Exercise
Take a sensitive or finicky character and send him or her on a grimy journey, to an interesting place where that person is threatened or imagined they are threatened by a passenger in a train, bus, plane or taxi. Or take three characters who have as little in common as you can think and place [...]
Archive for July, 2009
SHORT STORY MAGIC – Part 4
Posted in John Lehman, books, contests, creative writing, fiction, get published, nonfiction, publishing, reviews, writing, writing contests on July 26, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
SHORT STORY MAGIC – Part 3
Posted in John Lehman, books, contests, creative writing, fiction, get published, nonfiction, publishing, reviews, writing, writing contests, tagged Action, CoJournaling, Jack Lehman, Scene Basics, Short Story on July 20, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
Evening Exercise
Construct a character from one aspect of your personality (not the dominant one). Make this trait the main motive force of the character’s feelings and thoughts. If you are shy, for example, construct a character who is much more shy than you. This character should be different from you in most ways-age, occupation, appearance. [...]
SHORT STORY MAGIC – Part 2
Posted in John Lehman, books, contests, creative writing, fiction, get published, writing, writing contests, tagged Action, characters, fiction, John Gardner, John Updike, Mothers and Daughters, Picasso, Setting, Story Idea, The Art of Fiction on July 15, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
Always have two or three story ideas you could work on.
Truth—The Story Idea
Theme—Four Questions
Is it your story to tell? Can you make it your own? Most often dynamic story ideas won’t be things that you already know and have settled. Settled things make for explanations not for absorbing fiction. Instead, they’ll be situations or people [...]
SHORT STORY MAGIC – Part 1
Posted in John Lehman, books, contests, creative writing, fiction, get published, publishing, tagged plot, Scenes, Short Story, short story magic, character, dialogue, characters, motivation, story structure, point of view on July 11, 2009 | 4 Comments »
“A short story is something that can be read in an hour and remembered for a lifetime.”—Stephen Vincent Benet
Introduction
The short story has gone in and out of fashion, but the form itself offers writers a unique opportunity to sharpen their tools. Many of our greatest writers, Hemingway, Faulkner, Fitzgerald and Henry James were masters [...]
SAMPLE SHORT STORY
Posted in John Lehman, books, contests, creative writing, fiction, get published, nonfiction, publishing, reviews, writing, writing contests on July 5, 2009 | 7 Comments »
Anatomy of a Story
by Jack Lehman
How much detail should a writer include, what makes dialogue interesting, should there be a twist at the end of a short story? The answer to these questions is that you need to go deeper than these stylistic matters. Back to the underlying reason this is a story that [...]
A BRIEF HISTORY OF MY TATTOO – Final Part
Posted in John Lehman, books, contests, creative writing, fiction, get published, nonfiction, poetry, publishing, reviews, writing, writing contests, tagged Gypsy Women, Beatrix Potter, Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, Anne of Green Gables on July 1, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
Some give us birth, some give us children, but it’s gypsy women in the night who adorn our male bruises with tattoos.
Why I’m Telling You This
I’ve always thought that organizing and re-organizing books is a pretty good metaphor for life itself. Remember the first time you did it—placing the large picture books on one end [...]
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