Julie Duffy's Blog, page 85

143 – NaNoWriMo Survival Tips

Whether you’re taking part in NaNoWriMo this month or simply trying to keep your rating on track, I have five tips from the trenches of the extreme creativity challenge world.

Recommended:

The Nature Fix by Florence Williams

Bright Line Eating by Susan Pierce Thompson

No Plot, Not Problem by Chris Baty

Save The Cat Writes A Novel by Jessica Brody

Power Nap  by Andrew Johnson https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RXBG1-1zI_E

It’s another new episode of the StoryADay Podcast

The post 143 – NaNoWriMo Survival Tips appeared first on StoryADay.

SWAGr for November 2019

Post your goals for this month and let us know how you got on with last month’s goals.

Leave a comment below telling us how you got on last month, and what you plan to do next month, then check back in on the first of each month, to see how everyone’s doing.

(It doesn’t have to be fiction. Feel free to use this group to push you in whatever creative direction you need.)

Did you live up to your commitment from last month? Don’t remember what you promised to do? Check out the comments from last month.

And don’t forget to celebrate with/encourage your fellow SWAGr-ers on their progress!

Download your SWAGr Tracking Sheet now, to keep track of your commitments this month

****

Examples of Goals Set By SWAGr-ers in previous months

Write a story a day in May – everyone!Revise at least 10 short stories – IraideWrite two short stories. – JamiAttend one writers’ conference – JulieWrite fable for WordFactory competition – SonyaRe-read the backstory pieces I wrote in May and see if I can use them within my novel – MoniqueResearch the market – JamiFocus on my serial – Maureen

 So, what will you accomplish this month? Leave your comment below (use the drop-down option to subscribe to the comments and receive lovely, encouraging notifications from fellow StADa SWAGr-ers!)

(Next check-in, 1st of the month. Tell your friends!)

The post SWAGr for November 2019 appeared first on StoryADay.

[WoW] Party Time

On Wednesdays, I provide a writing prompt aimed at sparking a short story, with tips and advice included. Want them in your inbox? Subscribe now!

The Prompt

Write a story in which your characters go to a party

Tips







Don’t tell the story of the whole party, focus on one incident. Build up to it let it act like the fulcrum in the middle of your story, and then get out.Really focus on the language that you choose. Try to be surprising. Allow your characters to speak in idiosyncratic ways. Make sure they also different from each other. I’m thinking of a story by Jamel Brinkley from the Best American Short Stories 2019 , where two women use the word bubble in weird ways that exclude the other characters but include the women in their own little world. Why not try something like this?Try picking one or two types of metaphor or image to use in this short story. See how many different ways you can play with that single image or concept.Try to write the complete story in one setting and then schedule some time later on to go through it and revise it a little bit.Now let’s think about your title. Is there an obvious theme that you could sum up in a phrase from popular culture? Can you steal a table from the popular song?Still thinking about your title, if that first idea doesn’t work, how about this? Look at the dead center of your story. I mean literally, the middle of the word count. Is there a line or a phrase right there that you could pick out and turn into an intriguing title? I often find that the midpoint of the story is a great place to find the heart. It’s something about the way we write. You get into the flow and you start to understand what the story is really about when you approach the middle or the point just after the middle. Look there for your title.This exercise will also also help you with your revisions. Once you have identified the theme or a phrase that you can use in your title, you can go back through the story and insert or strengthen these things throughout the whole story.

If you share you story somewhere (and here’s why you might not want to) post a link here so we can come and read it.

Leave a comment to let us know what you wrote about today, and how it went!

Do you have trouble with titles? Do they come naturally to you? Have any tips for everyone else? Leave a comment!

The post [WoW] Party Time appeared first on StoryADay.

[Reading Room] No More Than A Bubble by Jamel Brinkley

This story was featured in The Best American Short Stories 2019 , edited by Anthony Doerr

The Reading Room is a series of posts where I review short stories with a writers’ eye.

The opening

“It was back in those days. Claudius Van Clyde and I stood on the edge of the dancing crowd, each of us already three bottles into one brand of magic brew, blasted by the music throbbing from the speakers. But we weren’t listening to the songs. I’d been speaking into the open shell of his ears since we’ve gotten to the party, shouting a bunch of mopey stuff about my father. Sometime around the witching hour, he stopped his perfunctory nodding and pointed towards the staircase of the house. “Check out these biddies,” he said. Past the heads of the dancers and would-be seducers I too saw the two girls he meant.”

So what do we know from these opening lines?

