Limit the Exotic. Write What You Know.

Dr. Alice C. Linsley

Most fiction writers tell stories that reflect their life experiences. They tap into what they know. John Updike's novels and stories express his familiarity with Protestant, small-town, middle-class American life with an overlay of sophistication. He wrote for The New Yorker for years and enjoyed and immensely successful writing career. Yet success brought trouble at times and strained his relationships. Shortly after his marriage to Mary, stories about the Maples began to appear in The New Yorker. They portrayed an attractive couple in their mid20's, their four children, a move from New York to a town north of Boston, the couple's quarrels and reconciliation and eventual no-fault divorce in Massachusetts. Updike and Mary divorced in 1976.

Updike admitted, “All the Maple stories were fairly close to the bone.” While discussing an episode in one of them, he recalled, “I had a fever” — and then he corrected himself: “I mean, the hero had a fever.”

Fannie Hurst's novels portray her experiences in New York City during the "roaring Twenties" and express her frustration as an ambitious woman who wanted to shake things up. Her most famous novel Back Street told the story of a woman who dedicated her life to a married man she passionately loved, only to lose him to his family in the end. This novel reflects personal experience. While she was married, Hurst had an affair with Arctic explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson during the 1920s and 1930s. 

Her novel Lonely Parade portrayed three successful career women who she intended should be happy, but happiness eluded them.

Hurst’s books are largely ignored today, though they were prescribed reading in some colleges through the 1980s. In the end, her flashy, unconventional lifestyle is not one to which most readers can relate. That danger always exists for the fiction writer.

Good fiction requires tapping into real life experiences. Grapple with the reality that is your own. Write what you know! Be aware also that your readers must be able to relate to your characters and their situations. 

Related reading: Wendell Berry: The Writer's Obligation

Write What You Know!

 

Alice C. Linsley

Most fiction writers tell stories that reflect their life experiences. They tap into what they know is real. That can be said even for the authors of science fiction. Though they have permission to create what is not real, they too draw on personal experiences, felt needs, and emotions. Some element of common human experience must be there for the story to gain readers. The reader is able to enjoy the story to the degree that the contexts are conceivable and relatable.

The legal complexities of John Grisham novels reflect his years of experience as an attorney. After hearing the harrowing testimony of a twelve-year-old rape victim, Grisham started a novel exploring what would happen if the girl’s father had murdered her assailants. Grisham spent three years on A Time to Kill and finished it in 1987. The novel was rejected by many publishers, but eventually bought by Wynwood Press, which published it in June 1988.

By then, Grisham had already begun his next book, the story of a hotshot young attorney lured to what seemed a perfect law firm. He sold the film rights to The Firm to Paramount Pictures for $600,000. The Firm became the bestselling novel of 1991.

With few exceptions, John Updike's novels and stories express his familiarity with Protestant, small-town, middle-class American life with an overlay of sophistication. He wrote for The New Yorker for years, and was immensely successful in his long writing career. Yet success brought trouble at times and strained his relationships. He divorced his wife Mary in 1976.  

Shortly after his marriage to Mary, stories about the Maples began to appear in The New Yorker. They portrayed an attractive couple in their mid20's, their four children, a move from New York to a town north of Boston, the couple's quarrels and reconciliation and eventual no-fault divorce in Massachusetts.

Updike admitted, “All the Maple stories were fairly close to the bone.” While discussing an episode in one of them, he recalled, “I had a fever” — and then corrected himself: “I mean, the hero had a fever.”

His Rabbit, Run concerns a former star athlete who is unable to recapture success when bound by marriage and small-town life and flees responsibility. This was followed by three novels, Rabbit Redux (1971), Rabbit Is Rich (1981), and Rabbit at Rest in which Updike sets forth the later periods of Rabbit's life. Rabbit Remembered (2001) returns to characters from those books after Rabbit’s death.

Fannie Hurst's novels portray her experiences in New York City during the "roaring Twenties" and express her frustration as an ambitious woman who wanted to shake things up. Her most famous novel Back Street told the story of a woman who dedicated her life to a married man she passionately loved, only to lose him to his family in the end. While she was married, Hurst had an affair with Arctic explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson during the 1920s and 1930s.

