Posts Tagged ‘narrative’
It Could Have Been: The What-Ifs of Narrative
Cathy and I have been watching reruns of the old sitcom, My Three Sons, which first aired in 1960. At that time, I would have been around the same age as the youngest son, Chip, so watching the show has been a bit nostalgic for me. I remember the toys and board games I see…
Read MoreThe Importance of Silence in Narratives
My wife Cathy is in Chicago this week, visiting her sister, so, the house, without her to talk to, is filled with much more silence than usual. This has me thinking about how fiction writers sometimes rush to get the plot onto the page, neglecting the benefits of putting space around significant events through the…
Read MoreSmall Facts
On Friday, my wife Cathy retired after forty-seven years as a healthcare professional, and on Saturday we celebrated with a gathering of friends. It’s a bittersweet time for Cathy. As ready as she is to move on to a new chapter of her life, she’ll admit to a touch of sadness over leaving her work…
Read MoreLet’s Get Curious: A Writing Prompt
Ray Bradbury once said, “That’s the great secret of creativity. You treat ideas like cats: You make them follow you.” Far be it for me to take issue with Mr. Bradbury, but I find myself wondering whether the real secret of creativity is to train ourselves to follow our ideas. Take curiosity, for instance, which…
Read MoreJust Give It to Me: Clarity in Fiction
Without intending to, we sometimes withhold important information about the premise of our narratives in our attempts to be mysterious. The problem with such a strategy is it can lead to confusion. Readers can spend too much time trying to figure out the context of the story. As a result, their attention is kept from…
Read MoreThe Pause before the End: Our Characters’ Interior Lives
When I walked into my office this morning, I found Stella the Cat lying in a patch of sunlight. She loves the sun, and she likes to roll over on her back to invite a tummy rub. Each time I pet her warm fur, a great feeling of calm comes over me. Everything in my…
Read MoreMemoir and Dramatizing Meaning
We all have moments from our pasts we can never forget. Memoirists tap into those moments when constructing a narrative. Dramatization allows us to find a causal chain that perhaps didn’t exist in real life. When we write memoir, we strive to document, but we also try to give some shape to experience. If we…
Read MoreCollage Approach for Narrative
The short story, “Escapes,” by Joy Williams opens with what at first glance may seem to be a series of disconnected oddities: the narrator’s memory of her father telling her about her grandfather being alive just before he died, her memory of a twenty-foot tall champagne glass atop a nightclub, her father pretending to be…
Read MoreLet’s Make a Scene
When children misbehave in public, parents often tell them, “Don’t make a scene.” What an unfortunate reprimand for any child who one day might be a writer, particularly if we’re prose writers. We spend our days making scenes on the page. I want to get down to basics in this post; I want to illustrate…
Read MoreMaking the Small into Something Large
One of my favorite short stories is “Killings” by Andre Dubus. The major event of the story, the revenge killing of a man who has murdered the main character’s son, is large, but within the narrative that moves to this climax, there are smaller, quieter moments that are equally significant. One such moment occurs in…
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