As writers, it’s our job to keep stories fresh and exciting. Humans have been writing stories for thousands of years, so it’s inevitable that some story conventions get overused. yet many of us still struggle with ideas and wind up using clichés that ruin the experience for our readers (and therefore, get rejected by […]
Venerable poet William Blake, author of sometimes mysterious and sometimes brilliantly simple works, was a self-publishing super hero who might serve as an inspiration to would-be self-publishers. He’s perhaps best known for his illuminated “Songs of Innocence” (example plate below) and “Songs of Experience.” He had a soup-to-nuts approach to publishing, illustrated by the unpoetic […]
CS Lewis would disagree, but–as reported by the Guardian–the Nobel Prize committee declined LOTR for its “second-rate prose.” (Cough.) And don’t miss a slightly shorter work, the Jan. 2012 Flash Fiction Online edition following its reboot efforts.
An amusing bit by William Meikle on sffworld.com. 🙂
Many authors write stories with twists. For a while, Law and Order even advertised the fact that there was a twist at the end of their episodes. The problem with twist endings and flash is that they often don’t feel like twists: they feel like punch lines. And that makes the stories jokes, not stories. […]
I just stumbled across a year-old post by Steve Goble called “Swords and Flashery“. It hits on a topic I’ve been thinking about as I go through the submissions we’ve received over the last two months. [After writing the first draft of a fantasy flash,] I read the [2000-word] piece and found nary an ounce […]