While working on the great American novel, I have been reading many how-to books on writing fiction, but none helped me with the heart of the story - realistic dialogue. Until, that is, I came upon Mr. Stanbrough's primer at a writer's conference. I laughed. I cried. Then my writing transformed with this simple realization: you can lose your reader in narration (horrors), but even weak dialogue will invite her deeper into the story line, becoming an eavesdropper intent on turning the page to find out what tidbit will said next. (Whew, saved!) With dry wit and a gentle but insistent manner, the author takes you by the hand through such topics as 'Conveying Emotion,' 'Influencing the Mood of the Reader,' 'Writing Naked,'(Yeah, now that's a topic!) 'The subtleties of Implication,' 'Mechanics of Punctuation,' 'Action Verbs and Mental Movies'. . . and the list goes on. And the cool thing is, he makes sure you get it! This primer is filled with examples and exercises that WILL improve your dialogue writing skills. Weak dialogue? Not anymore. Using these techniques, I just had my first article published in a national publication. Buy it! It'll be the best 12 bucks you spend on your craft.
Monday, November 28, 2005
book: Writing Realistic Dialogue and Flash Fiction, by Harvey Stanbrough
Saturday, November 26, 2005
story: Reinventing Julia
By Jennifer Prado - JenniferPrado@yahoo.com
= = = = =
The week after my birthday, as I parted my hair in front of the bathroom mirror I found a rebellious strand of white hair that stuck straight up. It didn’t have the courtesy to come in as gray first; it went straight to white! I was also still thinking about Danilo’s baby dream. Overnight, I was desperate to be young and reckless before motherhood and middle age descended upon me.
I was also motivated by the most dangerous of fuels: revenge. Danilo was away for the next week at a film festival in Amsterdam. The night he left, I had read his E-mail. I know that’s pathetic, but so is wallowing in suspicion and I already knew his password. He had exchanged a series of messages with a Dutch woman, who sounded overly enthusiastic about his participation in the scheduled events.
"I hope we have time to disappear." That had been Danilo’s last answer to her, and I was floored by jealousy. He’s cheating on me again! But this time, instead of crying, I became determined not to stay home alone. I had five nights to go out and look for as much trouble as I could find.
There is a simple rule to going out alone. If a Girl is on her own, every guy thinks that she wants it. This time I didn’t know what I wanted. It was like I was conducting what finance people call a mark-to-market. I intended to go out on the town with my coolest clothes, my biggest attitude, and my sassiest ass to see how my goods measured up to what was available on the scene. My reasoning: I was now twenty-six and before I knew it I would be thirty. I was running out of time. My youth was escaping me and I was working too hard. That was as complex, as I could manage.
Monday Night:
I would need a different look. I opened a drawer in my dresser and put on a pair of iridescent swimming goggles. I opened my closet and pulled out a big, beige coat with yak fur, and stood in front of the mirror and pulled my hair into a spout with an elastic band.
In the lobby of our building, our doorman looked at me oddly. He didn’t recognize me. I left our building, waved, and stopped a taxi.
The taxi driver rolled down the window. “No dogs, Lady.”
“What?”
He drove away.
I chased after him, pounded on the window, and he stopped. “What are you talking about?”
“No pets,” he said through the window.
“What pet? This is my coat!”
“Sorry, Lady,” he said, when I was in the car. “Where are we going?”
“Brooklyn.”
The driver sulked. He had to take me anywhere I wanted in the five boroughs, but at this time of night he would be too afraid to pick up a passenger on his return trip. So he started on the mumble-and-grumble routine.
“Don’t be like that,” I said. “I’ll pay both ways.”
He perked up. “You want music?”
“Play it,” I shouted. He threw on Miles Davis, Some Kind of Blue. Night drivers had class! I pushed up my goggles so he could see my eyes. “I thought you were calling me a dog when you stopped,” I said.
He laughed.
“Yip.Yip.Yip,” I barked as we drove off.
When we got to the warehouse in deep Brooklyn, the taxi driver lost his nerve.