Fannie Hurst enjoyed a long heyday during the years between World Wars I and II. Her works were turned into films thirty-one times in forty years. By 1928, she was earning an extraordinary $4000 per story. 

Her novel Lonely Parade portrayed three successful career women who she intended should be happy, but happiness eluded them.

Hurst’s books are largely ignored today, though they were prescribed reading in some colleges through the 1980s. In the end, her flashy, unconventional lifestyle is not one to which most readers can relate. That danger always exists for the fiction writer.

Good fiction requires tapping into real life experiences. Grapple with the reality that is your own. Write what you know!

Beware of Proofreader Errors

"Why is a raven like a writing desk?" is a riddle proposed by the Mad Hatter during a tea party in Lewis Carroll's classic 1865 novel, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. Alice was unable to answer the riddle because there was no answer. The Mad Hatter admitted as much. When Alice said she couldn't answer it the Mad Hatter finally admitted the riddle has no solution. He said, "I haven't the slightest idea!"

Alice sighed at the Mad Hatter's response and said, "I think you might do something better with the time, than waste it in asking riddles that have no answers." The Mad Hatter replied, "If you knew Time as well as I do, you wouldn't talk about wasting it. It's him." You can read the chapter with the riddle here.

The riddle became one of the world's most famous riddles. Carroll did not intend for there to be an answer but her later offered an answer to the riddle in an updated version of the book. Carroll wrote that the answer is, "Because it can produce a few notes, tho they are very flat; and it is never put with the wrong end in front!" Carroll also wrote never as "nevar," which is raven spelled backwards but the clever pun was erased by a proofreader according to Gizmodo.

Read it all here.

Related reading: Pen Pecked Dreamers

Another Look at George MacDonald

MacDonald in the 1860s

Born 10 December 1824 in Huntly, Aberdeenshire, Scotland

Died 18 September 1905 (aged 80) in Ashtead, Surrey, England

George MacDonald was a Scottish author, poet, and Christian minister who pioneered figure fantasy literature in the 19th century. He was a graduate of the University of Aberdeen.

MacDonald's notable works include: Phantastes (1858); David Elginbrod (1863); At the Back of the North Wind(1871); The Princess and the Goblin(1872); and Lilith (1895). In addition, he wrote several works on Christian apologetics.

He mentored a fellow writer Lewis Carroll and his work influenced W. H. Auden, G. K. Chesterton, J. R. R. Tolkien, E. Nesbit, and Madeleine L'Engle.

C. S. Lewis regarded MacDonald as his "master" and wrote, "Picking up a copy of Phantastes one day at a train-station bookstall, I began to read. A few hours later", said Lewis, "I knew that I had crossed a great frontier." 

MacDonald's faith was one of the factors that lead Lewis to question atheism. 

The relationship between C.S. Lewis and MacDonald is the focus of a Facebook group called C.S. Lewis and his Master.

Chesterton cited The Princess and the Goblin as a book that had "made a difference to my whole existence."

Elizabeth Yates wrote of Sir Gibbie, "It moved me the way books did when, as a child, the great gates of literature began to open and first encounters with noble thoughts and utterances were unspeakably thrilling."

Even Mark Twain, who initially disliked MacDonald, became friends with him, and there is some evidence that Twain was influenced by him. 

Oswald Chambers wrote in his "Christian Disciplines" that "it is a striking indication of the trend and shallowness of the modern reading public that George MacDonald's books have been so neglected."

In recent years there has been a resurgence of interest in MacDonald's work. There is another interesting Facebook group dedicated to discussing the works of MacDonald, C.S. Lewis, and G. K. Chesterton.

Michael R. Phillips has written an excellent book on George MacDonald: Scotland's Beloved Storyteller. I highly recommend it. Phillips makes extensive use of MacDonald's own writings as well as the accounts of Greville MacDonald, his son.

