Recently, I attended the Muse & the Marketplace writers conference sponsored by Grub Street. I wrote a piece last week about how I came away from one of the sessions with a new sense of what makes a great story beginning. Another session focused on story endings. The speaker for that session was Robin Black. I will paraphrase her here, but she said that a writer doesn’t create an ending in order to close a story down, but instead writes the ending in a way that opens the story up. Think of the ending as a “giving,” she said. She went on to say: It’s your opportunity to invite the reader to extract meaning and contemplate the significance of what the story means. This idea ... Continue reading →
Recently, I attended the Muse & the Marketplace writers conference sponsored by Grub Street. I wrote a piece last week about how I came away from one of the sessions with a new sense of what makes a great story beginning. Another session focused on story endings. The speaker for that session was Robin Black. I will paraphrase her here, but she said that a writer doesn’t create an ending in order to close a story down, but instead writes the ending in a way that opens the story up. Think of the ending as a “giving,” she said. She went on to say: It’s your opportunity to invite the reader to extract meaning and contemplate the significance of what the story means. This idea ... Continue reading →
It seems that I have been living under a rock. I’m only now just discovering the fabulous Steven Millhauser. I did read his piece, “Phantoms” in the the Best American Short Stories for 2011. But I hadn’t read anything else from him. Then this weekend, my boyfriend brought home Millhauser’s collection, Dangerous Laughter, which was languishing in the used book section for the low, low price of $8.00. I am agog. I have some things to say about Millhauser’s style, which has inspired me to do some different things with my writing, and I’ll get into in another post. The point of this post is direct you to his essay, The Ambition of the Short Story, which he wrote for the New York Times. I ... Continue reading →
Since you need to establish the tone of your book right from the start, I want to spend a little bit of time discussing this element. Tone is a subtle thing, and it overlaps sound, style, and voice. I’ve already discussed voice in an earlier post, and where voice is really generated and inspired by your characters, tone is something more consistent and covers your whole book. Kind of like icing spread over the top of a multiflavor cake—the voice of all your characters being the different flavors. Give a Feel for How You Feel Tone really has nothing to do with how you construct a sentence, paragraph, or even chapter. Think of tone as your (the author’s) overall opinion or feeling about your story. ... Continue reading →
In less than 24 hours Lake Cachet II in Chile's southern Patagonia vanished, leaving behind just some large puddles and chunks of ice in the vast lake bed. The lake's water comes from ice melting from the Colonia Glacier, located in the Northern Patagonian ice field, some 2,000 kilometers (1,250 miles) south of the capital, Santiago. ANALYSIS: Glaciers: The Biggest Losers The glacier normally acts as a dam containing the water, but rising temperatures have weakened its wall. Twice this year, on January 27 and March 31, water from the lake bore a tunnel between the rocks and the glacier wall. The result: Lake Cachet II's 200 million cubic liters of water gushed out into the Baker river, tripling its volume in a matter of ... Continue reading →
It seems that I have been living under a rock. I’m only now just discovering the fabulous Steven Millhauser. I did read his piece, “Phantoms” in the the Best American Short Stories for 2011. But I hadn’t read anything else from him. Then this weekend, my boyfriend brought home Millhauser’s collection, Dangerous Laughter, which was languishing in the used book section for the low, low price of $8.00. I am agog. I have some things to say about Millhauser’s style, which has inspired me to do some different things with my writing, and I’ll get into in another post. The point of this post is direct you to his essay, The Ambition of the Short Story, which he wrote for the New York Times. I ... Continue reading →
