A larger-than-life character and a moment of cowardice When you buy a book, do you use the Amazon book description (full of soft ambiguous words), or the jacket copy (a torrid one hundred words), or a friend’s recommendation, or the New Yorker 3,000 word review? Consider the first lines instead. Pay attention and perhaps your own first lines will become the immediate link to your best reader. Grab the Character If you are writing a book about A person, the best decision may b

How Droll Is That? Shopping for a new book? The author will have put her most work into the first lines and the last. Pay attention, and perhaps you’ll buy the book you want. Pay attention and perhaps your own first lines will become the immediate link to your best reader. Don't follow (a Writer's Digest) Formula. This Isn’t Kansas Anymore Let the reader think they are in the regular universe, and then throw in a shock so that they are disoriented and asking, Where the hell

Consider the First Lines This is not one of those formulaic pieces of advice where you are exhorted to include two or four or five key elements in your first sentence in order to have a winning start to your book. Writers Digest tells you to use direction, (no static) characterization, distinctive voice, and basic plot (conflict), but then, they are into pat answers. Instead, there is a list of examples that could be used as deep reads—how did the author do that? First lines

Consider the First Line

Geek With Exploding Brain Literary Devices 101 Resource: www.literaryterms.net The Big Four: Metaphor – conditional equivalence. Henry II was a mighty lion. Simile – so, as, like, than Aphorism – a concise, terse, laconic, or memorable expression of a general truth or principle Analogy – Peter De Vries, comparing the unknowable universe to a safe, wrote, “The universe is like a safe to which there is a combination. But the combination is locked up in the safe." Next Rank Tool

The Gate Opens, But Not For You “ I am a ticket taker, many tickets have I torn” – Song By The Low Anthem Mary Ann, I am the ticket taker This is what I do. The gate opens, but probably not for you, Mary Ann. You’re not the one lucky today. You don’t have a degree from a hyphenated private college. Neither did you intern for a Congressman, or spend that semester in Bologne. Your father has never purchased a Senator, and you’ve never ever been invited to the Governor’s Man

Why Are They Just Sitting There? Every writer goes down to the DoItYourself for story ideas. For some, it’s the obituaries DIY, for some it’s the Police Blotter DIY, but they come home with a notebook of nuts and bolts, a hammer, a trowel. But then for all writers, it’s observation that provides the lumber to build the story out. Here’s your observation: You’re late driving back from Albuquerque up through the Native American Reservations to your house In Taos. You didn’t get

It’s Only Zeros and Ones MFA programs are inadvertently designed for hostile takeover by Probability Engines, because at the lowest level they teach dogma and Rules. [Of course you’ve heard “Be creative. Learn the rules and then break them judiciously.”] Probability Engines love rules. They reverse-INVENT the rules from the thousands and millions of texts upon which they have trained. They need the guardrails, the connect-the-dots, the predictability. More precisely, they inv

BUILD-OUT OF YOUR COMPETITOR At the Santa Fe International Literary Festival, Jenifer Eagan was asked about AI and what it meant to “writers,” as persons, as a collective, as a profession. Her response was largely, “Look, we’ve faced these upheavals before, and the book world has been knocked on its head, and the answer is always the same. As writers, we have to get better.” OUR upheaval is AI. I like talking about the large language machines as Probability Engines = PE, and

Whose Story Is It? Let’s talk point of view [WHAT! AGAIN?]. Most fictional work, and most of my work, is in third person point of view. It’s so strong, so adaptable. You can have a separate narrative voice, one that knows more (or less) than the protagonist. You can play distance tricks to fit the book’s situation—move in closer to the main character or zoom out. You can treat the protagonist coldly, or in using informal indirect discourse, get right into her head with the wr

There is a street that plunges down straight away from the front windows.

An Archtype That’s a Prison Scott Archer Jones Too Easy Drill Sergeant The cynic puts all human actions into two classes: openly bad and secretly bad. – Henry Ward Beecher I’ve been pondering Archtypes lately. Cynic, Burnout, Conspiracy Theorist, Angry White Man, Entitled Influencer. When I was twenty, I encountered my first full-blown, two-hundred horsepower cynic. A history major, he could twist anything into an observation of sneering skepticism. He wore black, for C

Scott Archer Jones 2008. On the seafloor of the Stockholm archipelago near Ingarö the tides swept a body not yet dead back and forth, in eddies of dust that tornadoed up into black, cold water. Jazz had missed its chance again. Each decade gifted people kick jazz down the road like a can, people like Joshua Redman, Nicholas Payton, Herbie Hancock, the Brecker Brothers. These incredible musicians keep it alive and vibrant, but don't change the rules, just commit little adulte

Home Sweet Home We're serializing Alphabetic Karma, a short story originally published by Hawkshaw Press. This is our final posting. When we left Kim last, Kim and Tony had both been shot, and Kim had retired from truck-boosting. *** When I turned twenty Uncle Zach and I had to tap into our hard-way gains. I hired a woman in the trailer park to watch over Zach while I worked at the garage. He was on his own in the evenings while I held down a job as a cashier at the market. I

Kim Goes Full Auto (Shop) Over the next few weeks, we're going to serialize Alphabetic Karma, a short story originally published by Hawkshaw Press. Sign in every Wednesday and Sunday to get the next paragraphs. When we left Kim last, she was busting her knuckles under cars, learning auto repair, and feeding Zack green mac'n cheese. *** The first summer was killer and not in a good way. On Sundays, Iʼd sit outside with Uncle Zach as he smoked and told me lies about his glamor

Over the next few weeks, we're going to serialize Alphabetic Karma, a short story originally published by Hawkshaw Press. Sign in every Wednesday and Sunday to get the next paragraphs. When we left Kimmie last, she's been thrown out of her McMansion home again and has travelled by bus across town to Uncle Zacks's trailer, to seek refuge. *** Zach peered at my face, dropped his gaze and brought it back up. “Huh. So thatʼs how it is. You better come in.” He rolled backwards int

Over the next few weeks, we're going to serialize Alphabetic Karma, a short story originally published by Hawkshaw Press. Sign in every Wednesday and Sunday to get the next paragraphs. When we left Kimmie last, she'd just avoided being shopped for 4 days of smack. *** I hitched back across town. For a half hour, I begged my father to forgive and forget, there on the front stepʼs Italian stones. Gave it my best shot. “My best friend out here is an addict. Do you want me to end

Over the next few weeks, we're going to serialize Alphabetic Karma, a short story originally published by Hawkshaw Press. Sign in every Wednesday and Sunday to get the next paragraphs. When we left Kimmie last, she had been dumped in a downtown park by her father. ****** . . . She slumped on the other end of the bench, stared out over the park, and asked, “Are you in some kind of trouble?” “You could say that.” She was in her mid-twenties go

Over the Next Few Weeks, we're going to serialize Alphabetic Karma, a short story originally published by Hawkshaw Press. Sign in every Sunday to get the next paragraphs. ****** The second time my parents threw me out, I already knew the streets couldnʼt work for me. Iʼd learned enough the first time. I needed to stay with a relative somewhere. My moments of revelation in my first journey into the badlands still burned. My father went so far

Bereaved The last nephew has spoken his eulogy: the minister leads a prayer then closes the fat book shrouded in a black binding. Against...