Spoilers below. Please read the story first.
Tag Archives: story
Author’s Note: About ‘A Late Walk’
Posted in Author's Note
Tagged Author's Note, experiment, fiction, poetry, Robert Frost, story
Quotable 50
There have been great societies that did not use the wheel, but there have been no societies that did not tell stories.
– Ursula K. LeGuin
Quotable 37
If you haven’t got an idea, start a story anyway. You can always throw it away, and maybe by the time you get to the fourth page you will have an idea, and you’ll only have to throw away the first three pages.
– William Campbell Gault
Pen to Paper: Generating Ideas
Where do you get your ideas?
That’s a popular question to ask writers. Some, weary of answering, claim to have hired a service to send ten or fifteen a week. Harlan Ellison famously answered: “Schenectady.”
I can track down the inspiration for some of my stories; others surprise me as much as, if not more than, they do the reader. Some quick examples for ones I know about:
Pen to Paper: Omit Needless Words
I recently entered Round Five of NPR’s Three-Minute Fiction contest. The opening and closing lines were given; all I had to do was fill the space between them without exceeding 600 words. I wrote my story and the word count read 772. So I began to edit. (Unfortunately, the contest rules don’t permit me to post the story, so I can’t show you specific examples. I’ll do that with another story in a bit.)
To tighten a story, start with the low-hanging fruit. As King Arthur did Excalibur, so I wielded Rule 17 from Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style: “Omit needless words.” Find three words doing the work of one and replace them: “about that time” becomes “then.” Find words that aren’t serving much purpose: “in the bottom drawer” is better than “in the bottom desk drawer” if you’ve already referred to the desk. Look for unnecessary adjectives: “He put on his blue coat and went out.” Do we need to know the color? If not, toss it out. This is a quick and painless way to reduce wordiness.
Posted in Pen to Paper
Tagged contest, editing, NPR, Pen to Paper, story, Strunk and White
