Storytellersunplugged

I'm currently listening to the audio book of a short story collection by an author named David Sedaris.  The collection is entitled When You are Engulfed in Flames, and it's basically a series of stories based on events in the author's life, characters he's met, and stories he's heard from others. Prior to this book, I've had no experience of Sedaris as an author.  He is a regular contributor to The New Yorker, a market I decided a long while back I ... Read More

By way of backing into this, it must first be confessed that August was one of those months that I was heel-kickin’ glad to see dwindle in the rear-view mirror. Choice highlights: Food poisoning that wrung my innards of every last drop of black and yellow bile, plus a few other colors I hope to never see again. The back half of an ongoing domestic Internet outage, hair-pulling tech calls to and from India included. A long bumpy spell in the New Novel ... Read More

Photo by Hryckowian I’m in the midst of teaching an online workshop called Jump Start Your Novel, which focuses on the methods I use to organize a project so that I can write the most powerful novel possible in a reasonable time frame. In the workshop we’ve been talking a bit about characters, so I thought I’d share some thoughts on that subject today. Characters are the heart of any story. A reader wants to be transported out of their daily existence to another ... Read More

This has been one of those days you know you should curl up and hide from, but after wading through it, I have come to the conclusion that it can end on a positive twist. It can inspire me to write this essay, and that is how I intend to banish it from my mind, heart, and life. Actually – it started last night. Let’s be accurate. It started Saturday. I woke up in the morning, and my machine – before ... Read More

The View from the XX Set by Justine Musk 1 Writing is seduction, when you think about it. Seduction is to get inside someone else’s view of things and reshape it to your own, to lead them in your chosen direction, to compel them until they are exactly where you want them, whether it’s in your story or in your bed. What writers and seducers have in common is a mindset that is empathetic enough to get into the skin, the head, of another ... Read More

--Justine Musk So here’s the thing. I sat down yesterday to write my essay for this site. I had a topic. I had a sense of where the piece would start, where it would end up, and how it might go in-between. But when it came game-time, I realized: I got nuthin’. Could be I’m a bit burned-out – and maybe I could have essayed about that, except Elizabeth Bear already said everything I would want to say about that point in your ... Read More

This past weekend I said goodbye to four friends that I’ve known for some time. We’ve gone through a lot together; the deaths of loved ones, work-related problems, outside influences that tried to hurt us, that didn’t have our best interests at heart. Sometimes I loved them like brothers. At other times, I wanted to kill them and I spent many an evening developing the most deliciously cruel and bizarre ways to do so. The thing is, we’d ... Read More

By David Niall Wilson Recently, following the news, I've been reintroduced to a concept that I think about now and then, and I thought I might bring it to the group for dissection. The idea is a simple one. The characters we write about, no matter how much of ourselves or our experience we invest them with, must never be real. We use a lot of stereotypes to connect with the "group mind" of our readers and draw out particular ... Read More

by Guest Storyteller Jeff Osier I used to think of myself as a writer. Never mind the details. Started when I was a little kid, went through a new phase every year (at least), started submitting stories to magazines in my mid-twenties, accumulated rejection slips, found some sympathetic editors in the small press, managed to get about thirty short stories published, co-wrote a nonfiction book that actually got published, wrote a couple of novels, one of which I had an agent try to ... Read More

by Dick Hill I think my good friend Rick Steinberg mentioned in these pages as he covered for me last month that he did so because I was involved in the longest, most ... Read More