“With short stories, you never really expect the World at Large to care one way or the other. It’s a labor of love, and no one disputes that, and I think the purity of that endeavor is very liberating.” ~ Valerie Laken Further Reading: Read more about Valerie Laken on Fiction Writers Review Looking for something to read? Check out the Stories We Love Need inspiration? Try our Get Writing exercises
Jack London’s “To Build a Fire” (1908) is one of those stories—paralleled by certain films—that I always return to with an odd yearning. Each time, despite myself, I hope that the story (or film) will somehow end differently. That Connie won’t leave with Arnold Friend. That Christopher Reeve won’t discover that penny from 1979. Or, in the case of London’s story, that “the man” won’t break through the ice—and that the fire won’t go out. Perhaps part of the story’s great appeal is how very different it is from my own lived experience and writerly tendencies. My version of the […]
Write what you know without simply writing what you know … Write What You Know. I’ve never felt wholly comfortable with this phrase. I tell my students to abandon the literal idea of it on the first day of class. How bored and boring we’d all be if that were all any of us ever wrote. There needs to be an imbalance—more fiction than fact. Be Authentic. I ask my students to be authentic on the page instead, to create relatable characters navigating real stories. Our goal as storytellers is to engage our readers and spark a reaction in them […]
Happy Short Story Month 2012! Once again, we’ll be celebrating short stories all month here at Fiction Writers Review: Reviews of fantastic story collections Interviews with short story writers like Lysley Tenorio, Ben Fountain, and Laura Maylene Walter The return of our popular “Stories We Love” blog posts: writers on the stories that inspire them—and why Book of the Week giveaways highlighting short story collections Writing prompts to get you started on pieces of your own The 2012 Collection Giveaway Project—chances to win FREE short story collections from writing blogs all over the internet And more! We think short stories […]
Welcome to Fiction Writers Review‘s third annual Collection Giveaway Project: a community effort by lit bloggers to champion great short story collections. The brainchild of Contributing Editor Erika Dreifus, 18 bloggers participated in the CGP 2011, giving away dozens of collections. Instructions on how to participate in The Collection Giveaway Project 2012. Note: Bloggers, please feel free to copy and borrow the CGP banner from this post for use on your own site. CGP 2012 Participants (updated daily!) David Abrams / The Quivering Pen: with Friday Freebies – Fires of Our Choosing, by Eugene Cross, This Will Be Difficult to […]
Short Story Month countdown: 7 days to May! Fiction Writers Review will host the third annual Collection Giveaway Project: a community effort by lit bloggers to champion great short story collections. The brainchild of Contributing Editor Erika Dreifus, 18 bloggers participated in the CGP 2011, giving away dozens of collections. How to participate in The Collection Giveaway Project: (1) Blog about a recently published short story collection (or two, or three). Long or short, review or rave. Only rule: you, the blogger, read and loved the book(s). (2) Offer a copy (or copies) as a giveaway to one lucky commenter. […]
Editor’s note: What? Isn’t Short Story Month over? Yes, it is—but that doesn’t mean we stop loving short stories. So here’s an encore round of “Stories We Love.” In “Map of the City,” a story from her new collection Separate Kingdoms, Valerie Laken portrays the life of an American college student in perostroika-era Moscow. The story is brilliantly structured—the names of Moscow metro stations head the various sections, each of which captures a new moment in time and space and thereby mimics the experience of using the subway: you descend into one station and resurface at another. Perestroika, after all, […]
Is SSM really almost over?! Thankfully we can read stories year round, but I still feel the urge (while they’re center stage) to list two recommendations this week. They both come from Narrative magazine, which does require (free) registration. But I promise, these stories are so good, it’s worth filling out a quick form to read them. And Narrative offers a huge, inspiring, and ever-growing archive of fiction from emerging writers to authors as well known as Margaret Atwood and T. C. Boyle; if I weren’t headed to a wedding this afternoon, I might curl up with this site all […]
When I first read William Faulkner, in high school, it felt less like reading a book and more like an archeological find—unearthing something long dormant that I’d always known. His cadence, and that humid, repetitious, biblical world of the South, tapped into something in my bones. The first time I read David Foster Wallace’s “Incarnations of Burned Children,” at my brother’s strenuous recommendation, it struck me the same way—whole cloth, True in the capital-letter sense of the word, so perfect I didn’t want to deconstruct it as a writer, lest I drain a bit of its magic. A writing teacher […]
For the last weekend of Fiction Writers Review’s Short Story Month celebration, here’s one more helping of short-story-related news (and some gratuitous shorts-related photos—you know you enjoy them): READ: Ninth Letter shares a story by Rachel Cantor, “Zanzibar, Bereft,” to read online. At The Millions, Paul Vidich reflects on the livelihood of the short story: “Is today’s short fiction not as good? Hardly. Why aren’t readers holding up their part of the bargain? The answer, let me suggest, is related to how readers are given the opportunity to read – distribution, in commercial terms.” Still not enough short stories for […]