Phillips also wrote George MacDonlad’s Transformational Theology of the  Christian Faith. It is a compilation of the published sermons of George MacDonald, some complete and presented in both original and edited formats, others condensed to highlight essential themes. The selections are introduced and briefly placed in their theological and historical context Michael Phillips. This 400 page volume is a thorough and significant presentation of the theology and thought of this 19th century Scotsman and his place in Christian theological history.

Alice C. Linsley

Writer and Independent Researcher (meaning I'm poor! :)

Teens and Dark Fiction

Barbara Kay

Last week Nancy Drew, teen detective, celebrated her series’ 85th anniversary of continuous publication. In the 1950s, Nancy still wore demure dresses, drove a snappy blue convertible and called home from a telephone booth. Today I’m told she wears jeans and t-shirts, drives a hybrid car and carries a smartphone. Nevertheless, I am sure the clever sleuth is still the upright character she always was: cheerful, resourceful, civic-minded, ethical, honourable, courageous and loyal. And non-sexual.

What a sea change fiction for adolescents has undergone since Nancy solved the Mystery of the Old Clock.

In my youth, children read what educators call “window books,” books that focused a child’s attention outward onto character-building adventures abroad — literally or figuratively. Nancy Drew was a humble subset of what one would call literature, and made no special moral or aesthetic claims. But the series nevertheless obeyed the general principle of its era of influence: while unrealistic, the stories mimicked the aspirational thrust of classic literature — that is, its main character strove to prove her merit according to the standards of her (admittedly white-bread) culture.

As we became more and more an identity-obsessed, sexualized “therapy culture,” adolescents gravitated to “mirror books,” me-focused fiction in what became designated the Young Adult category (YA), targeting 12-18 year olds. This fiction is usually narrated by a disaffected adolescent, the plot typically lingering over social pressures involving sex, drugs, divorce and racial or gendered alienation. Adults in these books are often either absent, hostile, abusive or in other ways unsympathetic. The reigning motif is victimhood. The narrator’s only source of self-esteem is pride in remaining “authentic” in a conformist and hypocritical society. The Urtext for mirror books was J.D. Salinger’s 1951 novel, Catcher in the Rye.

The troubled protagonist of Salinger’s novel, Holden Caulfield, is an icon of psychological health, though, when compared to today’s YA protagonists. Holden merely moped about and sneered at people for being “phony.” By contrast, in Jackie Morse Kessler’s 2011 YA novel, Rage, a girl is filled with self-loathing, symbolized by compulsive cutting. Sadistically bullied by her peers as “cutterslut,” she slashes her arm to shreds, “but the badness remained, staining her insides like cancer. She had gouged her belly until it was a mess of meat and meat.…” In Cheryl Rainfield’s 2010 YA novel,Scars, the narrator is a girl who has been raped since she was a toddler by her father, who provides her with knives to cut herself to death as a teenager. In the Canadian YA novel, When Everything Feels Like the Movies, by Raziel Reid — this year’s Governor-General award winner for best fiction in children’s literature — a narcissistic and masochistic gay teenager, whose ambition is to become a cocaine-addicted male prostitute in Hollywood, obsesses over sexual fantasies (some quite deviant) and proudly recounts successful baiting strategies to ensure attention-getting beatings.

Clearly this kind of lurid extremism pays off in the marketplace. Books ostensibly written for adolescents are nowadays increasingly bought by aesthetically lazy adults with simplistic adult appetites. So there is strong motivation in this glutted buyer’s market for writers of YA to gild their festering lilies. They are furthered encouraged in their transgressive impulses by progressive cultural elites (like those who sit on the G-G Awards committee) who naively pride themselves on their belief that the more frankness around sexuality of all kinds young readers encounter, however disturbing, the more helpful it will be in expanding their understanding and sympathy for marginalized youth.

Is that the case? Does adolescent immersion in fictional worlds where characters their age suffer or inflict horrible sex-related abuse on themselves, and where graphic content is — it seems to me — expressly designed, like pornography, to elicit a prurient response, have a salutary effect?

