The time of your life

This month’s story, The Five Boons Of Life by Mark Twain, is very short, but packs a lot of interesting features into such a small word count. As always, you’ll get the most out of this master class if you read the story for yourself: https://writ.rs/fiveboons.

Although the story is so short, it is divided into five chapters. This structure helps to underpin the story as it follows the main character through a whole lifetime. Note also how the structure of a day is used to reflect the structure of a life, with the references to ‘the morning of life’ and, later on, ‘the fading day’. This helps to make the timeline of the story feel tighter, and keeps the reader moving through the story, although the action is unusually spread out in time.

Because the story is