Cut the Last Line, and Other Lessons in the Short Story

About our guest blogger:

Cynthia J. McGean is a Portland-based teacher and writer with a background in theater and social services. Her work includes novels, short stories, children’s stories and scripts for stage and radio. She loves stories with depth and complexity that aren’t afraid of the dark side of life.

Over the past few months, I’ve embarked on a self-taught exploration of the short story, as I battle to improve my skills in this form and to build a presence and platform through it.  I’ve been reading a wide range of short stories, in literary magazines and in collections of all sorts.  Here’s some of what I’ve learned to make my own short stories better. Maybe it will be helpful to you, too.

Origami & The Act of Fiction

About our guest blogger:

Katherine Heiny’s stories have been published in The New Yorker, The Antioch Review, The Greensboro Review, Seventeen, and have been presented on Selected Shorts on NPR, and performed off-Broadway.  She lives in Washington D.C. with her husband and two children.

Origami & The Art of Fiction

About Rejections, Writing and other Useful Topics – Katherine Heiny Interview

Our guest blogger and friend Katherine Heiny has been interviewed on the site ‘The Review Review’, where she talks about her first short story publication in the New Yorker, and also about rejections, writing and other useful topics. It’s a cool and witty interview and not too long, you can find it here: Katherine Heiny interview.

I don’t know why that story was selected.  Maybe because it’s about unrequited love, which is something almost everyone has experienced.

Katherine Heiny

Why I Quit My Writers’ Group

About our guest blogger:

Peter Crowe’s stories have been rejected by publications as diverse as Versal and the official newsletter of the school he works at as an English Teacher. The same stories have inhabited the attachments of emails ignored by some of his best friends. He lives in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, and has a wife and a young son.

In the ultimate scene of Woody Allen’s Bullets Over Broadway (1994), the protagonist-playwright David Shayne finally faces a truth dodged throughout the tortuous efforts to stage his latest production. “I’m not a writer. There, I said it, and I’m free.” He walks off into the night with his fiancé Ellen, having cast off the vestiges of artistic vanity in order to live a life of humility. It’s a scene within whose shadow I’ve been weeping ever since.

Don’t Write What You Know?

About our guest blogger:

Erik Stearns is an artist and short story writer living in the Washington D.C. area, who unfortunately loves his day job too much to quit… so far. He is drawn to overgrown railroad tracks, abandoned buildings, and forgotten mythologies. His writing often makes use of fantastic elements in uncharacteristically dark or irreverent ways. His flash-ficiton has been published on the Potomac Review’s website, and he is currently working on a collection of short stories.

There’s a long running tug-of-war in the sphere of Writerly Advice between “write what you know” and “don’t write what you know.” (It is, presumably, only a debate in the fiction community: I would hope that authors of medical texts and airplane repair manuals do not struggle with this question.)

Rejection Letters

About our guest blogger:

Katherine Heiny’s stories have been published in The New Yorker, The Antioch Review, The Greensboro Review, Seventeen, and have been presented on Selected Shorts on NPR, and performed off-Broadway.  She lives in Washington D.C. with her husband and two children.

Let me be very clear about something from the start:  I don’t mind rejection letters. What I mind are poorly written rejection letters.

Recently I got a rejection letter that read, “Dear William Fitzgerald, while we chose not to accept your story, we thought it was bright and lively and well-written and we’d be interested in seeing more of your work.”