“It was a dark and stormy night…’ Remember Snoopy’s famous one-liner that was going to begin his ever- elusive great mystery story? Perhaps you know how Snoopy feels, perched atop his doghouse, typewriter silent. You’ve got that mystery story brewing in your brain. But where to begin. Random nefarious characters, eerie, foreboding nuances, grim settings…all ...
Many people think that writing a short story should be pretty easy. After all, its only about two to four thousand words that they have to get down on the page. But, when they sit down to actually write the thing, they may discover something. Writing a short story is not as easy as it ...
At first glance narrative writing, or story writing, may seem easy. Yet, it is quite easy for students to ramble, write too much dialogue or fail to have any conflict. Here are some tips for teaching narrative writing. Teach the Structure Kids often learn about having a beginning, middle and an end. Yet, it is ...
Ellora’s Cave was the first successful erotic e-publisher on the Internet, founded by Tina Engler, who writes under the pen name Jaid Black. With many more e-publishers popping up virtually every minute, Ellora’s Cave is still the big fish when it comes to publishing erotic works of fiction. The term Romantica, wildly used in writer’s ...
Learn from the professionals. It’s very simple advice, but rarely taken by the short story writer who could benefit first by reading the work of his or her peers. It’s something I didn’t learn until I was in my mid-twenties and took a college course in short fiction. In that class we did several exercises ...
To create a story, the ingredients that a writer needs to use and combine are plot, setting, characters point of view, narrative, scenes, the type of stories, form and structure. In order to write a successful, marketable short story, writers must know and understand each one of these vital parts of a story. Plot: Plot ...
Over the counter in the neighborhood deli hung a sign that said, “One sandwich not enough? Two sandwiches too much? Try a sandwich and a half!” Adapted for a writing class, it might be accurately transposed into, “An essay too short? A novel too long? Try a short story.” This is an in-between genre of ...