We know that this is a reminiscence from the very first line. We know who our two main characters are: Claudius and our narrator who has a problem with his father. We can assume they are young-ish because of the type of party they’re at and the implied relative-novelty of drinking beer, the brand of which they don’t seem to care about.

We also know something about the voice and style of the story we’re about to get into. That he is “talking into the open shell” of his friends ear and that he uses the word “perfunctory”, says to me that this is going to be a literary story, focused on language as much as on plot. 

That he tells us he is, in the midst of a party, moping about his father suggests this is going to be a story that has much to do with character as any external events. 

At this point the reader can make up their mind whether this is their type of story or they can move on.

But that’s not all it tells us.

Before I’m even halfway down the printed page in the book, Claudius introduces the idea of the two women our characters are going to pursue throughout the story. Already, I have a sense of the events of the story as well as the people populating it and the voice in which the story is going to be told. 

That’s a pretty good opening!

The Plot Thickens

The story starts with the men pursuing the women through the party. It also explores the narrator’s relationship with his parents, and theirs with each other, through the lens of men and women’s relationships. He does a great job of painting this young man as one who doesn’t really know anything, despite being close to graduating from college.

It’s really fun to follow these two young dogs at a party, using all their learned tactics to try to get two women into bed, and then discover that the story is going somewhere quite different. There are clues early on—and in the title—that the girls are not going to be victims. 

The story uses lots of storytelling techniques. It uses events in real time, the characters tell stories to each other, and the narrator reminisces within what’s already in reminiscence about his relationship with his parents. One of the reasons this works is that it is all tied to the same theme: men and women.

The story also moves location: at one point they are in the living room; at one point they go outside into the garden; they roam through the house …and at every point the writer pauses to ground us in the physical reality as well as the thoughts and the characters’ heads. This happens after the reminiscences as well—the writer describes the physical setting to bring us back to the present day of the party.

“Claudius and I spent the next two hours or so chatting, smoking and drinking out in the backyard, where the torches flattened everyone’s faces and made them clean. Eventually we went in. I munched on cookies and a sopping square of rum cake in the kitchen, intent on some sweetness.”

Notice how it’s not just “cake” but “a sopping square of rum cake’? That’s another signal that this party is being thrown by people with Caribbean backgrounds, something the writer alludes to several times throughout the story. But it’s subtle. 

The more specific details you give a story the less you need to actually tell us.

When the characters move on and the scene changes, the author spends a few words orienting us to the new setting. In short fiction it’s especially important to signal to the reader when a scene change happens, because they’re not going to be spending as much time in the story world as they would be if this were a novel and you don’t want to lose their attention even for a second

“We stood together, surrounded by the high-pitched barking of a neighbor’s dog, the buzz of a faulty street light, the faint clinking of metal. I clapped him on the shoulder and said we should head back up to the campus.”

Imagery, Theme & Title

In the author’s notes at the end of the anthology, Brinkley talks about how his working title for this story was much different. It was something that evoked a much more violent, aggressive tone.

In the writing, discovering what happens to his characters and how they react, he found a different title. Throughout the story the word ‘bubble’ is used and the concept of impermanence and fragility crops up several times. The women use the word “bubble” like their own private joke, excluding the men from their conversation. They are almost literally in their own bubble, one that the men cannot penetrate.

So the title becomes “No More Than a Bubble”, a very different feeling from his original, aggressive, title.

Show, Don’t Tell

This story probably happens in the late 70s or early 80s. The writer never actually tells us, but there are lots of little details that give us a clue. Claudius has a pager. One of the women has an Afro. And possibly most telling is his description of Brooklyn,

“wooden boards slanted across the windows of the apartments above a corner store and lines of stiff weeds punched through cracks in the sidewalk. We passed a place called Salt, a bar that looked like it hadn’t been open for business in years… The ground became more densely littered with crushed paper bags, empty bottles of malt liquor, and other shapeless hunks of trash.”

Never once does he say “Brooklyn wasn’t like it is today, a hipsters’ paradise.” He doesn’t have to. He has shown us.

The End

In an interesting turn, the narrator goes back to the opening sentence and reminds us that all of this has been told as a reminiscence. The modern day version of our protagonist reflects on the story he has just told us and what it might mean. He leaves us with a moment from the morning after the party which shows a distinct change in the protagonist’s character. 

If this last paragraph didn’t exist, this story would be very unsatisfying. It would just be one of those stories that your friend told you about a drunken party. That we get to experience this change with the protagonist at the end, makes the story feel like it has a point. Plus it gives extra resonance to the title and its suggestion of impermanence and sudden change.