“This is where you’re getting out?” There were two tall guys at the door dressed head-to-toe in baggie sportswear. The designer had outdoorsy campers in mind, but the inner city had inhaled this look for its own use. The taxi driver drove onto the sidewalk to get me as close to the door as possible.
“Don’t worry,” I said. “They know me.”
Ralphael was working the door and he opened the taxi for me.
“Where you been, girl?” I shrugged.
“Got busy doing things. How’s your music going?”
“It’s going,” he said. “You alone?”
I nodded. Ralphael had given me his demo CD during another party I had gone to with Danilo. The plastic cover had his name scrawled across it in pretty script. His mom had decided to spell it that way. It was a combination of Ralph meets Raphael. I listened to his CD at home. Ralphael’s singing voice sounded really smooth. He was one more guy with natural talent, trying to get noticed.
Within a half an hour of my arrival, I realized that I drank more vodka at the bar than I could handle and stumbled towards the dance floor to try to burn it off. I took the keep-moving to keep-from-falling-down approach. I danced by myself and with people I didn’t know. When I accidentally stumbled into someone, they lightly pushed me away. The way I looked didn’t draw any stares. We were all bizarre. But they watched me when I danced. That’s when I expressed everything I couldn’t say. Somehow, I managed to climb onto the box above the speakers and danced until my clothes were drenched in sweat. This was a place I could go to reinvent myself. When they threw the spotlight on me, I felt like a superstar.
I was so drunk when I arrived home that I ricocheted back and forth in our doorway when I first stepped over the threshold.
“I smell like cigarettes and I’m doused in enough alcohol to spontaneously combust." I dove onto our bed and passed out. Alone.
= = = = =
Bio: Jennifer Prado has a degree in Fiction Writing from the University of Wisconsin- Madison and her short fiction has appeared in numerous on-line magazines. For further information on "Reinventing Julia" and her Young Adult novel "Latina in Wonderland" please go to http://www.publishersmarketplace.com/members/JenniferPrado/.
Friday, November 25, 2005
Johnny America
Johnny America is a small journal of fiction, humor, and other miscellany. It’s also a web site, updated frequently and with much affection. Johnny America #3 (Halloween, 2005) sports thread binding and glow-in-the-dark covers, and is available now from our online shop.
Their submissions page is worth a read:
Submissions will be skimmed by a junior volunteer of questionable competence who sneaks web access while at his day job. If he likes a submission he will forward it to our lazy and capricious editors, who depending on their sobriety might or might not take notice. Our junior volunteer’s attention span is limited and his taste unrefined, so here are a few ideas that will likely propel a submission past him: reviews of bars (he likes to drink), stories with explosions, obtuse film reviews that he’ll misidentify as Clever, stories featuring Lucy Liu or any other Asian sexpot handwashing clothes or preparing dinner, non-fiction accounts of supernatural creatures (including unicorns). Mind that brevity is rewarded by our volunteer screener, and poetry by persons other than Stephanie Wakefield and Keith Kennedy is consistently rejected. We do not know why.
Thursday, November 24, 2005
Flash Memoirs
The Flash Memoirs Writing Workshop is for flash fiction-length creative nonfiction (stories 1,000 words or less). Participation is required (no lurking or browsing). Members must use real names and must be at least 18 years old. The workshop will include submitting, critiquing, sharing of markets, and writing-related discussion.
Fast Fiction: Creating Fiction in Five Minutes, by Roberta Allen
Gather your writing utensils, set the timer to five minutes, and write a short short story. Do not think. Do not judge. Just write. You'll be amazed with what you come up with. The rest, says Roberta Allen, is merely a matter of rewriting and refining. There's something very appealing about the short short form (defined by critic Irving Howe as 'a moment rendered in its wink of immediacy' and limited here to 1,000 words). As in poetry, every word and punctuation mark counts. Your characters' histories have to be delivered, if at all, with just a sliver of language. The form is elegant in the way a mathematical proof can be elegant--beautiful and economical--and the examples Allen uses, from the works of Anton Chekhov, Carolyn Forch�, Mark Strand, and others, are sublime. (The examples from her students are less compelling, and one does tire of trying to keep her many students straight.)
