How Not to Open a Short Story, by Philip Athans

From: https://fantasyhandbook.wordpress.com/2012/11/27/how-not-to-open-a-short-story, by Philip Athans November 27, 2012 I generally don’t like this kind of negative approach: lists of what not to do. I prefer to encourage you to do things, not discourage you from doing things, but back to the subject of short stories, I can’t help but point out some very common pitfalls that I’ve seen over and over again for years—decades, actually. So here goes, in no particular order, half a… Read More

Why Most Readings Suck and How to Fix It

From: http://www.deadendfollies.com/blog//2016/04/essay-why-most-readings-suck-and-how-to.html * [Dead End Follies] Editor’s note: Gabino came back from AWP shirtless and green this week, so I asked him “Sup’ bro?” and it turned out he had a chip on his shoulder about the public readings at the event, so I thought Angrybino was too good to pass up on and so, here here he is for you in all his glory in a new exclusive piece about people who… Read More

Data Mining Reveals the Six Basic Emotional Arcs of Storytelling

Recommended by Randy LaBarge. From: https://www.technologyreview.com/s/601848/data-mining-reveals-the-six-basic-emotional-arcs-of-storytelling by Emerging Technology from the arXiv; July 6, 2016. Scientists at the Computational Story Laboratory have analyzed novels to identify the building blocks of all stories. Back in 1995, Kurt Vonnegut gave a lecture in which he described his theory about the shapes of stories. In the process, he plotted several examples on a blackboard. “There is no reason why the simple shapes of stories can’t be fed into… Read More