On Writing: Potpourri — First Lines, Short Fiction, Dialogue

DavidBCoeDavidBCoe

I’ve been staring at my computer screen for close to an hour, trying to figure out what to write for this week’s post.  Every idea I come up with seems to be something that one of my MW colleagues or I have written about recently.  This is one of the problems with writing a weekly post for a focused blog site like MW.  With my personal blogs, if I’m bored with writing about writing, I can write about baseball or my kids or politics.  I can’t really do that here.  So what to do.

Well, my solution for this week is to write about ALL the ideas I came up with as I tried to find a topic.  Instead of writing 800 to 1,000 words on one subject, I’m going to write a couple of hundred on several.  You’re free to respond to any or all of them.

1.  [...]

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On Writing: A Novelist Takes on Short Stories

DavidBCoeDavidBCoe

What is the hardest part of writing short fiction? Or more to the point, what is the most difficult adjustment a novelist needs to make when writing a short story?

These are questions I’ve been grappling with for the past couple of weeks as I work on a series of short stories that I’m writing in the Thieftaker universe. Before I address those questions, though, maybe I should address a different question: With one Thieftaker novel already written and in production, and a second finished and in revisions, why am I bothering with short stories?

Well, for one thing, it’s fun. I’m playing with story lines, experimenting with descriptive passages and stylistic approaches, polishing the series voice. Writing the stories is also giving me a fresh perspective on my lead character, his past, and his relationship with other characters. More to the point, the stories will help me promote the [...]

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