Here’s a good interview with Claire Messud, author of The Emperor’s Children, on the Kenyon Review blog.
So is ambition ever justified? There’s always something insane about it, there’s something always unjustifiable about it. But what would ever get done without it?
Nanomo Writing Exercise:
Write a story that is propelled in part by a character’s blind ambition.
“In addition to watching the rhythm of his scene–the tempo or pace–the writer pays close attention, in constructing the scene, to the relationship, in each of its elements, of emphasis and function. By emphasis we mean the amount of time spent on a particular detail; by function we mean the work done by the detail within the scene and the story as a whole.” John Gardner, The Art of Fiction
Frederick Barthelme’s The 39 Steps: A Primer on Story Writing, begins:
Step one in the great enterprise of a new and preferable you in the house of fiction is: Mean less. That is, don’t mean so much. Make up a story, screw around with it, paste junk on it, needle the characters, make them say queer stuff, go bad places, insert new people at inopportune moments, do some drive-bys. Make it up, please.
Expect more of the same plainspoken, excellent advice in the following 38 steps, which range from the enigmatic–#9)Grace Slick (yes, people, that’s the entire entry for #9)–to the fundamental: #11)Be sure there’s a plot for the reader to grasp; while not necessarily the center of the story, it’s key to lulling the reader into that comfort zone where he’s vulnerable.
Learn how to write a short story in the online fiction writing course Master the Short Story.
Here is one of the most economical sentence pairings I’ve come across in a while: He couldn’t remember his wife clearly–only the hats she wore. How surprised she would be at hearing from him after this long while; there had been one letter written by each of them since the boy died. Graham Greene, The Power and the Glory
The exercise:
Compose two sentences in which a great deal is revealed about a character. Like the sentences above, yours should suggest something fundamental about the character’s inner life and/or relationships, as well as revealing something significant about his past.
Get more fiction writing prompts here.