Fiction Craft Essays

I once earned a well-deserved reaming for my writing an awful story involving who I viewed as lower-class patrons inhabiting a dive bar. The narrative too often emphasized these characters giving each other the business over abundant beers and cigarettes they could all barely afford. In between, some fought out back in an alley because they were drunk and bored and had something silly to prove.

In my brief career teaching fiction workshops, the bar story has appeared too often as a genre vying for literariness. Students have written about debauchery at house parties, barns, parks, cemeteries, and, of course, bars. All involved similar commentary on class hierarchy, where some students seem aware halfway through that their story bores.