Writer’s Notes

There’s a lot of discussion in writing circles at the moment about inclusivity, diversity, and the challenges of writing ‘the other’.

It’s not a great idea to write one-dimensional versions of people who are not quite like you. But of course it’s a challenge to get other diverse points of view right and there can be a temptation to omit characters who don’t look and sound like you.

If you’re not a young black man, how do you know how young black men talk about women or describe themselves or talk to each other? 

Reading writing by the people you would like to include in your stories, is a great start.

I’ve heard a lot of complaints about people of color being described purely by the color of their skin, with metaphors and similes related to food, and other lazy descriptions that set people’s teeth on edge. In this story our narrator describes the girls like this:

“A neat ladylike Afro bloomed from her head and she was a lighter shade of brown and her friend with the buzz cut, a thick snack of a girl whose shape made you work your jaws.”

Can’t you see them? And look, not a mention of coffee or chocolate to be seen! Of course it’s important to remember that this is still a problematic description of the girls, since it is being uttered by a clueless young guy who is acting on instinct and expectations as much as any real character…

When you want to include people from cultures other than your own, the best way, of course, is to talk to them, be-friend them, listen, ask. 

The second best is probably a careful reading of literature written by them.

(Not necessarily watching TV shows and movies that include diverse characters but may not have been written by diverse writers. Also, while movies and TV shows are a great way to absorb story, if you want to be a writer of short stories you need to be reading short stories. Why not ensure that the stories you read are coming from a diverse background while you’re at it?)

Discussion

I love Jamel Brinkley’s writing. I got a lot out of the story.

It’s still not the kind of story I would seek out. 

There was a moment towards the climax of the story when a dog appeared out of nowhere and I really hoped that it was going to turn out to be an alien or transform into a robot or something, because those are the kinds of stories that I love. 

It didn’t.

So what should I do? Write to Jamel Brinkley and ask him to apply his formidable talents to the kinds of stories I love? Or should I study his writing and try to better craft the stories that only I can write?

 (I think you know the answer.)

Do you read stories that don’t necessarily light you up, to learn from them? Do you also read stories you secretly love, even if you feel you shouldn’t? Have you encountered literary snobbery?

Let’s discuss!

The post [Reading Room] No More Than A Bubble by Jamel Brinkley appeared first on StoryADay.

On Revision by Tony Conaway

This post came as a response to a question I posed about revision: how you approach it and how you feel about it. This answer was so good, I asked Tony if I could repost it here. Thanks Tony!

I have no trouble revising my work. I usually want it to be as good as possible.

I have no problem revising my fiction. My problem is deciding when to STOP tweaking it.

I revise to catch errors, of course.

I revise to catch overused works and sentence structure. (No semi-colons allowed, and few colons.)

I revise to even out the pacing. (One scene may resolve too quickly. Another may get more space than the scene deserves.)

I revise to “kill my darlings.” (I had a nice description that I’d researched about what happens to the human body when a 50 caliber round hits it. But it wasn’t necessary, and the story was too long, so it had to go.)

I even revise to make sure the story looks good on the page for whomever is buying it. (Last night I fixed a paragraph which had one word on the last line. That shortened the entire page count by one.)

One technique that helps with revision is to read my work aloud. Not only does that make it easier to catch errors, it helps me catch overused words. (I finished a story yesterday at 4 a.m. When I read it aloud, I realized I’d used the word “obsessive” twice in a 2,000-word story. One of those had to go.)

Finally, remember what Jonathan Mayberry says:

One of your re-readings should be solely to include all five senses. This revision should make sure that even lesser-used senses (like smell and touch) are included in your work.

Jonathan Mayberry

P.S. I was speaking today to a physician who is also a wannabe-novelist. He said “You know, med school was hard. Residency was hard. But learning to write well, that’s really hard.”

[image error]

Co-author of the best-selling Kiss, Bow, or Shake Hands series and 8 other business books, Tony Conaway shares more writing tips at his blog. His short stories often anchor anthologies, most recently Fall Into Fantasy (Cloaked Press, 2019).

The post On Revision by Tony Conaway appeared first on StoryADay.

[WoW] What We Remember, What Has Been Lost

Today’s Write On Wednesday prompt was inspired by reading Wendell Berry’s story The Great Interruption: The Story of a Famous Story of Old Port William and How It Ceased To Be Told (1935-1978)  in this year’s Best American Short Stories. (Read my review here.)