The center section of the book comprises a nice selection of exercises to get you started. One involves writing stories from photographs; another has you choose one item from a list (such as 'a broken promise,' 'something that was stolen,' 'a party,' 'something that hasn't happened yet,' 'a child,' and 'a secret') and write a story about it.
The third part of the book, in which Allen makes an argument for using her method to write a novel in five-minute bites, is shakier. Writing longer fiction generally requires some kind of flow that this method doesn't allow for. Using this method for that purpose would require that a lot of energy to be spent creating connective tissue. Even still, the five-minute method would be useful for tapping the unconscious, working through problem spots, and getting going in the morning. After all, doesn't that page look much more inviting once it has some words on it?
Wednesday, November 23, 2005
Flash Fiction: Very Short Stories, by James Thomas,Denise Thomas,Tom Hazuka
These stories are among the best I have ever read. Each is short, but full of excellent writing.
Fandango Virtual Fiction Contest - 2005
Fandango Virtual is pleased to host its third annual fiction contest. This year we are opening the contest to the combined readership of Fandango Virtual's two quarterly publications, Gator Springs Gazette and Bonfire. We are accepting short stories of 1000 to 5000 words, but we won't quibble about a few words more or less. Works must be previously unpublished in any print or online venue and may be in any genre as long as they have a literary quality. Copyright to the work must be held by the contest entrant. No sim-subs allowed. Entries will be accepted from now until midnight (GMT) on 30 November 2005 and the winners will be announced on New Year's day 2006. Winning entries will be published in the May-June-July edition of Gator Springs Gazette in 2006. Authors of other entries which meet Fandango's acceptance standards may be invited to publish in future issues of the Gazette or Bonfire.
The reading fee of $10 . . . entitles the entrant to submit one story.
Monday, November 21, 2005
Sudden Fiction - American Short-Short Stories, by Robert Shapard, James Thomas
The short fiction (each piece is one to five pages long) in this collection represents the richness and variety of American writers. A few are no longer contemporary (Hemingway, Malamud, Cheever), many are well established (Paley, Oates, Updike, Donald Barthelme, Ray Bradbury, Peter Taylor, Raymond Carver) and many are newer presences on the fiction scene. With a tiny 'frontisstory' by Robert Coover, a lighthearted introduction by Shapard and afterwords about the short-short-story form by 40 outstanding American writers, the definition of what lies between as 'sudden fiction' is well attended to. The 70 pieces themselveshighly compressed, often tantalizingdisplay a multiplicity of modes and derive from a variety of traditions. The collection presents a group of writers whose miniature stories do, indeed, as the editors suggest, 'confer form on small corners of chaos.'
Margin: Exploring Modern Magical Realism - Deep South magic for hurricane relief -- guidelines
WHAT ARE WE LOOKING FOR?
Contributions to Southern Revival must capture, in some way, the magical essence of the Deep South. While our usual focus is magical realism, the editor has expanded the possibilities this time to include all imaginative literary forms. We are interested in diverse voices and ideas. Forms: free verse, flash fiction (<1000 words), creative nonfiction (<1000 words), digital artwork and prose poetics. Possible subjects: faith healing, voodoo, haints, curses, miracles, legends, fish stories, vampires, devils, preachers, black cats, owls, thunder and lightning, snake oil salesmen, black magic, mardi gras, witchcraft, planting by the moon, superstitions, ghost armies, sleepwalking, and all things haunted. From these submissions, we will select the best work to fill 24 pages.
Mytholog - Guidelines & Style Sheet
We publish short fiction and poetry. We aren't hardwired to genre at all. We'll publish things that fall between the cracks and perhaps stick their claws up to horrify or tantalize us, literature on the mythskirts of a genre. We're interested in anything that is part of the modern mythos or part of the construction of myth, from the ancient and traditional to contemporary culture, whether it be dark, bright, erotic, mysterious, adventurous, dystopian, folkloric, or fantastic. We're interested in storytelling and theme. The thread of continuity for us is mythic development.
