Fiction Craft Essays

Suzanne Grove explores Laura van den Berg’s short story collection I Hold a Wolf by the Ears, focusing on the art of story openings, the creation of mood, and the role of memory, ambiguity, and trauma in storytelling. Her essay combines combines analysis,and an interview with van den Berg.

Albert Liau analyzes Karen Russell’s short story “The Ghost Birds,” focusing on how its opening paragraph functions as a microcosm of the entire story both in structure and theme. Liau concludes that Russell’s “The Ghost Birds” exemplifies how a strong opening can function as both a roadmap and an emotional portal. Through its layered voice, reflective structure, and evocative setting, the beginning hints at the whole, preparing readers for a story where environmental tragedy, personal grief, and fleeting wonder intersect.

Albert Liau explores how fabulist flash fiction uses swift, minimalist openings to immediately engage readers, often sacrificing detailed exposition for momentum, vividness, and thematic depth. Liau discusses how fabulist flash fiction creates powerful narratives through lean openings, emotional immediacy, and suggestive depth. It invites both readers and writers to appreciate how a few carefully chosen sentences can open entire imaginative worlds and how the magic often lies in what's left unsaid.

This article analyzes how Alexander Weinstein establishes experiential reality at the beginning of his short stories drawing readers into fully realized physical and emotional worlds, often within a single paragraph. Albert Liau illustrates how Weinstein opens his stories not just with intriguing scenarios, but with emotional clarity and sensory immersion. His varied approaches to opening paragraphs all serve the same goal: to make the speculative feel real by making the characters deeply human from the start.

Albert Liau explores how the openings of stories function and proposes a flexible taxonomy of story openings based on narrative technique and effect. Openings are more than hooks, he says, they are orienting tools that ground readers in who, where, and when the story is, while often establishing tone, voice, theme, or tension. A successful opening doesn’t just grab attention—it prepares the reader to experience the story on its own terms.