The Prompt

Write a story from your childhood memories, keeping in mind your audience and what changes there have been since the time of your story

Tips

Think about your audience carefully. Imagine you’re writing for a single person
Try to make the voice of the narrator a character all itself.
What do you want to tell the reader about the ways the world has changed since your childhood? How will you recreate that world and contrast it with the modern one?
Write this story as if only the person you’re writing it for will ever see it.
Bonus points: send it to them

The Rules:

You should use the prompt in your story (however tenuous the connection).
You must write the story in one 24 hr period – the faster the better.
Post the story in the comments — if you’re brave enough.
Find something nice to say about someone else’s story and leave a comment. Everybody needs a little support!

Optional Extras:

Share this challenge on Twitter or Facebook

Some tweets/updates you might use:

Don’t miss my short story: TEXT #WriteOnWed #storyaday LINK

This week’s #WriteOnWed short story prompt is TEXT! #storyaday LINK

Come and write with us! #WriteOnWed #storyaday LINK

See my story – and write your own, today: TEXT at #WriteOnWed #storyaday LINK

The Write On Wednesday story prompts are designed to prompt quickly-written stories that you can share in the comments. It’s a warm-up exercise, to loosen up your creativity muscles. Come back every Wednesday to see a new prompt or subscribe.

If you would like to be the Guest Prompter, click here .

The post [WoW] What We Remember, What Has Been Lost appeared first on StoryADay.

[Reading Room] The Great Interruption by Wendell Berry

This story was featured in The Best American Short Stories 2019 , edited by Anthony Doerr

This story’s full title is The Great Interruption: The Story of A Famous Story of Old Port William and How It Ceased To Be Told (1935-1978). It’s a great example of the benefits of writing a lot, and never trying to sound like anyone else.

The Opening

The style of this short story was a challenge, for me. Its long, complex sentences, so unlike most of what I read these days, slowed me down. In fact, I had to read a page or so, out loud, to get myself into the rhythm of the narrator’s voice.

Even the title was confusing—until I untangled it, when it became intriguing.

It read like Mark Twain, like Charles Dickens: of a time and place that is not mine.

But I knew straight away it was going to be worth it. Here’s how it starts.

Billy Gibbs was as lively a boy, no double, as he could have been made by a strong body, excellent health, an active mind, and an alert sense of humor much like that of his father, Grover Gibbs.

That’s a 45-word, three-line opening sentence. 

But can’t you just hear the voice.

It forces you to settle in, and relax, and understand that you are meeting a raconteur. You won’t need to puzzle things out in this story. You’ll be fed the information you need, just when you need it. 

Take a breath, it says. Relax and let me do the work.

It’s quite unusual in a modern short story.

The Language

I know Wendell Berry primarily from his poetry, which is steeped in the natural world. This story’s main character is a boy steeped in his natural world, and the language the narrator uses, reflects this beautifully.

From the time he grew from the intelligence of a coonhound to that of a fairly biddable border collie, his parents, who were often in need of help, found work for him to do. 

The assumption is that the people hearing this story will understand the difference between a coonhound and a border collie. If we, the readers, don’t, then that tells us something about ourselves. The narrator’s not going to change anything for us!

The Plot Thickens

While the first two page of the story immerse us in the world and the humor of the story [1. Something that warns me this is not going to be flash fiction. It is more immersive than that. I can expect a longer story. In fact, this story is around 5000 words long.] there is a moment near the end of the second page where I sense the ‘real’ story was beginning.

If a gentleman from down at Hargrave wanted to conduct some business strictly private, he could turn his car through that gate, drive a hundred or so feet parallel to the inside of that fencerow, and become almost magically invisible to anybody driving a car or a team and wagon or even walking along the road on the outside.

He could be somewhat less invisible to a boy who would be across the road, fishing in the Blue Hole on Birds Branch…

On first reading, I thought that including all those details (fishing in the Blue Hole on Birds Branch) were just the writer slowing us down, painting a scene. But it turns out that he is telling this story in a particular way for a reason. And for that reason, take a look at the title: The story of a famous story. 

This story is, yes, the story of Billy’s adventure on that day, but it is also the story of a time and a place; of how stories were told and why they were told in that particular way; and how something was lost in the modern era.

But none of that matters yet. 

You’ll read the story of Billy’s adventure and enjoy it, just the way you are meant to.

It’s only when the writer has given you all the fun of hearing the story, and seeing how it spread around the town, that he begins his reflection on the true them of this piece.  

