Sometimes I come across an article about writing that I know I’m going to return to again and again. David Jauss writes just such an article in the March/April issue of The Writer’s Chronicle. (I’m clipping it out and saving it, AND making a link to the digital version of the story a permanent computer bookmark…) In the article, Homo Sapiens vs. Homo Fictus, Jauss explores (deeply) the differences between “real people” and the characters that we bring to life in our fiction,

Naming our characters (or, sometimes, not naming our characters) is a big piece of the literary puzzle for many writers. This is the second essay about the names of characters in A Good Man is Hard to Find. It didn’t surprise me that my fellow writer, Andrea Cumbo, would write about the names in this O’Connor story. I’ve read a draft version of the book Andi is working on (which she mentions briefly at the end of this post) and I know how important nameless-ness is to her. He

Today and Thursday this week, I’m going to be giving you an adaptation of an exercise in “What if?” by Bernays and Painter. You can get your own copy from Amazon right here. The exercise for today and Thursday is basically the same, with some different questions being asked to stimulate your writing. For this exercise you need a story of your own (likely, an early draft, though I would advocate doing this with a story that is just stuck and lifeless…one of those stories you k

So, I have this story. It’s called, “The Silence of God is Impossible to Bear”. This was a story that I wrote several years ago, and it was part of my application package to the Queens MFA program. I re-worked the story twice before I sent it in to the Queens staff, and it was–obviously–strong enough to help me make the cut. It still needed work. I did two more editing passes and took the story with me as my large group workshop submission for my first on-campus residency. Th