In fact, there is no evidence to show that is the case. But there is evidence to suggest the opposite. In her 2013 book about bullying, Sticks and Stones, journalist Emily Bazelon describes a method some schools use called “social norming” to discourage drinking and driving. She writes, “When [students] find out that [drinking and driving] is less prevalent than they think — outlier behavior rather than the norm — they’re less likely to do it themselves.” The same with cruelty, and by inference, behaviours like cutting, anorexia and grotesque sexual fetishism.

We can’t go home again in children’s literature, nor should we try. But one can at least say with confidence regarding Nancy Drew something one cannot say with confidence about the representative YA examples I have cited above: She did no harm


Barbara Kay is a columnist for Canada’s National Post, where this article was first published.

Noah Barleywater Runs Away

Noah Barleywater Runs Away by John Boyne
David Fickling Books, 2011 (ages 9-12)
 

One day, eight year-old Noah Barleywater runs away from his home and his problems. Before long, Noah has been branded an apple thief and encountered a grumpy adult, a hungry donkey and a helpful dachsund. Most amazing of all however, is Noah's discovery of a magic oak tree and the toyshop that lies beyond it. There, Noah is greeted by an old toymaker every bit as mysterious and magical as the toyshop itself, a toymaker whose stories will change Noah's life forever.

Noah Barleywater marks John Boyne's return to children's fiction after the success of his deservedly celebrated first novel, The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas. I do not want to give too much away about the plot as there are a few secrets that some readers may want to uncover for themselves. One thing that I can say is that Noah Barleywater not only met but surpassed my expectations from an author of Boyne's calibre. The book has been called and marketed as a "fairytale" and it is my opinion that Boyne's enchanting prose could not be described as anything less. However, while the vocabulary of a nine year-old may be able to cope with the language used in the book (as well as be enriched by it), Noah's "problems" require an older, more mature, audience. The theme of death and its effects on family is explored. Also the imagery and metaphors used would be lost to a younger audience. In order to be able to fully appreciate this book and all its meaning, I would recommend it be read by teenagers and adults from the ages of fifteen onwards. It is comparable to Saint-Exupery's The Little Prince which, while its story can be appreciated as a fairytale by younger audiences, has infinite value for older readers.

Maryana Garcia is the eldest of four sisters. A student at the University of Auckland, New Zealand, she plans to major in History and is currently an employee at the Mount Albert Community Library. This piece was first published at MercatorNet.

Key Considerations in Fiction Writing

Point of view:  From whose perspective is the story being told? The main charcter?  The unseen all-knowing narrator (the author)? Will there be more than one point of view and if so, how willyou handle these?

Characterization:  Min characters are always better drawn when they have a foil – Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson, etc.

Plotting: Know where you are going and how the story will end. What is the conflict and how will the character handle it? How will things get worse for him? How will you "thicken" the plot?

Dialog:  Use the correct format. Each conversational thread should be set in a new paragraph. Is the conversation natural?  Don't put sophisticated language in the mouths of simple country folk.

Symbol and Metaphor: Used to imply a deeper meaning to the story. Use lightly but effectively. A pair of gold earrings could symbolism the feminine principle, for example.

Word Economy: The best fiction writers edit their work after they have finished the story. This is when you shorten sentences and cut useless words. Think of how Ernest Hemingway used few words to maximum effect.

The Title: Let your title be the “working title” only. A better title will suggest itself by the time you get to the end of the story.

Gary Gregg's Third Novel in the Sporran Series

As holiday reading and giving approaches, consider ordering Gary Gregg's third novel - The Iona Conspiracy. Published by Winged Lion Press and available for Christmas giving, this young adult adventure novel follows Jacob Boyd from his home in America to Scotland's sacred island of Iona where he discovers ancient burials, battles the evil "Mortimer," rescues a friend and mourns the death of another. Tapping into real history, events, and mysteries related to Iona, Saint Columba, the Book of Kells, Oran's Chapel, and Arthurian legends, the adventure doesn't end until Jacob must confront his greatest nightmare in the modern Gorgon of Lilith Frost.

Though it will be available through retail channels in the coming months, personalized copies for gift giving for 2010 can only be ordered direct from me. The 422 page book will retail for $17.95, but if you order by December 15, Dr. Gregg will pay shipping and handling if you order by that deadline.

