[Stylist] great article

Tue Sep 7 20:57:52 UTC 2021

Annie,

This is indeed a great article. I particularly like the sentence about when
a story really starts.

I will forward it to my writing group with your blessings, I hope.

Also, I would love to know the different platforms you use to further the
sale of your books and poetry-also others from this group.

Thanks so much for sharing.

Jackie

From: Stylist <stylist-bounces at nfbnet.org> On Behalf Of Ann Chiappetta via
Stylist
Sent: Tuesday, September 7, 2021 12:20 PM
To: 'Writers' Division Mailing List' <stylist at nfbnet.org>
Cc: anniecms64 at gmail.com
Subject: [Stylist] great article

https://www.writermag.com/improve-your-writing/fiction/3-tips-for-your-short
-stories/#content

>From the Front Lines: 3 tips for your short stories

After reading 500 short stories three times a year, here's some advice from
this side of the editor's desk.

As I write to you, it's been about a year since I left a literary magazine
where my team of two associate editors and I would vet 400 to 600 stories
for each tri-annual issue. (That's three times a year, not once every three
years, and no, publishing has never really figured out how to best
distinguish.) I thought it was time to institutionalize some of the advice I
passed on most regularly to writers looking for feedback on their short
stories.

Before we dive in, let's lay out some parameters: Yes, we hope our tastes
continue to evolve and change as editors and as writers. And yes, we
continue to learn, no matter where we are in our individual creative
journeys. One change I'm making is to phrase this advice in the form of
questions rather than in the form of prescriptive advice. I've been nudged
by Felicia Rose Chavez's Anti-Racist Writing Workshop; Matthew Salesses'
Craft in the Real World; Liz Lerman's Critical Response Process, which is
referenced by both Salesses and Chavez; and Letting Go of Literary
Whiteness, by Carlin Borsheim-Black and Sophia Tatiana Sarigianides. Boy,
you might say. This is a whole lot of work in the same vein. And, yes, you'd
be right. These books and resources have me revisiting the way I teach
workshops, which in turn is changing the way I edit, and so I thought I'd
pass these methodologies on to you. Ready? Here we go:

1. Does my story start in the right place?

This is a question every writer should ask themselves before they turn in a
draft or a submission. The number of times we saw stories that felt like
they began too early (that is, the first page or so drags until the reader
is piqued) or began too late (this is where the reader feels like they may
have missed something upon starting the story) was too big to count on all
the fingers and toes of our staff. With that said, there is a caveat to
this: Different storytelling cultures have different traditions to them. For
instance, Asian stories tend to start way in the background - there is no
me, goes the cultural knowledge, without all of this, and so short stories
from this tradition might feel different from Western stories. The advice I
used to give a lot of was from Irish writer Elizabeth Bowen: A story is the
moment after which a character's life is never the same. This advice
appealed to my Western education and to things I'd learned like the Hero's
Journey and Aristotle's three-act structure, and so I looked for stories
that fell more into this category; they are what suited me as a consumer of
literature and as a product of a Western literary education. But we are a
global economy, with access to lots of different cultures, and so we ask
ourselves as writers: "Does this story start in the right place for what it
is trying to be?"

1a. Related, it was common for us to see short stories that didn't suffer
exactly from plot problems - i.e., the plot started in the right place - but
that nonetheless felt as if they were dragging. This was often because the
writer was engaged in throat-clearing. This is that thing that happens when
you are struggling to start a thing, and your brain makes a noise like
you're trying to pull-start an old lawnmower. If you let the story sit for a
while, you're likely to "hear" it when you pick it up to read it again.

2. Does my narrator make sense for this story?

I used to see this most often in stories that were told from the point of
view of a child or a teen. This is an admirable challenge to take on, as
many literary magazines don't take stories that would be categorized middle
grade or young adult. The trick is two-fold. First, work on getting the
voice right. And then, in tandem, we should work on getting the point of
reference right.

Both have tried and true guides: ask yourself if your young narrator would
use the words you put into their mouths at their age. (If not, then you need
to establish personality traits or surroundings that would allow a young
narrator, say, to use terms that might otherwise sound older or out of
place.)

The point of reference thing is just a more in-depth version of vigilance
around diction and vocabulary. Essentially, it boils down to what a
character of a certain age and experience is likely to observe and how
they're likely to process that observation.

3. Which story do you want to tell?

We all know that flashbacks happen sometimes in stories. But using them
requires a delicate balancing act. Sometimes when we are too close to a
story, we fail to see that the balance is upset. Editors can see it, though,
because we have fresher eyes on the thing. I'd say if you're spending more
than a third of your time in flashback, you're probably going to tip my
internal scales, which will lead me to wonder which of the two stories
you're telling - one past, one present - actually matters the most to you.
And, by extension, which one we truly need to be reading.

Advertisement

The caveat, of course, is that there is such a thing as a braided story, in
which parallel narratives get told. If that's what you're working on, then
don't worry too much about the amount of flashback.

One great way to alleviate the amount of flashback is to ask yourself
whether or not you really need the information you're giving us in the
flashback to tell the story. A lot of times, background information - which
is often what flashback is - can be feathered into the current narrative. If
it can, great. If you're struggling to do that, maybe this is a good sign
that you should be telling the story that's now being told in flashback
instead.

Short stories go through trends, just like anything else. But these are the
litmus tests by which I've found myself measuring short fiction for years,
even as my understanding of literature from around the world continues to
grow and as my own skill set as a writer grows. Part of that consistency, I
think, has to do with one's capacity to re-interpret advice we may have
heard before to suit our ever-changing brains and capacities as writers. And
the other part of it has to do with that elusive part of the writerly craft:
Sometimes you know a great thing when you see it, or write it, or experience
it, and if it feels that way to you, someone else - an editor, perhaps - is
likely to feel the same.

-Yi Shun Lai is the author of Pin Ups, a memoir. She teaches in the MFA
programs at Bay Path and Southern New Hampshire universities and is a
founding editor of Undomesticated Magazine. Visit at
<http://undomesticatedmag.com/> undomesticatedmag.com.

Ann Chiappetta, Author

Anniecms64 at gmail.com <mailto:Anniecms64 at gmail.com> 

` Making meaningful connections with others through writing `

914.393.6605

www.annchiappetta.c <http://www.annchiappetta.c/> om Facebook Annie
Chiappetta

"We must let go of the life we have planned, so as to accept the one that is
waiting for us." 

*	 Joseph Campbell

Ann Chiappetta, Author

Anniecms64 at gmail.com <mailto:Anniecms64 at gmail.com> 

` Making meaningful connections with others through writing `

914.393.6605

www.annchiappetta.c <http://www.annchiappetta.c/> om Facebook Annie
Chiappetta

"We must let go of the life we have planned, so as to accept the one that is
waiting for us." 

*	 Joseph Campbell

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://nfbnet.org/pipermail/stylist_nfbnet.org/attachments/20210907/f99d1abb/attachment.html>