The End

We jump forward in time, after World War II,

…Port William by then was losing its own stories, which were being replaced by the entertainment industry…

…if Billy’s old story were to be told, it would have to stand alone, bereft of the old knowing-in-common that once enriched it…if one of the professionally successful descendants of the place as it once was were to tell it, say, at a cocktail party, it would be understood as an exhibit of the behavior of rural Kentuckians, laughable in all their ways, which the tell her earned much credit by escaping.

The author invited us readers into that world, and showed us the pleasures of hearing the story the way a local would have. That’s why, when he points out what has been lost, it doesn’t feel preachy, and we really feel it. 

Writer’s Notes

There’s nothing to be done about what’s past, of course, but there is plenty for we, as writers, to think about.

We operate in a world that has been, all of lives, taken over by ‘the entertainment industry’.

We have some decisions to make about how we tell our stories.

Who is our audience?  Do we even know who we’re telling our stories for? Are we telling them in a way that feels authentic, or in a way that we think the editor of a particular publication might want it told?

Or do we have the courage, and the confidence in our readers, to tell the story the way it wants to be told? 

Discussion

How much do you think about who will read your story, as you write it? Do you sometimes write for an editor? Do you sometimes write for yourself? For a single person? For an amorphous group of ‘book club ladies’?

How does each type of writing feel to you?

Or do you ignore the idea of an audience all together?

Leave a comment!

The Reading Room is a series of posts where I review short stories with a writers’ eye.

The post [Reading Room] The Great Interruption by Wendell Berry appeared first on StoryADay.

[Write On Wednesday] Multiple Choice

In honor of all the kids I know who will be spending this morning filling in bubbles on test papers, let’s use the weirdness of the short story form to try something a little different today.

The Prompt

Write a story in the form of a multiple-choice test

Tips



It seems to me this would be perfect for a break-up letter. One person could provide questions about the relationship or the break-up, with multiple answers for the recipient (and the reader) to choose from.I’m thinking about writing a murder mystery in this format.A horror story could also be funYou could parody the form. You remember? One answer is always ridiculously wrong, one is right, one could be right and the other one is wrong, but not-as-obviously. Or you could ignore that, and just write amusing/terrifying answers.

I’m not going to write any more tips because I just came up with this prompt and I’m really, really curious to see what you you do with it!

If you share you story somewhere (and here’s why you might not want to) post a link here so we can come and read it.

Leave a comment to let us know what you wrote about today, and how it went!

The post [Write On Wednesday] Multiple Choice appeared first on StoryADay.

[Reading Room] Natural Light by Kathleen Alcott

This story was featured in The Best American Short Stories 2019 , edited by Anthony Doerr

This story was dense and literary with a slow-build to a quiet conclusion. It was not to my usual taste at all. I didn’t much care for the protagonist. It had several elements that usually make me roll my eyes. And yet when I got to the end of this story, I immediately wanted to read it again. 

The language slowed me down, but not in a way that annoyed me. The exact meaning was often opaque, but through repetition, the author showed me how to read it and understand it. It was an odd experience, and I really liked it.

The Opening

I won’t tell you what my mother was doing in the photograph—or rather, what was being done to her—just that when I saw it for the first time, in a museum crowded with tourists, she’d been dead for five years.

Kathleen Alcott, Natural Light

Well. Isn’t that intriguing? We don’t know anything about the characters before this opening line, but all of a sudden we know quite a lot. 

We have the voice of the narrator, clear in our heads. We know their mother has been dead for a while.We know the mother had some kind of secret life.

In a story that keeps coming back to questions of truth and trust, this is a great opening on that level alone.

But this opening also creates suspense and tension, and raises questions to keep us from flicking on to the next story in the collection, or pulling out our phones and browsing social media.

Why didn’t the narrator know about this picture?What was the mother doing (or having done to her)? (We will find out, if we read the story carefully)Why is this unknown picture hanging in a museum.What kind of relationship did the protagonist have with her mother (and how will it mirror or differ from our own)?

Was it enough to keep me reading? Absolutely!

Before the end of the first page the author mentions email, to ground us in a time and place (here and now), and we know what kind of work the protagonist does (“when an acquaintance or the administrator at the college where I teach saw my eyes on my phone…”) so we can make some assumptions about her and where she fits in her society. 

I’m grounded in the story and intrigued enough to turn the page.

