Fiction Craft Essays

Laura Spence-Ash discusses how many writers stay as far away from conflict as possible—in real life, as well as in fiction—only to produce stories and novels that lack energy or that lie dormant on the page. Often, the solution for this is to add conflict to your story, to ramp up the tension. Thinking of conflict as a combination of “together” and “strike” may be helpful in considering ways to heighten conflict in your work.

Gwendolyn Edward writes about "one-sided dialog" as a means toward giving secondary character more autonomy in her stories. She analyzes how this technique works in Monica McFawn’s short story “Out of the Mouths of Babes.”

Laura Spence-Ash examines the idea of "speaking at cross-purposes" in which characters refuse to respond directly to what another character has just said. She claims this is an effective way to add subtext and conflict to your stories and uses “Emergency” by Denis Johnson to illustrate how this can work.

Laura Spence-Ash explores how the first person direct address, in which one character is speaking to another character, creates a sense of intimacy between characters that keeps the reader at bay. The reader is always the ultimate audience, she says, but first person direct addresses are a fascinating addition to our list of possible points-of-view.

Laura Nicoara employs Virginia Woolf’s eponymous novel, Mrs Dalloway to illustrate how free indirect speech allows virtually unlimited access to the character’s consciousness without requiring the author to use the first-person point of view. When done well, she says, free indirect speech also fosters intimacy between reader, narrator, and character.