Send your name, shipping address, and inscription request, with a check to Krysten Gregg, PO Box 43, LaGrange, KY 40031.

I've read his first two novels and they are unique, thoughtful and exciting. Adults will enjoy them too. Ask him to send you all three.

Find out more at http://www.thesporran.com/

Naming Fictional Characters

Much thought must go into finding just the right name for a fictional character. Naming a character is like naming the new baby.

Names are more important than one might think. An ideal name will fit a character like a shoe fits a foot, a wrong name is like an off-note on the music scale. What if Scarlet O’Hara had been called Myrtle O’Hara, or Huckleberry Finn had been called Strawberry Jones? Names carry with them a specific history and connotations about a character’s personality.

Read more at Suite101: Naming Fictional Characters: Finding the Best First Name and Surname for your Characters http://writingfiction.suite101.com/article.cfm/naming_fictional_characters#ixzz0rpMIOm9R

I'm working on a piece of fiction in which all the characters have one syllable names and no surnames. It is about the first people on Earth who I call the Firstlings. I wouldn't have guessed the challenge of coming up with meaningful one-syllable names!

Glimmer Train July Fiction Competition

The Very Short Fiction competition closes July 31. First place wins $1,200 and publication in Issue 77 of Glimmer Train Stories. Second and third place winners receive $500/$300 (or, if chosen for publication, $700). Go here for Guidelines.

Winners and finalists of the April Family Matters competition have been notified, and the Top-25 list is posted! Our thanks to all of you for letting us read your stories!

1st place: "According to Foxfire" by Randolph Thomas
2nd place: "Chim Chiminy" by Amy S. Gottfried
3rd place: "A Month of Rain" by C. Abe Gaustad

JRR Tolkien: Hope for the Older Writer

Alice C. Linsley


John Ronald Reuel Tolkien was born of British parents in Bloemfontein, South Africa in January of 1892, but moved to England with his mother, Mabel Tolkien at the age of three. Tolkien's father died when he was very young.

In 1904, Tolkien's mother died of diabetes, and the young John Ronald and his brother Hilary went to live with their aunt in the West Midlands. From there they eventually moved to the Birmingham suburb of Edgbaston.

John Ronald and Hilary were brought up in the Roman Catholic faith, and remained devout Catholics throughout their lives. Their parish priest, Father Francis Morgan, visited the family regularly and assumed responsibility for the boys' material and spiritual welfare after the death of their mother.

In 1908, Tolkien attended Oxford and in 1915 he was awarded First Class Honours degree in English Language and Literature.

Tolkien married Edith Bratt in 1916. The couple had four children. John entered the priesthood, and Michael and Christopher both served in the Royal Air Force. Michael later became a schoolmaster and Christopher a university lecturer. Priscilla (born in 1929) was their only daughter. She became a social worker.

During WW I Tolkien served in the army and saw action on the Somme. He returned home suffering from shell shock, and while convalescing he started to study early forms of language and worked on Silmarillion (published 1977). For the rest of his life, Tolkien expanded the mythology of his fantasy worlds.

In 1918, Tolkien joined the staff of New English Dictionary and in 1919 he became a freelance tutor in Oxford. Tolkien then worked as a teacher and professor at the University of Leeds. In 1925, he became Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford University. He was appointed Merton Professor of English at Oxford in 1945, and retired in 1959.

His scholarly works included studies on Chaucher (1934) and an edition of Beowulf (1937). He was interested in the Finnish national epos Kalevala, from which he drew inspiration for some of his imaginary language Quenya. Most of the inhabitants of Tolkien's imaginary Middle-Earth are derived from English folklore and mythology or from a romanticized Anglo-Saxon past.

With C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams and other friends, Tolkien formed an informal literary group called The Inklings, which took shape in the 1930s. They all had an interest in storytelling and their Tuesday lunchtime sessions in the Bird and Baby pub became a well known part of Oxford social life. At their meetings, the Inklings read drafts of fiction and critiqued one another's work. Williams died in 1945 and the meetings stopped in 1949.

In the 1960s American paperback editions of The Lord of the Rings began to acquire a following of devoted readers. In 1972 he received CBE from the Queen. Tolkien died on September 2, 1973.

