We started by talking about what makes a story and the idea of character(s) involved in a conflict with rising tension that moves to a resolution at the end. It’s a pretty classic model and Vonnegut says some useful things about it here. Everyone brought a two line description of the story they’d like to write, and we listened to those and talked about which would work as is for stories and which need some narrowing down.
In discussing how we know when a story will be good, we looked at the first few paragraphs of stories by Carol Emshwiller, Joe Hill, and Kurt Vonnegut. I asked you to, in the coming week, look particularly at how people begin stories, and for Week 2, people will be bringing in a story beginning by someone else that knocks their socks. I mentioned that there’s plenty of online magazines to find speculative fiction in and here’s a brief starter list for you (feel free to add recommendations in the comments): Abyss & Apex, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Clarkesworld, Daily Science Fiction, Lightspeed, Strange Horizons, and Tor.com. One of the things I mentioned is that reading other people’s short fiction, particularly good stuff, is important: you’ll find more story ideas coming to you, you’ll learn new tricks from them, and you’ll become familiar with the markets you hope to sell to.
We also spent some time on writing process and the idea of timed writings, as taken from Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones and did some in class. Feel free to post yours here if you like it. I urged you to spend some time this week thinking about your writing process and perhaps trying to change it up a little: writing by hand instead of the keyboard, or in a place you don’t normally write.
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>>I mentioned that there’s plenty of online magazines to find speculative fiction in and here’s a brief starter list for you (feel free to add recommendations in the comments):
One thing I found pretty helpful are the Hugo nominated stories featured in audio over at Escapepod.org. Save the .mp3’s to your player of choice and listen on your way to work / school / date / etc. Another great audio fiction site is of course is The Drabblecast at http://www.drabblecast.org. They have some fantastic features.
If you want to be mega-cool, try transcribing some of your favorite stories to screen or paper. Peace & love.
I absolutely agree with that – one of the things I keep is a notebook where I copy out passages from stories and novels that I really love. It’s part of how I try to figure out how the author’s achieving the effect (and how I might use it.)
Timed writing was great. I can’t believe I haven’t tried that before. I went through one of my collections last night and read the first three paragraphs of each story and was surprised to see how well they fit the pattern you discussed. I’ll do a few line edits on one of my short stories tonight and get it sent over to you. I’m really enjoying the class!
Awesome! Thank you for volunteering for the first workshop.
And yeah, once you catch onto that first three paragraph thing, you realize how much the good stories are packing in there.
I just e-mailed you my story for the workshop.
I really enjoyed the class last night! The timed writing was fantastic.
Thanks! I missed the part where you talked about the first three paragraphs and what they do. Is there any way I can get caught up to speed on that?