THANKS BUT NO THANKS by John M. Floyd I’ve decided, for this week’s Mississippi mudpie, to write about a subject I really understand. I can hear some of you now, saying that that might not be an easy task, for me. Well, you’re wrong. There’s one thing about fiction — specifically short fiction — that […]

CHARACTER STUDY by John M. Floyd I love to read books about the craft of writing. Some are worthwhile and some are worthless, but now and then you find a piece of advice that makes a lot of sense. For example, this point made by Stephen King, in his book On Writing: “I can’t remember […]

FANTASYLAND by John M. Floyd Who said fiction writers are strange? Well, it doesn’t matter — whoever said it was probably right. To paraphrase Lawrence Block (I really like Lawrence Block), anyone who spends most of his or her waking hours in the company of imaginary people — people that he or she invented — […]

STARTING OUT by John M. Floyd At a book signing awhile back, I ran into a friend from a previous life — we were in college together — who said he had only one question for me: “How in the world does someone who worked with computers for 30 years wind up writing fiction for […]

I LIKE SHORT SHORTS by John M. Floyd I recently sent in a third-person bio that contained the words “short story writer John Floyd.” After hitting the SEND key, it occurred to me that I probably should have included a hyphen: At six feet four, I’m not a short story writer, I’m a short-story writer. […]

DIALOGUE IS LIKE A BOX OF CHOCOLATES by John M. Floyd I’ve decided to make you an offer you can’t refuse. Awhile back I mentioned that I suspect most fiction readers enjoy movies too, and that fiction writers can sometimes learn almost as much from movie dialogue as from the written word. Surely that’s true […]

FUNNY BUSINESS by John M. Floyd Pat Walsh, the founding editor of MacAdam/Cage, once said that the most difficult thing to write is a sex scene, and the third most difficult is dialogue. The writing task that comes in at second place is something that surprised me only because I figured it would have taken […]