The Hobbit was published in 1937 when the author was 45 years old. He developed the history of Middle-Earth in The Lord of the Rings which was published when Tolkien was over 60. That give me hope as an older writer.

Tolkien's Masterpiece

Tolkien created a universe on a scale which was entirely unique. No one before or since has come close to equalling his achievement, because no one before or since has followed a creative process as singular and unrepeatable as Tolkien’s.

This enormous scope is a significant factor when trying to explain the extraordinary and lasting popularity of Tolkien’s work, and why The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings remain in the best-seller lists several decades after their publication, when most other imaginative fiction writers of Tolkien’s generation are forgotten. Dozens of authors have created cities, continents, planets, galaxies, even parallel universes, but none have succeeded like Tolkien, because his Middle-earth was much more than just a setting for his novels; rather, it was his life’s work, spanning more than half a century, during which time he sought to fill in every detail, to leave no corner of his enormous canvas blank. He was not particularly concerned about being a successful author in critical or commercial terms.

These issues mattered to him as they would to anyone, but they were not central to his work. For one thing, he was in the comfortable position of earning the salary, and enjoying the undemanding timetable, of a professional academic. However, Tolkien was not some Kafkaesque intellectual ascetic, shunning worldly gain in his pursuit of artistic expression. Simply, he wished to create a new mythology for his own satisfaction, and his two main novels are small chapters in this overall design of Middle-earth, from its creation by the supreme God Eru onwards, which absorbed much of his life.

Read it all here.

Opening Paragraphs that Rock!

Great short stories have great first paragraphs. Greatness is marked by punched up word selection, writing stripped of useless words, key details, images that evoke emotion, and action with an element of suspence.

Consider the following example of a great first paragraph:

Some of the evil of my tale may have been inherent in our circumstances. For years we lived anyhow with one another in the naked desert, under the indifferent heaven. By day the hot sun fermented us; and we were dizzied by the beating wind. At night we were stained by dew, and shamed into pettiness by the innumerable silences of stars. We were a self-centered army without parade or gesture, devoted to freedom, the second of man's creeds, a purpose so ravenous that it devoured all our strength, a hope so transcendent that our earlier ambitions faded in its glare. (T.E. Lawrence, The Seven Pillars of Wisdom)


Here is an exercise for Creative Writing teachers to use with their students:

Select 2 of the following opening paragraphs. Re-write them so as to increase action and to evoke emotion in the reader. Submit your work to a peer for evaluation and evaluate that peer's work, using these questions to evaluate the success of the editing:

• Is the editing effective in cutting useless words? (The most common useless words are just, like, that, and very.)
• Does the re-write stir the suspence pot? Does it make the opening more exciting?
• Does the re-write make you want to read the rest of the story?
• Does the re-write produce a feeling or emotion in you as the reader? What is that emotion?
• Is the re-write better than the original overall?

Example #1: The First Book of Adam by Carl Dauber (winner of the First Place Fiction Award at the 28th Annual Midwest Writers' Conference at Kent State University)

In the beginning there was me. At least that's how I remember it. God told me He was here first so I have to take Him as His Word. God's big on keeping His Word.

I was born in the Garden on a Friday. I awoke fully grown with morning dew and God was whispering in my ear.

"Good morning, Adam."

"Morning, God."

"Adam, I have given you the gift of life and in return I ant you to end my Garden."

"Whatever you say, God."

"As well, you must obey My One Commandment."

"You'll have to be a little more specific about this commandment business. For instance, what is it?"

"Other commandments may come later, but for now this is it: do not eat the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil."

"Can I eat vegetables?"

"Yes, Adam, you may eat vegetables. But stay away from the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil."

"Is there a vegetable of Good and Evil I should know about?"

God let loose a heavy sigh. "Adam, I have given you a brain and I expect you to use it. Any more questions?"

"Just one. If you don't want me to eat from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil why did you put it in the Garden in the first place?"

