Recently, I had a short story published in the Baltimore Review. I tweeted out my good news, and another writer responded, asking me about writing short stories. He finished his question with “Do you think it’s worth it?” That stopped my fingers mid-tweet. “It depends on how you define worth,” I finally replied. There are…
You’ve got them lying around somewhere, don’t you—one- or two-page writing scraps that you dashed off at some point? Maybe they were character sketches you wrote while working through a how-to book on characterization. Or maybe they’re tucked into a notebook you used at that last workshop you attended, where the instructor had you do…
Last month, I wrote about story beginnings (“Top 10 Ways Not to Start a Story”). A reader asked if I could expand on why those story beginnings may be weak choices, beyond just overuse. (Thanks for the suggestion, author Gloria Lesher!) A story’s first pages make promises to the reader. As an author, you must…
Story beginnings are challenging. On the one hand, you’ve got all the excitement of getting to know your characters and their dilemmas for the first time, and you haven’t yet hit the point where flaws begin to raise their thorny heads. Ah, young love! On the other hand, those first-draft opening pages are seldom the…
We humans aren’t good at seeing our own flaws, especially in our writing. When we look at something we wrote, we know exactly what we intended to say. So when we read the words back to ourselves—get this—it makes perfect sense to us! Our brain automatically fills in any gaps, ignores the hiccups, even glosses…