This project is an extension of my Story-A-Day project that I started on my Livejournal oh-so-many years ago. The general idea of the project still stands: To become a better writer by understanding what works, and that means examining published stories and applying those lessons to the stories in my trunk. The schedule has slowed down quite a bit, and frankly a short story a day turned out to be a greater challenge that I could deal with.
Of course, the best way to become a better writer, as any writer will tell me, is to write. I know this. I also know that writing in a vaccuum is not good for my writing, and while workshops work well to create the collaborative effort artists need, it also leads to reading workshop-quality fiction, and I know my reading falters when I’m in a heavy workshop cycle.
So I want to be a better writer. I have a lot of stories tucked away. Finished stories, unfinished stories, stories that have two dozen rejections, stories that have stalled out after a few paragraphs (and–distressingly–at 20,000 words), stories that have received form rejections and stories that have sold. All of them could be improved.
The plan is to take a story and summarize what’s going on, as far as I can tell, and also to give myself some lessons and provide some exercises that may or may not be useful to the reader. Hey, I have to use my M.Ed. for something, right?
I am a genre writer from the Great Metropolitan Rain Forest.
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