Driving scenes are ubiquitous in movies, but some authors turn their noses at them in fiction. Unless the scene of two people side-by-side in a Toyota Camry is crucial to your story, most will suggest you trash it. I get why they happen in film: chronological, visual storytelling requires that the viewer see the character…
I’ll bet not a single editor in the world would encourage their authors to write from a second-person point of view. Many publishers and editors say the POV is wearing, potentially confusing, repetitive and not worth the trouble. But, come on, is it really that bad? After all, it’s as natural to our self-expression as…
Author C.J. Hribal was in love, so he asked his love to marry him. She was a sharp-witted, one-hundred-watt-smile woman, a mother, an academic and a cancer warrior. She had also just been re-diagnosed with cancer after five years of remission. “Officially, I asked her to marry me after she got her re-diagnosis. I knew…
By now, you probably know that unicorns and Santa Claus aren’t real, but wouldn’t it be great if they were? The human mind loves to believe in the unusual and unlikely. Some still believe that the crop circles of the 1990s were made by extra-terrestrials, even though the pranksters who made them have long since…
I’m not much of a planner. This is not a philosophical stance, just the way my brain works. I jump with both bare feet into whatever stream interests me. I don’t pick the best spot on the stream or check the speed of the current. I go. It’s only after I’ve experienced some of the…
Sonya Larson didn’t set out to write “Gabe Dove,” one of the stories chosen by Meg Wolitzer for inclusion in TheBest American Short Stories 2017, differently than her previous stories. But circumstances forced her hand. “I was in a state of exhaustion. I had no more ideas.” Her job was demanding 10 and 12 hour…
In American vernacular, we often call a shameful or troubling past, “buried.” We know there’s some unfortunate event left unspoken, and to bring up those bodies is messy and largely unwanted. Instead, an order arranges itself around the unspoken, and we get used to the roles and assumptions needed to carry on with the silence….
“Everyone knows this can happen,” is the first sentence of Joan Silber’s incredible—and award-winning—2017 novel, Improvement. It’s the sort of opening that lures in the reader. The eye reaches for the next words that will define the “it,” and that word “happen,” suggests a story right from the get go. What, we ask? What do…
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