"I don't want to get too philosophical on this point, Adam, so let me just say this is an experiment in Free will"

Example #2: Deep Betrayal by Ansil Williams (winner of Ms. Linsley's First Place Award for Adventure-Suspense)

It was a hot day in Kingstown, so hot that the tires on the cars were gooey. Even the rain that afternoon turned to steam as it rose off the streets. Kevin Brown, a respected policeman, made his daily route through the most dangerous part of town. Jamaicans sat idle on the front steps of rundown homes and shacks. Kevin's black Cadillac with gold rims was known by everyone in that neighborhood.

As he turned onto New Street, he noticed a familiar figure trying to pick the lock of a clothing store. Kevin sighed. Only a fool such as Sprintie would try to rob a store in broad daylight. Kevin parked his car and approached the culprit.

Example #3: Five Stones by Matthew Healy (winner of Ms. Linsley's First Place Award for Fantasy)

The plants and trees around Chad were dying and there was a stale odor that hung heavy in the air. Chad looked at the gray dried moss that he held in his hand. It was the moss that was infecting the forest, leeching life out of the trees and plants. This was the moss his father had left him as a clue before he was murdered.

Chad stood in the unnatural silence, looking at the dead forest, unable to grasp what was happening. What was he supposed to find here? Even thinking was difficult because of his grief and the gray darkness around him.

Example #4: Solitary, Alice C. Linsley (pending publication)

We were all miserable the day that Sergeant Rahmani was caged outside in the hot sun, visible from the airless staff room where the instructors gathered to drink mostly stale coffee. There were no trees or shrubs, just an endless stretch of dusty earth and the dejected Rahmani slumped in the sweltering heat. Company policy said that the Americans were to keep their noses out of the Iranian Army's business, and the barbed wired enclosure, 7 by 7 by 7 feet, had the strategic effect of reinforcing policy.

The Iranian government's contract with Regent Helicopter Company was concise and unambiguous. We were to teach the Iranians how to fly helicopters, to read the manuals in English, and to maintain their aircraft. And we were to be respectful toward all nationals and their traditions, especially careful not to tread on any Shi'ite sensibilities. No boozing, no provocative dress, no public display of affection, and no public disturbances that might reflect poorly on the company when it came time to renew the contract.

Example #5: Inner Harbor, Nora Roberts

Phillip Quinn died at the age of thirteen. Since the overworked and underpaid staff at the Baltimore City Hospital emergency room zapped him back in less than ninety seconds, he wasn't dead very long.

As far as he was concerned, it was plenty long enough.

What had killed him - briefly - was two .25 caliber bullets pumped out of a Saturday night special shoved through the open window of a stolen Toyota Celica. The finger on the trigger had belonged to a close personal friend - or as near to a close personal friend as a thirteen-year-old thief could claim on Baltimore's bad streets.

The bullets missed his heart. Not by much, but inlater years Phillip considered it just far enough.

That heart, young and strong, if sadly jaded, continued to beat as he lay, his blood pouring out over the used condoms and crack vials in the stinking gutter on the corner of Fayette and Paca.

What Makes a Good Short Story?

It used to be that we read good stories in literature textbooks, stories selected for their literary merit, but today the stories are banal and uninspiring. That is because they are not chosen for literary merit as much as for their political correctness, as it is judged by political pressure groups of all kinds. The mediocre quality of literature textbooks in America is due to the adoption process used in over 20 states, including Texas, Florida and California, which purchase enormous qualities of textbooks. The books are selected by statewide committees rather than by the teachers, who must then try to teach good writing using inferior examples. It is a sad state of affairs that speaks once again of how children really are not the main concern of American public education.

Some of the stories students read in their literature texts receive a more favorable response than others. Contrary to the prevalent view, the stories they like best are the ones that open before them experiences and worlds that they have never imagined. Students really don't care about characters who are like them, or who resemble people they know in school. This is one of the reasons they keep returning to classics like Dune, The Lord of the Rings, and The Chronicles of Narnia. They want to read about worlds where young people are challenged, where they can be heroes, and where dangers and challenges bring strength and character.

What makes a story good? Well, it should entertain and it should have memorable characters. But most importantly, it should have a positive impact on the character of the reader.