Recently, I was listening to Saturday Cinema, with radio host Lynne Warfel. In advance of the Oscars, Warfel was featuring academy-award winning films and scores, including The Way We Were, a 1973 film starring Robert Redford and Barbara Streisand as two very different people who share time together. Listening to the theme song and reflecting on the poignancy of the music and film, I was reminded of Marcel Proust’s 1900s novel A la Recherche du Temps Perdu, which literally means in search of times lost. All of us return to places we’ve been and people we’ve known, often in search of the past ..read more

Try Before You Trust: To All Gentlewomen and Other Maids in Love (Historium Press, 2023), by Constance Briones, is an insightful work of historical fiction that captures the best of the genre. Here is an interview with the author on her writing journey with this novel. What made you choose this particular topic?I discovered the protagonist of my novel, Isabella Whitney, while researching my Master’s thesis on literacy and women in England during the sixteenth century. Whitney is credited as the first English woman believed to have written original secular poetry for publication in the mid-six ..read more

Writers are often asked, “Where do you get your ideas?” Answers to the question vary, but one common response is—experience. Memoirists and fiction writers have a lot in common. Besides the fact that most writers now work in both genres, we share a foundation best described by memoirist Vivian Gornick in The Situation and the Story. “Every work of literature has both a situation and a story. The situation is the context or circumstance … the story is the emotional experience that preoccupies the writer: the insight, the wisdom, the thing one has come to say [about the circumstance].” No ficti ..read more

It's impossible to build a house without a plan, and most architects need more than one to achieve the results their clients envision. The same is true for writers. No one can accomplish everything—story arc, character development, smooth prose—in just one try. When writers say they wrote a story in one sitting, they usually mean they did little or no revision while putting the initial concept on the page. While this is a great feeling, a strong first or early draft is still just a beginning. The all-important second or development draft is when the real story starts. While a story or novel m ..read more

One reason I started writing fiction was to avoid research. It wasn’t long before I realized that research is an essential tool and skill required for all writing, including and perhaps especially novel writing. But what is the role of research in fiction, particularly the art of it? One problem most, if not all, fiction writers and novelists encounter is how to depict a difficult scene where what is happening is illegal, immoral, offensive. How does the writer present the reality, its causes, and its effects, especially when research only underscores that what is happening is wrong? One role ..read more

Our world has a lot going on. No surprise there. But stepping back, we could say that our very big (or very small) world has four main components—people, place, period, populace. Depending on the genres we write in, these may not look anything like what we see on earth, but we still need to fully develop each part, for ourselves and our readers. PeopleWhile we’re using the word people here, fiction can comprise any type of living being. One writer created a story world where flowers were the life representatives. Ask these questions when creating and developing the beings in your story: What ..read more

Sometimes writers don’t think much about the form a story will take because stories often seem to take on a shape of their own. But writers of long-form fiction should be aware that all stories have a shape, or pattern, and that they can craft and mold that pattern to suit their vision for the work. First, what do we mean by “pattern”? In the classic reference work Aspects of the Novel, E. M. Forster refers to pattern as the shape a longer work takes because of the choices the characters make. Here’s an easily recognizable pattern. Our characters meet, their lives converge, then their live ..read more

Sometimes we write to remember. Sometimes as we write and remember, we discover.  A writer often intuits when a character in a novel isn't fully realized. And since characters are like actors in that there are no small characters, only insufficient depictions, it’s important to make sure all characters, especially main characters, are their fullest selves. With a little imagination and strategizing, writers can glimpse more of who characters are and render them more fully. One way to flesh out a scantily drawn character is to put the person in two scenes back to back, the first facing a ..read more

“I'm a failed poet,” wrote twentieth-century novelist and short-story writer William Faulkner, author of Light in August and winner of the Nobel Prize for literature. Faulkner also said it might be true that all novelists start out wanting to write poetry and when they find they can't, they try the short story. Then failing that, they finally try writing novels. Regardless of a writer’s interest or genre, there’s much to learn from the precision, imagery and persuasiveness of poetry. Like most people, writers don't have a lot of spare time, and when they do, they may not naturally gravitate t ..read more

Whether you write fiction or memoir, you’ll eventually need more than one person to help tell your story. Here are considerations for using a braided narrative approach to create a point-counterpoint storyline that’s informed by and greater than the sum of its parts. A braided narrative is when more than one primary person is involved in telling a story. As with the concept of a braid, the number of people telling the tale usually is limited to two or three. This approach differs from the use of multiple perspectives in these ways: Each person’s contribution to the story is roughly the same ..read more