Sunday, November 20, 2005
Micro Fiction: An Anthology of Really Short Stories
Stern provides an introduction relating short-shorts and micro-shorts to teaching tales, fables, jokes and similar short tales with ancient roots both in literary and oral cultures. In doing so, he takes the short-short out of 'current fads' and puts it into legitimate literature.
His collection is based on a limit originally of 250 words, raised to 300 - micros not just short-shorts. The collection gleaned from contests is a very mixed bag - some tales are memorable, some interesting and forgetable, a handful you wonder how they made the cut. These fall into the normal percentages that an anthology normally presents.
Memorable tales: The Poet's Husband by Mollie Giles - a wry look at listening to your spouse's confessional poetry. The Halo by Michael McFee - the difficulties (and solutions) to raising Jesus. Worry by Ron Wallace - observations on worry as a dominate family member. Painted Devils by Fred Chappell - a friendship in trench and safety.
A few of the tales strike be as character sketches not narratives; a few seem to have been squished and mangled into a contest form rather than allow the tale to dictate its form. But given all that, this is a pleasant introduction to the smallest of the small.
story: Taste Test
By Martin Heavisides - martinheavisides@sympatico.ca
= = = = =
They blindfolded our entire section for the in-flight meal. This was annoying because I had a window seat and we were flying toward the sun, but apparently it was in the fine print of something we'd signed on boarding. They were kidding I'm sure when they said “the pressure door's that way, we have parachutes should you require them,” but you don't want to take the chance. The carrots tasted like rutabaga, which is really strange since I've never eaten rutabaga so how would I know? I'm not saying it tasted like good rutabaga anymore than the spinach tasted like good mashed potatoes or the beefsteak like good chocolate pudding. Now every time I see a chocolate pudding I think about mad cow disease. I suppose that makes sense since it's a milk-based product.
Other testers reported variable but equally subjective tastings. I don't think anybody correctly identified a single serving. Orange juice tasted like tequila, I don't know why that couldn't happen to me (especially since they were charging for drinks on the flight). On the plus side I didn't get the ravioli which tasted like earthworms still covered in gritty soil, though she didn't mind. Said it took her back to when she'd been a bird in happy transient flight once upon a time. Until she was caught and snapped dead by a hooded falcon but that's another story. She later married the falcon but that was another life.
When they removed my blindfold the clouds below our wing were awrithe with serpents and agallop with stallions. I had to wonder how even a billowing cumulus cloud could hold up so vivid and solid a tusked woolly mammoth. I remember thinking maybe that's where all the prehistoric creatures went instead of becoming extinct. It seems a more sensible choice. Through a gap in the cloud I could see the ocean below, which was on fire. Green, orange, lavender and bright blue flames. In a subsequent letter I was informed the probable reason for these visions and the wildly subjective taste impressions both was the substantive dose of lysergic acid dialethamate in our lemon iced vanilla cake. (It tasted like hominy grits, which is not my idea of dessert.) They said it altered our perceptions backward as well as forward in time because it was a new, unusually proactive variety. But how did the acid know in advance who was going to ingest it? I think personally the reason was the time zones we were passing through.
I have no idea the purpose of this study, but I for one will study the fine print in airline contracts a great deal more watchfully in future.
= = = = =
C 2005 Martin Heavisides
Bio: Martin Heavisides has published in Studies in Contemporary Satire, Canadian Forum, Jeremiad, Black Cat Review among others, online at Mad Hatter's Review, the beat, monkeybicycle, and he has a story upcoming in The Landing.
Flash Writing: How To Write, Revise And Publish Stories Less Than 1,000 Words Long, by Michael L. Wilson
Flash fiction is one of the hottest literary trends of the 21st century. Online magazines crave it, mainstream publications such as Esquire, The New Yorker, and Vanity Fair publish it, and many other markets and contests seek it.
Flash Writing is your guide to writing, revising and publishing stories fewer than 1,000 words long. Learn how to generate story ideas, create characters, develop conflict, and establish setting and point of view for flash fiction. Then discover how to research, format, and submit your work to flash fiction markets. Shorter is better, and Flash Writing helps you learn how to create entertaining, publishable flash fiction.