The Plot Thickens

The story begins with to the protagonist’s relationship with her mother, and explores that for a while, before broadening out and reviewing her relationships with other significant people in her life (mostly her husband and her father), as well as the events leading up to and surrounding her discovery of her mother’s picture in the museum. 

This discovery is what I call the fulcrum of the story, the moment around which everything in this character’s life revolves (for the duration of the story, at least). It allows us to explore her past and present, and speculate on her future, but none of this would have happened without the discovery of the picture. 

The early parts of the story also explore her relationship with the world—and her recurring thoughts about how she might leave it.

The author also begins to seed the story with the narrator’s thoughts on suicide, in a really interesting way. It’s undramatic. The potential methods simply pop up, the way they might in her mind, triggered by something she’s telling us about. At first I didn’t know what these sentences mean but, with repetition, I began to understand what she was really saying.

The End

The story keeps circling back the to the question of the photograph of her mother. 

When the writer doesn’t get the answers she needs from other sources, she goes to the one person who might be able to help: her father. It’s already been established that her parents weren’t big on transparency, so of course, her father’s first reaction is one of obfuscation.

But, suddenly, there is a moment when her father acts uncharacteristically. The reader can feel something coming: 

Will it be a moment of honesty? Will it have an impact on our narrator and the trajectory of her life? Will it be life-changing?

The author doesn’t, in my opinion, tie this up in a bow for us, but she does give us more than enough information for us to reach our own conclusions. 

It’s a very satisfying ending.

Writer’s Notes

The prose is dense and literary, in a way that often annoys me, but in this story it manages not to. Perhaps it’s because the author intersperses dense, literary rumination with straightforward, stark lines.

Look at how different the first sentence is from the second.

It is true that there were parts of me that must have been difficult to live with, namely an obsessive thought pattern concerning various ways I might bring about my own death, but also clear that I rose to the occasion of this malady with rosy dedication, running miles every day and recording the hedonistic pleasures of which I believed spoke to my commitment to life. Could a person who roasted three different kinds of apples for an autumn soup, really be capable of suicide?

Kathleen Alcott, Natural Light

I came to see that the dense, convoluted language was a necessary part of the story, with all it’s tricky examination of truth and trust. Can we really trust a narrator who says that her husband:

…began not to trust me on issues I saw as unrelated: what a neighbor had said about a vine that grew up our shared fence, a letter from the electric company that I claimed to have left on his desk.”

Kathleen Alcott, Natural Light

That “claimed” makes me question everything she’s just said, too.

On Training The Reader

Novelists often say they approach the middle of each new novel with dread because, although they’ve written novels before, they’ve never written this novel before, and every book teaches you how to write it.

I suspect that short stories, being the weird and varied form that hey are, have a similar opportunity. But in this case, you get to teach the reader how to read the story. 

Short story readers enjoy this challenge, this puzzle. After all, unless you pick up a short story collection that promises to be a collection of Sherlock Holmes parodies, the reader never really knows what they’re getting. Even a collection of ‘mystery stories’ or ‘science fiction stories’ can contain everything from a story composed entirely of tweets, to a traditional narrative story, to a story told in reverse; the tones and subject-matters will be all over the place, along with the style of telling.

In this story, Kathleen Alcott trains us to understand what’s going on when her paragraph suddenly end with a location, an object and a person who needs to be warned what they are about to encounter. It’s subtle. She doesn’t explain it. But the repetition invites the reader to puzzle out the connections. 

(It’s not a happy topic or one I recommend writing about, but it was very well done, in this story!)

She also trains us to start looking for examples of truth and mistrust, so that when the moment approaches that her father is going to tell her something true, we can feel it coming, in the way his behavior changes. 

Discussion

Are you using things like ‘email’ and the reactions of other people in the narrator’s life, to ground the reader in the story in the first few lines?

What elements are you worried your reader might miss? How might you train them to see what you want them to see?

Leave a comment!

The Reading Room is a series of posts where I review short stories with a writers’ eye.

The post [Reading Room] Natural Light by Kathleen Alcott appeared first on StoryADay.

142 – An Audience Of One

In which I talk about how writing helped me in the wake of a recent, unexpected loss, and the importance of writing for an audience of one.

LINKS

Listen to my recent interview on the Unmistakable Creative Podcast: https://stada.me/unmistakable

Listen to me talk about short stories on the Kiingo podcast: https://stada.me/kiingo

An Audience Of One by Srini Rao: https://amzn.to/2Mroq3w (aff)

It’s another new episode of the StoryADay Podcast

The post 142 – An Audience Of One appeared first on StoryADay.