"You let the scene speak for itself." - My friend Ike

I've been taking Writing Fiction this semester. Out of the first twenty stories submitted, ten ended with suicide. One of the suicides ended mid-sentence, as the narrator's neck snapped halfway through her first-person past-tense account of hanging herself.
But complaining is beside the point. The point is that it's gotten me thinking about what kind of writer I'd like to be. I suppose every writer wants to write with a little bit of every story she's ever loved and a dash of something all her own, and I'm no different. My strengths lie in description and in understatement, in symbolism and chiasm, and my weaknesses are dialogue, coherence, and plot layouts. I guess that means I'm more of a poet than a novelist. Whatever. Anyway, these are credentials I'd like to write for:
1) For plots, I want to write stories that sound like something out of a Bob Dylan ballad circa Blood on the Tracks. Old-timey feeling, semi-tragic, and driven towards some inevitable, unknowable wisdom. I want them to have a sanctity in the highest moment and a despair in the lowest, with a bit of both and an extra taste of notalgia in the end.
2) For theory and sunsets, I'd like G. K. Chesterton, rollicking haphazard paradoxes and ravenous orthodoxy, crimson slashed through with vermillion and drenched in liquid gold.
3) For descriptions and turns of phrase I'll take Dylan Thomas and Jeff Tweedy, with something modestly understated that is in none of them.
4) For symbolism I get my cue from fairy tales and myths all over the world, full of roses and mirrors, serpents and hourglasses, hidden gardens and inescapable towers. These are the symbols of human consciousness itself, the language of our dreams, rituals, and tattoos in a subconscious world where everything stands in the place of something brighter.
5) Communication I'd like to do like the best-loved writers of my girlhood, Robyn McKinley and Madeline L'Engel, speaking to a whole generation about what it means to be different and the strength and struggle of being a young woman.
6) My settings will be vivid and predominately southern, in a long tradition carved out by authors like Flannery O'Connor, Eudora Welty, William Faulkner, and Mark Twain.
7) Each story will be unique, a tale unto itself. It will be firstly a good yarn and secondly explore an idea, not shying away from depth for fear of drowning. It will wrap up nicely in the end, echoing a symbol from the beginning, and answer a question asked at the beginning. If the question has no answer, the story will be left open, but there will only be one question and it will be very clear what that question is.
8) The opening must be intriguing and never contrived.
9) All stories must have at least one line that makes you laugh and one that breaks your heart.
10) You must come away trembling and think about the story for at least an hour afterwards. Preferably for the rest of your life.

Ambitious? Perhaps. And yet, I know no other way to write.