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Category: short stories
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Sara Dailey week #002: Character and pathos
In “The Memory Train,” Sara Dailey begins by describing a man, Phineas Gage, a railroad worker who survived after a large iron rod punctured his left frontal lobe. The bleached bone shows a jagged U above the empty hollow of the left eye’s socket, bone that never again seamlessly met other bone. It…
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Sara Dailey Week #001: Starter from a title
Welcome to Sara Dailey week! Over the next seven days, we’ll be learning technique and getting ideas from a single article of hers, “The Memory Train,” that was published in Creative Nonfiction magazine, the one edited by Lee Gutkind. First up is taking a look at that title: “The Memory Train.” Other people’s…
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Knockout Idea: Photo captions
Here’s a knockout idea I got while reading Ariel Levy’s story, “Living Room Leopards.” At the very beginning of the story, there was a photo of a cross-bred cat: a mix between a wildcat and a domestic cat. The caption read: Half-bred crossbreeds are in vogue but controversial, and illegal in some states. …
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Speed bag drill #002: Mysterious deaths
So speed bags work this way: Once you finish reading the prompt, you start moving your pen on paper or you flash those fingers across your keyboard, and you keep going for at least five minutes. Today’s speed drill comes from “Findings,” in the June 2013 edition of Harper’s: Experts were unable to explain the…
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Starter: A mystery with two solutions
Today we’ll begin with a paragraph starter–the opening to Rebecca Solnit’s nonfiction article, “The Separating Sickness.” First, read the excerpt: Eddie Bacon was a forklift operator at Trident Seafoods in Akutan, Alaska. In the summer of 1999, he developed mysterious rashes on his hands, arms, and legs. He visited a doctor, who gave him a…
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Knockout Idea: Taiye Selasi on the importance of photography to writing
Taiye Selasi, author of Ghana Must Go, says, “I spend a great deal of time documenting…I’m always taking pictures. Somehow, these little snapshots of the world inform my work…. An elderly couple walking, rain on windows, light on anything, anywhere–these quiet details of everyday life are the stuff of human experience.” Try this: …
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Standing 8 Count: 8 Unusual Jobs to Think About for Your Characters
While you’re just standing there (sitting there?), let me tell you about a piece of a list I found in the June 2013 edition of Harper’s. The clip was called “Naan to Five,” and it contained several of the 2,945 occupations listed in the current edition of India’s National Classification of Occupations. Here are a…
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SPEED BAG: #001 Brainstorm from this title…
Today, we’ll try our first speed bag drill. These are meant to be quick writings–your hand flows across the paper for as long as you can maintain it (hopefully at least 5 minutes). Here’s how it’ll work today: I’m going to give you a title. It comes from an article by Nicholas Schnidle in the…
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JOE HILL (Stephen King’s Son) Gets Sucker Punched!
[Source: Writer’s Digest] [Joe Hill] had been sending his short stories to The Atlantic for a while now, and thought he was getting close to breaking in. The rejection letters usually came in big envelopes containing his manuscript, but this one was different. It was small. Like, say, something you’d mail a check in. Hill…
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CONTENDER: Amy Sue Nathan, author of The Glass Wives
Amy Sue Nathan can give us all reasons to put butt in chair, and pen to paper. When she was asked about the process involved in completing her debut novel, The Glass Wives, this is what she had to say: I know it’s cliche, but I maintained a positive attitude (whenever possible) and kept…