Story Containers
by Melissa Scholes Young
“The tension between whether a story wants to be long or short requires us to examine them together.” Melissa Scholes Young thinks about form and story containers by engaging with the work of R.L. Maizes.
“The tension between whether a story wants to be long or short requires us to examine them together.” Melissa Scholes Young thinks about form and story containers by engaging with the work of R.L. Maizes.
“Fiction writers—like gardeners skilled with pruning shears working on a young plant—can bring a tremendous sense of shape to their work by cutting off opportunities for potential even while the work itself is in its infancy.” Steven Wingate draws from Robert Olen Butler’s short-short fiction to advocate for constraint.
Shawn Andrew Mitchell on Gifts of Love, Meaning, and Craft in Aimee Bender’s “The Red Ribbon.”
“None of us knows what these coming months will bring.” Travis Holland revisits William Maxwell’s 1937 novel, They Came Like Swallows, set during the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918, meditating on stillness, absence, and memory during the current crisis.
“Davis frequently operates as kind of phenomenologist. In her fiction, we get access to the outside world only if it’s part of someone’s inner world. The filter of perception is always there.”
Part II of Peter Turchi’s essay on shifting narrative distance in third person fiction continues with an examination of the techniques used by Jenny Erpenbeck in her novel Go, Went, Gone and Adam Johnson in his story “Hurricanes Anonymous.”
“There is nearly always a difference between the story the narrator understands and wants to tell, and the story the character would tell. That’s why the story is in the third person.” Part I of Peter Turchi’s essay on shifting narrative distance in third person fiction.
“I love when a writer asks me to forgive a parent despite the pain they’ve caused their child”: Amber Wheeler Bacon on empathizing with bad parents in fiction.
“After all, when there are few places to physically go in a story, every movement counts.” Alyson Mosquera Dutemple inhabits the limited settings of John Updike’s “A&P” and Stewart O’Nan’s Last Night at the Lobster.
“No matter how well-documented the history of a family home may be, there are gaps… I revel in the license to move into those uncharted spaces; to take a leap of faith from the springboard of memory into the untethered dimension of the imagination.” Ellen Prentiss Campbell on dreams, intuition, and following “the vapor trail of memory” in fiction.
“As anyone who has tried it knows, simply withholding information is no guarantee that the reader will continue patiently, or eagerly”: Peter Turchi on the strategic release of information in fiction, with assists from Colson Whitehead and Toni Morrison.
“Jokes can deliver information in a way that gets through to readers.” Kate Kaplan on the work of “conditional jokes” in Cynthia Ozick, Ana Menéndez, and Paul Beatty.