This book includes: *Over 400 writing exercises to get you started *Story examples to illustrate concepts *Guidelines for coming up with topics for flash fiction
AUTHOR BIO: Michael Wilson has been teaching creative writing classes and facilitating writers' groups for over 8 years and was an award-winning Contributing Editor for The Writer's Block at Suite101.com. He earned a BA (with honors) in English from Ohio University. Michael has been a featured guest speaker at the Thurber House, the Maumee Valley Writers' Conference, and the Columbus Writers' Conference. He has worked on writing projects for companies such as Lucent Technologies, Qwest Communications, American Electric Power, and Nationwide. He is also the publisher and editor of Grist for the Muse a free monthly creative writing e-newsletter.
Saturday, November 19, 2005
story: What Would You Like?
By Martin Heavisides - martinheavisides@sympatico.ca
=====
Arsenic? cyanide? please! those are so late Renaissance, we've made advances in poisons since then that are not to be believed (and need- less to say—since you come recommended—not to be spoken of outside the trade). Fast acting, slow acting, we like to leave that up to the client. The key feature we pride ourselves on is undetectability. (We're helped somewhat by the general indiscriminate mixing of toxins into our food, water and air. I remember a film years ago where police tracked a murder victim's movements in the 48 hours before her death by area-specific pollutants in her body. They'd have a harder time doing that now, what with generalization and overlap of toxic fields. Still forensic science is a wonderful thing. Keeps us on our toes, staying that extra little step or two ahead.)
None of my concern whether it's business or personal, but those two categories embrace most of our clientele. People think the chief means of advancement in the corporate jungle are backbiting, infighting, verbal undercutting and snide insinuation. All those have their place and so too, if you're discreet about it, does a small dose in a main rival's coffee or third martini at lunch. If you know what you're putting it in we can often match flavours between poison and comestible.
My own marriage is happy, three lovely children, discreet mistress for when the wife's too tired, but not everyone's so fortunate and I think you'll agree with me, the divorce rate's a scandal and a shame.
Something more . . . general? Ahh! I get your drift. Well if you're going that way I'd recommend chemical nerve agents and such, we do keep biological agents but don't recommend their use unless you have a well-grounded strategy for containment. Well . . . if you insist, we do have this brochure outlining our selection in viruses and bacilli. The black plague? Really sir, if you don't mind my saying, that's so 1348. This is the 21st century.
=====
C 2005 Martin Heavisides
Bio: Martin Heavisides has published in Studies in Contemporary Satire, Canadian Forum, Jeremiad, Black Cat Review among others, online at Mad Hatter's Review, the beat, monkeybicycle, and he has a story upcoming in The Landing.
Friday, November 18, 2005
Self-Editing for Fiction Writers: How to Edit Yourself Into Print: Renni Browne, Dave King
Both novice and seasoned fiction writers can ensure themselves greater publishing success by correcting textual problems before submitting their manuscripts to an editor. This exemplary instruction manual offers readers the wisdom of two experienced editors who focus on writing/editing techniques (the mechanics of dialog, characterization, point of view, etc.). Adhering to fiction's underlying principle of 'show and tell,' this lively text includes both good and bad examples in each lesson. At the end of every chapter is a tip checklist to match against one's own work and two or three exercises with which to practice and reinforce the chapter's topic. A superb tutorial for anyone wanting to learn from pros how to polish fiction writing with panache.
- Cathy Sabol, Northern Virginia Community Coll., Manassas
Salt Flats Annual
We consider poetry, fiction, and nonfiction.
There are no set guidelines for content or length. The quality of the work is most important to us. If you press us to be specific, we like writing that conveys a sense of place in the real or imagined landscape.
We accept email submissions September 1 to January 31.
Dark Recesses Press - Submissions
Haven't I read that story before? Of course not. It's just a touch of clichethat has us thinking that. We, at Dark Recesses, have not seen enough stories of serial killers, vampires, schizophrenics with imaginary friends, confused ghosts in haunted buildings or creepy countrysides, and those who sell their soul to Satan for a righteous cause. We are starving for more of these. Yes, we are sadomasochistic. We want CLICHE!
