Am/Want to Be/Will Be
I’ve been working a lot lately on what kind of writer I am . . . what kind I want to be . . . and what I will eventually be. There are countless English language journals, anthologies, bookshops and libraries in the world, and that translates into I-have-no-idea-how-many fiction readers. Regardless of the actual number, I know and accept that I can’t be the writer for all of them.
What I can be is a writer who is consistent in certain core ways and is comfortable with that. Maybe most important in these fractious times is to be aware of what my writing constitutes and what it does not.
Self-analysis begins with “self,” so here is a scratch-coat version of the literary and authorial elements I believe are most important to me. For context, I’m nearly seventy years old, a prairie resident who began my fiction practice in 2016, after 20 years in advertising and marketing. I have one published book, “Pinching Zwieback” (At Bay Press, 2023). I’ve published 142 individual stories (including excerpts, interviews, poems, and essays) and have a novel forthcoming in the spring of 2026. With any luck, I’ll also have another book out sometime after that.
That’s a lot of words, so I BETTER know what I am and what I’m not.
Yep List
√ Prioritize quality of prose and storytelling
√ Commitment to craft over cachet
√ Focus on regional or rural sensibility—without being provincial
√ Heartful, deeply human prose with unshowy language
√ Value meaning and emotional depth over literary fashion
“Be political—but to be heard, be quiet and mature in a noisy era.”
√ Write place-based prose with resonance
√ Be humble and consistent (AVOID pomposity!)
√ Hold to empathic realism and clarity
√ Recognize that emotional intelligence, rural ethics, and cultural humility are the ethos of your readers
√ Moral nuance and intergenerational narratives are central traits in the writing
“Emotion must be earned through character, situation, and moral complication.”
√ Embrace moral ambiguity—we all have it
√ Spiritual content need not be religious content (no sermons)
√ Build on strong character underpinnings and clean prose with a steady, but constant, moral arc
√ Be attuned to displacement, contradiction, and the need to belong
√ Interrogate beliefs and also what people “get away with,” and at what cost?
“Always be curious and honest about fairness, decency, and failure in the story.”
Nope List
× No authorial moralizing
× Reader catharsis is never the primary objective—no melodrama or superheroes
× No authorial identity—tell the story and let social class, rurality, and age arise through the fiction
× Write lean but never at the expense of the emotional arc or the distinctiveness of place
× Create quiet stories, but don’t be afraid to “make the quiet sharp”
“As soon as it’s read, it ceases to be your story—it belongs to each individual reader.”
× No apologies (Sin Qua Non)
Photo by Eric Peters
