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| Introduction | |
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| Getting the Idea | |
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| Where do stories come from? Beginnings (Part I) | |
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| What makes a story a story? The reader's questions | |
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| Shooting an arrow | |
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| Writing Assignment #1: The story cloud diagram | |
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| Alternative exercises | |
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| Reading Assignment #1: Flannery O'Connor's Revelation | |
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| Beginnings (Part II) | |
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| Evoking the world of your story | |
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| Beginning in the middle | |
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| Writing Assignment #2: Writing your opening scene | |
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| Questions for revision | |
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| Alternative exercises | |
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| Reading Assignment #2: Judith Claire Mitchell's A Man of Few Words | |
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| Point of View | |
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| One story, three beginnings | |
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| Types of point of view | |
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| The surface of the story | |
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| Writing Assignment #3: Choosing your point of view | |
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| Questions for revision | |
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| Alternative exercises | |
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| Reading Assignment #3: Tobias Wolff's Bullet in the Brain | |
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| Tone of Voice | |
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| Who's telling the story? What's your narrator's relationship to the story or its characters? Try writing the way you talk | |
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| Making sound match sense | |
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| Your way with words is not the subject of the story | |
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| Imitation-its uses and abuses | |
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| A few thoughts on precision | |
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| Overdependence on Adjectives and Adverbs | |
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| Writing Assignment #4: Finding the right tone of voice | |
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| Alternative exercises | |
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| Reading Assignment #4: Jorge Luis Borges' The Aleph | |
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| Building the Scene | |
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| How action becomes praxis | |
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| Exposition and summary | |
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| The parts that make up the parts that make up the whole | |
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| Making the action plausible | |
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| Show, don't tell-right or wrong? Setting | |
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| What's going to happen here? What's your setting's emotional temperature? | |
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| Where and how do you want your reader to enter the setting you're creating? | |
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| How would you shoot this setting if you were making a movie? | |
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| Are you appealing to the full range of senses? | |
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| How much detail is necessary? | |
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| Does your description of setting support the scene's action? | |
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| How do your characters' emotional state and the setting affect each other? | |
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| Writing Assignment #5 Writing where things happen | |
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| Alternative exercises | |
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| Reading Assignment #5: Wallace Stegner's The Traveler | |
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| Characterization | |
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| Characteres are what they do | |
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| Avoiding types | |
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| Treating characters respectfully | |
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| Round and flat characters | |
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| Allowing characters to declare themselves | |
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| Building a foundation for characterization early on | |
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| Adding characterizing detail like layers of lacquer | |
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| Writing Assignment #6: Building your characters | |
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| Alternative exercises | |
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| Reading Assignment #6: Kevin Brockmeier's These Hands | |
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| Dialogue | |
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| Dialogue's dual nature | |
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| Making your dialogue fit your characters | |
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| Making speech sound natural, even though it's artificial | |
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| Dialect-to use it or not? | |
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| Making characters sound different from ach other-and from the narrator | |
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| Weaving what characters say together with what they do | |
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| Using Dialogue to convey information | |
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| Finding the right mix of speech, description and action | |
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| Writing Assignment #7: Putting Words in Your Characters' Mouths | |
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| Alternative exercises | |
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| Reading Assignment #7: Kazuo Ishiguro's A Family Su | |