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Compare the First and Final Scenes
Posted on February 26, 2017 Leave a Comment
This fantastic video on Vimeo (below) from Jacob T. Swinney could be the best five minutes you’ll spend today. It shows the opening and closing scenes of famous movies, displayed side by side. I’ve written a few posts here about beginnings and at least one post about endings. But once you have your story finished, whether it’s […]
Joyce, Wallace, Woolf and More Wrote in Fractals
Posted on April 5, 2016 Leave a Comment
For writers who never did well in math, you might be surprised to learn that literature contains fractals. Fractals are geometric figures made of small components that have statistical characteristics identical to the whole. If you zoom in on a fractal, you see the same shapes again and again no matter how far you zoom […]
The Year of Reading Women
Posted on December 13, 2015 1 Comment
There’s an important essay going around that, if you haven’t read it yet, you should read now before finishing this post. It’s called On Pandering by Claire Vaye Watkins, who is known to me by her fantastic 2013 debut collection of short stories, Battleborn, which won five literary awards. The essay is actually a speech […]
Test Driving Literary Journals
Posted on September 17, 2012 1 Comment
This year I began with gusto reading literary journals. I paid for subscriptions to a couple, including Glimmertrain and McSweeney’s, to get a feel for what they had to offer. And then I sent a short story in to a contest at Redivider — the $15 fee giving me a subscription. But I also purchased […]
Shiva and the Art of Revision
Posted on September 13, 2012 1 Comment
I’ve had a pretty good year so far with writing. Some of the pieces I’m churning out, I’m proud of, other stuff, well….not so much. The time has come for me to review several rough, first drafts I wrote earlier this year and turn them into polished stories. But how?
A Moment In An Hour
Posted on August 9, 2012 1 Comment
I’m a spare writer. I tend to write in scenes, moving the character forward through the action. But that kind of writing can go flat pretty quickly because I move too quickly past the details. Recently, I’ve come to love and admire Steven Milhauser’s writing. He has a gift for detail. In his short story, […]
The Right Word
Posted on August 2, 2012 7 Comments
I’m always so impressed with writers who construct amazing sentences comprised of exactly the right words. I try to do this with my own writing, but know it’s a talent that needs much developed. I recently asked my writing friend Kim Davis, who writes beautiful poetry, for advice on polishing my word-choice skills. She had […]
The Exploratory Draft
Posted on June 25, 2012 7 Comments
I’ve started doing something completely different. Instead of trying to write a story. I’ve begun simply to write. The writing is more like riffing or freewriting. I focus on the characters, or the situation, or the setting, or the emotions, or the back story and just go. My goal each time I sit down to […]
What’s the Situation?
Posted on June 20, 2012 2 Comments
I have a couple of short stories stories I’m working on that don’t seem to be going anywhere. I took a break from spinning my wheels the other day and came across a little section titled “Situation” in the book Creating Short Fiction, by Damon Knight. He writes, “A dramatic situation is unstable—you know it […]
Dialogue That Multitasks
Posted on June 19, 2012 6 Comments
While at the library last night, I glanced at a copy of the July 2012 issue of The Writer and a quote from ZZ Packer on the cover caught my eye. It was about dialogue and prompted me to open to the article and read the interview. I thought I’d share what she said about […]
Tracy Staedter 