And then?"

"Then it has to go somewhere." He closed her hand over the towel. "That is the only rule."

She drove out past the lane, where a crooked old tree she had never thought to ask about stood a little apart from the rows, and in the mirror she watched him walk not toward the house but toward the north block, slowly, the way he walked when he was counting.

Choices, not facts. A story's elements (setting, sequence of action, characters) are not given; an author chooses them, and each choice could have gone another way. Analyzing the impact of a choice means comparing what the text does with what it could have done and explaining what difference the actual choice makes to meaning. The most reliable method is the counterfactual test: imagine the alternative, then say precisely what would be lost or gained. "The author sets the story in March" is a fact. "Setting the story in March, when the trees are dormant and grafting is commonly done, makes the action of the story plausible and turns the season itself into an image of postponement" is analysis of a choice.

Where a story is set. The setting works on three scales. The season, "the second week of March," with the orchard "still bare," is when this kind of bench grafting with dormant wood is commonly done, since scion wood is "taken while the tree sleeps"; it also places the story at the edge of spring, before any outcome is known. The farm is divided in two by the author: the "north block," which the lease would cover, and "the lane," where the nursery row, the crooked old tree and perhaps the first Ruth stand. By relating these two places, the author turns a legal question into a map: the future the lease threatens and the past the family tells stories about are a short walk apart, and Teodor's last walk "toward the north block" is a movement across that map. The smallest setting, the kitchen table with "the envelope... under the salt shaker," makes silence visible: the document is present at every meal and never discussed openly.

How the action is ordered. The story's events, in the order they happened, begin decades ago (the Ruth's origin), pass through Nell's childhood, reach Dale's phone call "three weeks earlier," and end on a single weekend. The author does not tell them in that order. Section 1 opens on the weekend, in the barn; section 2 jumps back to the phone call; section 3 jumps back decades; sections 4–6 return to the weekend and move forward. This ordering relates the elements in a particular way: the reader learns about the lease only after seeing Teodor teach Nell to graft, so the craft lesson already seems to carry more weight than a craft lesson. Had the story opened with Dale's call, the reader would have read the barn scene as a scene about the lease; opening in the barn makes the lease an intrusion into something older.

How characters are introduced and developed. Teodor is introduced by a maxim, "You cut toward yourself, you bleed... You cut away, you learn," before we learn anything about his situation. The choice establishes him as a teacher who speaks in rules, which prepares the last rule, "That is the only rule," to bear the story's meaning. Nell is introduced by what she notices, the knife is "colder than Nell remembered, and smaller," which tells us she has been away and has grown. Dale appears only on the phone and only in section 2, a choice that makes him a source of pressure without a face. Ruth, the grandmother, never appears at all; she is developed entirely through an apple, a name on a tag and one story about the ocean, which is fitting in a story about what survives a person. Development is shown through change: Nell moves from silence ("she had not asked about the lease") to the one question in section 5 that comes near the lease, and then to reading the lease herself in section 6.

Where to begin and where to end. The opening sentence is about a knife, and in the final section the same knife is given to Nell. That frame is a structural choice with meaning: the object that opens the story as her grandfather's tool closes it as hers. The ending is placed at a precise moment, after Nell has learned the line is blank and before Teodor acts. Ending one scene earlier (before she reads the lease) would leave the reader not knowing whether he had signed; ending one scene later (with a decision) would turn an open question into an answer. The chosen ending gives the reader exactly as much as Nell knows.

Comedic or tragic resolution. In the literary sense a comedic resolution restores order and joins people together (a reconciliation, a marriage, a return), whether or not anything is funny; a tragic resolution ends in loss that follows from choices the characters could not or would not unmake. This story offers the materials for both and chooses neither. A comedic ending would have Teodor tear up the lease and plant the thirty grafts with Nell; a tragic one would have him sign, the trees cleared and the Ruth lost because no one would say what they wanted. By refusing both, the author keeps the meaning in the present tense: the story is about the moment before a choice is known. The aesthetic impact is a particular kind of tension, quiet and unresolved, that stays with the reader after the last image.

The misconception. Students often write "the author uses setting to create mood" and stop. That sentence is true of almost any story, which is why it is weak. Name the specific choice, test it against an alternative, and state the specific effect on meaning.

Worked counterfactual on order: Actual order: barn (weekend) → phone call (three weeks earlier) → Ruth's origin (decades earlier) → barn → barn → Sunday. Alternative: start with Dale's call and tell events in chronological order. Effect of the actual choice: the reader meets the grafting before the lease, so the craft appears to be the story's subject and the lease an interruption; the flashbacks arrive when Nell's thoughts would supply them, which keeps us close to her point of view. What would be lost: the delayed reveal of why this weekend matters, and the sense that the family's silence is layered over something older.

Worked character analysis: Choice: Ruth never appears and is developed only through objects and one story. Evidence: she "had died when Nell was four"; the apple bears her name; "We said next year for thirty-one years." Effect: her absence makes her the story's clearest example of what postponement costs, and her survival as a variety name gives a human form to one of the story's themes, that what is handed down continues only by being cut and joined to something new. If she had appeared in a flashback scene, she would be a character; kept offstage, she becomes the thing whose keeping is in question.

Worked analysis of the ending: Choice: end with Teodor walking toward the north block "the way he walked when he was counting," seen in Nell's mirror. Evidence of openness: the lease line "was blank"; the crossed-out word is unreadable. Comedic alternative: he tears up the lease; one likely effect is that the story becomes a celebration of tradition and the theme that postponing a choice is itself a choice, with a cost, shrinks to a problem solved, though a decision could also complete that theme. Tragic alternative: he signs; the theme of continuation through grafting could turn toward elegy, though grafts by the lane might still survive. Other supported predictions are possible; the test is what each ending would change. Actual effect: the story's structure keeps both themes alive, and the mirror (a view backward while driving forward) gives the ending its aesthetic force: Nell leaves carrying the knife while the decision stays behind her.

Order map: Make two timelines. On the first, place every event in the order it happened (the Ruth's origin, Ruth's death, Nell's catalog search, Dale's call, the grafting, Sunday). On the second, place the same events in the order the story tells them. Draw lines connecting each event on the two timelines and mark each crossing line with a sentence explaining why the author moved that event.

Independent performance: Write a 600–800-word analysis of the impact of two of the author's choices, one about how to develop and relate elements (setting, order of action or character introduction) and one about how to structure a specific part (the opening, the ending, or the choice of an unresolved rather than comedic or tragic resolution). Success criteria: each choice is named precisely; each is tested against a specific alternative; the effect of each on meaning is stated and supported by at least three quotations; at least one paragraph explains the choice's contribution to the story's overall structure and to its aesthetic impact; and no claim could be made of any story ("creates mood") without the specifics that make it true of this one.

Rewrite experiment: Write a 150-word alternative ending (comedic or tragic). Then write one paragraph explaining what your ending changes about the meaning of the whole story.