Torture us, please! This is the official Dark Recesses DejaVu Contest. There are two ways to play:
Take our prompt, set it up, and make it the most clichestory ever! Show us how cheesy clichecan be. Make it a parody of cliche. Think 'Scary Movie' and dazzle us with your skills to point out the obvious.
~Or~
Take this prompt and create a masterpiece. Make us entrench ourselves so deep, that we forget we've read this plot many, many times before.
The winner will receive $100 hard cash, a signed collector's edition book by a selected author and publication in Issue Two of Dark Recesses Press.
Other Magazine
'Despite its national aspirations, other magazine has a distinctly San Francisco flavor: smart, do-it-yourself, full of vim and venom. It's upbeat in the face of leftist despair over the global geopolitical situation, vaguely obsessed with sex, gender and bodily functions, technologically savvy and occasionally wonky.'
From their submissions page:
At Other, we print articles and art which question the idea that your identity and tastes are as simple as checkboxes on a questionnaire. Our editorial format most closely resembles that of a general interest magazine like The New Yorker, Salon.com or Harpers, with a focus on genuinely challenging concepts and scathing social criticism.
Other seeks essays, fiction, satire, investigative journalism, cartoons, and art which reject traditional categories, both in style and content.
Possible topics might include: the trouble with target marketing, going beyond party politics, racial blurring, subversive media and technology, rebel futurism, queerness, anti-authoritarianism, non-traditional families, and pop culture. We like writing that combines critical thought with personal experience, but memoirs and personal essays don't excite us. Regular features of every issue include an anti-tourist travel column, profiles of people who are "other," as well as short write-ups of unusual news. Every issue will also include several longer essays and one piece each of micro and macro fiction.
Chick Flicks
Chick Flicks, an ezine that fills a void in publishing. We're looking for well-written stories and essays that are moody, dark, real, gritty. Stories about internal conflict juxtaposed against external demands, about real life people coming to terms--good or bad--with themselves and their choices. You don't have to be a woman to submit to Chick Flicks; your characters need not even be women. We want emotion and honesty and engaging journeys from point A to point B and beyond. Send us pieces with less-spoken, but common universal truths. Make us laugh, make us cry, make us hurt in the deepest, darkest parts of our souls, but most of all, be honest, raw, real.
flashquake Fall 2005
flashquake is embarking on a special three-month project to hear directly from those who have been affected by the weather that devastated the southern U. S. this year.
If you lived through these powerful storms, we'd like to hear from you.
From their About page:
flashquake is a paying online journal, dedicated to publishing the best of flash literature. "What is 'flash literature?'" I hear you asking. It's a term we coined — if it existed prior to us, we were unaware of it — to describe the material we were interested in showcasing.
Here's how we define it: Prose of under one thousand words; poetry of less than thirty-five lines. That's the physical definition — but regardless of the form, the best flash literature is much more than a word or line count. It tells a story, tells it with depth, with clarity, with an emotional and intellectual impact that leaves the reader changed in some way. In a masterful piece of flash, every word is essential.
We want work that respects the reader's intelligence. We seek work that opens the reader's mind to new experiences, to new ways of looking at situations we'd long ago dismissed as mundane.
Scribble
SCRIBBLE, the short story magazine, was launched at the beginning of 1999 and has developed into one of the UK's most popular general fiction magazines. Scribble contains a wide range of high quality fiction from new and established writers. The magazine is now being circulated world-wide. Scribble is a quarterly magazine in A5 format. Each issue contains at least 60 pages of entertaining short stories including a section for readers' letters.
LENGTH...up to 3000 words
SUBJECT...Any subject.
PAYMENT...Prizes of £75.00, £25.00, and £15.00, will be awarded for the best three stories in each issue. For other published stories, a complimentary copy will be given. Annual subscribers will also receive a credit voucher to the value of £4.00. Stories from non-subscribers are welcome but must be accompanied by the entry fee. Entry fee for the competitions is £3.00 (cheques payable to Park Publications). Free unlimited entry for subscribers.
