Editorial Opinions

The importance of empathy in our lives is enormous but underestimated and often ignored. Empathy is a concept and an experience, and it seems that you may have it or not, and probably if you have it, it fluctuates throughout life. Although empathy is esoteric and impossible to define, it can be a profoundly useful concept in fictional character development … as well as in our lives. Psychologists try to corral an individual human understanding of others because of its social importance. And writers of fiction stories benefit from psychologists’ research to understand transference of mental states between minds. Empathy … Read More…

We live by stories, descriptions of people and events, real or fictional, that inform or entertain. Stories are ubiquitous as air, essential as a heartbeat, and as varied in the telling as there are humans to tell. The story as a fiction art-form in prose has evolved over the past few centuries, but recently has declined as literature, a regrettable fact emitting from failure of contemporary authors to strive for “art” in their “creative” writing. What is lost? Imagined fiction and literature as written works considered to have lasting artistic value. The loss of written story as an art form … Read More…

Plan #1 Want to be an author? Just do it and enjoy. That’s enough for most of us! Writing is a pleasure and we don’t have to be the best for all readers or achieve some impossible measure of success. BUT– If you want satisfaction for: a) being the best author of the best story you can write that might persist for generations, b) creating stories that speak to contemporary and future readers about the complexities of being human, then you may want to write a fiction story as an art form that engages, entertains, and enlightens, and consider these … Read More…

Great literary fiction storytelling as an art form is not for all readers, and its success is not measured solely on volume of commercial book sales but rather the number of readers moved or enlightened by characters and story, usually about what it means to be human. Many of the literary stories that have lasted into new generations of readers have important, common characteristics; here are the principles. 1. Characterization. The fictional humans that populate successful literary fiction seem real to the reader, either in the context of the reader’s world, or the story world created by the author. It … Read More…

At a recent writers’ workshop-conference for thriller and mystery writers taught by two bestselling authors in their genres, the state of contemporary literary fiction was dissed as being self-serving and small. Who wants to hear about another dysfunctional family or an abusive childhood, or my extraordinary recovery from drug addiction? Why is there no resolution in literary fiction? (There is often no conflict.) Why is contemporary literary fiction always, in some way, about me, the author, without objective storytelling and characterization? Most literary-fiction writers in the audience silently agreed–a majority of academically-trained literary writers fail to create adequate stories . … Read More…

Literature is written stories considered superior and of lasting merit–an art form. Fiction portrays imagined events and people. If you’re a writer, you can’t know what stories from today will be the literature of tomorrow, but you can write the best story possible using the techniques of past writers who’ve reached literary status: Austen, Flaubert, Chekhov, Homer, Tolstoy, Melville, Hawthorne, Woolf, Henry James, Babel, Twain, and the like. In the main, these authors have common, basic elements of story construction that may, for the contemporary writer, mature into meritorious longevity. Who cares? “Fiction writers continue to evolve and their works … Read More…