INTERACTIVE FICTION by Leigh Lundin Last week, you enjoyed Hal White‘s little mystery story. This week, I offer a peek at interactive stories. My Scary Credit In the transition period between text adventure games like Colossal Cave and graphics games like Myst, I prototyped scripts for a couple of games, one based on Alice in […]

A 360-DEGREE STORY ARC by John M. Floyd Much has been said recently about the endings of short stories and novels. The fact that they should they should be satisfying, should happen quickly after the point of highest tension, should be surprising, etc. I especially like a quote by Aristotle: “Endings should be both inevitable […]

FAST TRACK FICTION WRITING by Steve Steinbock This month is NaNoWriMo. Sounds like a disease, doesn’t it? Or a microscopic poetry-writing machine. But NaNoWriMo (short for National Novel Writing Month) is an annual event started in 1999 by Chris Baty in which writers and regular folk sit down with the goal of hammering out 50,000 […]

SHORT WORKS by Deborah Elliott-Upton I remember him best for From Here to Eternity and The Thin Red Line among the best war literature of Americans. Probably for this reason: I think it is one of the few war books written by somebody who was there, in the military and in combat. Most of our […]

ELECTORAL CHARACTER STUDIES by Rob Lopresti It is my fond hope that by the time you read this we will know who the next president will be. As I write this the suspense is killing me. I spent the afternoon at my party’s county headquarters, phone banking for the Candidate Of My Choice. I have […]

RETREATING INTO CREATIVE THOUGHT by Melodie Johnson Howe On this final day of one of the longest most frenetic campaigns for the presidency, I’ve retreated into thinking about creativity. I’m not very good at talking about creativity and I certainly don’t like to talk out my plots. I’m a little like the native who is […]

FIRST LINES by James Lincoln Warren Received wisdom states that the two most important sentences in any story are the first sentence and the last sentence. This is supposed even more crucial for short fiction than for novels, since every word in a short piece is critical and there is no wiggle room. I don’t […]