Posts Tagged ‘plot’
The 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 MoreDetermining the End of a Novel
We’ve reached that time of year when we. . .well, when we mess with time. Springing forward to Daylight Savings Time, has cost us an hour. What could have happened between two a.m., standard time, and what should have been three a.m., standard time, will never happen. That hour disappeared as soon as we moved…
Read MoreThe Hidden Object: A Prompt for Fiction Writers
This week before Christmas, I’m thinking about how, as a child, I couldn’t resist searching for presents my mother had hidden from me. I wish I could say I was a better kid who could resist that temptation, but, alas. . . . Of course, one of two things happened whenever I found a gift…
Read MoreA Little Something Sweet: Plotting Our Fiction
We start with a bit of jelly on a plastic lid. Cathy and I were having breakfast on a restaurant’s patio this morning and bees were swarming around each table, trying to get at everyone’s food. “All they want is a little something sweet,” Cathy said. Then she took the lid off the little plastic…
Read MoreIrony as Plot Strategy
Last week, along with my students, I was thinking about irony and how it can often be a useful strategy in constructing plots. Here, then, is an example from my forthcoming memoir, Gone the Hard Road, offered up here in hopes of being useful to anyone wishing to add resonance to their narratives. One day,…
Read MoreAnd Then What Happened?: Plot in Short Fiction
Jhumpa Lahiri’s story, “A Temporary Matter,” opens with this sentence: “The notice informed them that it was a temporary matter: for five days their electricity would be cut off for one hour, beginning at eight P.M.” Eerily resonant with the shocking news out of Texas this past week about the cold weather and the failure…
Read MoreStories That Matter
I’m going to be presenting a session at the Erma Bombeck Writers’ Workshop on Friday, a session called “Writing Stories That Matter.” In preparation for that event, I had to think about exactly what I mean by stories that matter. William Faulkner, in his 1950 Nobel Prize acceptance speech, said, “. . .the young man…
Read MoreHappiness in Stories
I turned sixty-five on Friday, and it was a good day. I’d be lying if I said I never thought about the dwindling number of years left without a certain degree of apprehension, but for the most part I do my best to keep my focus on the here-and-now which still contains plenty that delights…
Read MoreContext in Fiction: Using the Past to Create the Present
Our friends, G. and S., came to visit last night. At one time, this would have been such a simple statement to make; on the surface it might have even seemed banal. These days, though, the ordinary fact of a visit carries with it a significance only available if one knows the context. Sometime in…
Read MoreThe Precise Names of Things
Yesterday evening, Cathy and I drove down to the lake in Fryer Park, which is located off Orders Road about a mile from our home. It was a pleasant evening—humid, but overcast and with enough of a breeze to make things comfortable. We sat awhile on a bench overlooking the lake and then decided to…
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