Ziv W

Five Years of Counter Craft + Subscription Incentive

This past month marked my five-year anniversary of launching Counter Craft. When I started, I thought I’d run out of steam after two dozen articles or so. Apparently not. Five years of a (fairly) consistent weekly schedule means I now have several hundred Counter Craft articles. A bit hard to believe. And I received a very nice anniversary present from you lovely readers who put me past 20,000 subscribers.

I still publish every article for free initially and plan to keep doing so. But I have paywalled many older pieces. If you want to dig through five years of articles, interviews, and reviews, then consider upgrading to an annual subscription. Being a free subscriber is very nice too. However, to incentivize anyone on the subscription fence I thought I’d offer a five-year anniversary subscription incentive: I’ll send you a signed book.

Subscription incentive details: if you purchase an annual subscription—or extend a current subscription for another year—I will sign and mail you a copy of one of the above books. Either one of my two novels or one of two anthologies I’ve co-edited. (Postage costs mean I can only do this for readers in the US, I’m afraid.) If you’re interested, simply send me a message when you subscribe with your address and which book you’d like. And also say if you just want it signed or dedicated to a specific person. Substack allows you to send a message when paying for a subscription.

The book options are:

• Metallic Realms (satirical space opera meets autofiction novel)

• The Body Scout (science fiction / cyberpunkish noir novel)

• Tiny Crimes (anthology of flash crime/mystery stories from Brian Evenson, Laura van den Berg, Charles Yu, and more.)

• Tiny Nightmares (anthology of flash horror tales from Stephen Graham Jones, Jac Jemc, Kevin Brockmeier, and more.)

I’ll offer this from today until the end of March.

Interior Decorating Tips

I got a great response to my last article, “What Not Reading Does to Your Writing,” which looked at tics and deficiencies I see in prose from writers who do not read much fiction. I had quite a few professors, editors, and agents say they see the same issues in submissions and more than a few readers expressed distress at realizing they default to those same habits. To the latter group, I have two bits of advice. 1) Read a lot of good books. You will absorb good habits. 2) Don’t stress too much about having issues in your writing. This is what revision is for. Truly. No writer gets everything down in their first draft. Revision is exactly the place to balance out chapters, see what needs to be amped up or toned down, improved or cut. So, read and revise. Simple enough.

However, several readers asked me a more specific question: “How do you actually add interiority to scenes?” A lack of interiority isn’t the only feature of what I called “TV brain writing,” but it is the one that provoked the most questions. Other questions I saw asked whether using interiority “violates show don’t tell”? And does fiction really have to have interiority? I figured I’d answer these questions, as best I can. That means this will be more of a fiction 101 post than I usually write. These are things I consider basic, but there is nothing wrong with being refreshed on the basics. And sometimes what seems basic to one person isn’t to another.1

So, What Is Interiority?

In fiction, interiority is relating the internal world of a character to the reader. Their thoughts, feelings, hopes, fears, anxieties, memories, motivations, and so on. This is a simple yet consequential thing. Every one of us lives simultaneously in the external shared world and our own private worlds. These two realities are constantly colliding, separating, and distorting each other, whether that’s something as small as snapping at a friend because you are “hangry” or having a life-altering epiphany at the image of, I dunno, a dove flying over a lake that symbolically completes your character arc because you are a protagonist in a literary fiction short story published in a university literary magazine.

I kid, a bit. Still, it is true that our interior worlds are as vast as anything outside of them. If your fiction is missing interiority, it is leaving quite a lot out. This is true in a grander, philosophical sense yet also in a very practical craft sense. Readers tend to connect to stories through the emotions and desires of the POV character(s), and interiority provides that connection. The simplest story structure might be a character wants something but obstacles get in the way. This is a classic and powerful story, but only when the reader understands the character’s wants.

Interiority provides far more than just desires and goals. An interesting character will typically have a gap between how they act or speak and how they think or feel. Here’s an old CW class chestnut: In every scene, you should know what a character says they want, what they think they want, and what they really want. This can be applied to anything from prize-winning literary novels to pulpy superhero films. In this scene, the villain, Dr. Evilguy, says to the security guard that he wants to just use the bathroom but what he thinks he wants is to steal the blasto-ray 4000 omegagun prototype and conquer the city yet what he really wants, deep down, is to please the daddy that never loved them.

There are more things interiority provides than I could list here. One point I would hammer is that while visual media has many advantages over text, access to interiority is one of the advantages of prose.2 It is a form uniquely suited to exploring psychology and thought process. And it is usually smart to lean into the advantages of your medium.

Doesn’t Interiority Violate Show Don’t Tell?

Luckily for us, the Show Don’t Tell law has not yet passed Congress, much less been tested in court. There is no jail time for “violating” it. The prose prison doors are unlocked. Run free!

Look, “show don’t tell” is a fine rule of thumb. It is. In general—and with many exceptions and caveats—readers are more engaged by something they can visualize than something they can’t. “I’m mad” or “I was extremely mad” don’t give the reader as much to see as even a cliché like “She screamed and gripped the steering wheel until her knuckles turned white”. A general rule is not a commandment. It does not follow that showing is always superior to telling in every context much less that every sentence should be showing and never telling.

There are also things that cannot be dramatized in scenes and must be told through interiority. A character’s thought process, emotional arc, or the contrast between their hidden feelings and stated words. To pick a classic example, consider Kate Chopin’s “The Story of an Hour” in which the bulk of the story takes place in the character’s mind as she moves from despair at her husband’s death to the joyous realization that she will now be free as a widow in a way she never could be as a wife.

And there are entire modes of storytelling that prioritize telling over showing. Fairy tales, for example, and those have been popular for quite some time.

Lastly, I have always thought that “show don’t tell” is better thought of as meaning a visual image (or other sensory detail) will be more powerful than an abstraction. The distinction here is that you can provide a visual image to the reader in ways other than action3 and dialogue, most obviously through metaphor. Here’s a section of the opening of James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues,” which has one of my favorite metaphors in literature. I do not think it would be improved by instead describing a bunch of the narrator’s physical movements and facial gestures.

It was not to be believed and I kept telling myself that, as I walked from the subway station to the high school. And at the same time I couldn't doubt it. I was scared, scared for Sonny. He became real to me again. A great block of ice got settled in my belly and kept melting there slowly all day long, while I taught my classes algebra. It was a special kind of ice. It kept melting, sending trickles of ice water all up and down my veins, but it never got less. Sometimes it hardened and seemed to expand until I felt my guts were going to come spilling out or that I was going to choke or scream. This would always be at a moment when I was remembering some specific thing Sonny had once said or done.

Must You Include Interiority in Fiction?

No.

If you have read my newsletter, you know that I love fiction for its protean form and infinite possibilities. Anything can be done. There is nothing you have to do. I write about books I love that have no real plot, have no real characters, deploy experimental structures, use illogical worldbuilding, or otherwise break “the rules.” My critique of what I called “TV brain prose” is that it seems to be a default mode of writing that lacks intention. Although, well, I can’t access anyone else’s interiority4, my impression is that the lack of interiority is not so much a conscious choice done to create specific effects and more something the writer just isn’t thinking about. Or not thinking about enough.

There are also intentional reasons to avoid interiority that should be avoided. Plot-focused authors—and especially the twist-focused author—may want to avoid spilling the [spoiler redacted5] or otherwise revealing information that would undermine the plot twists. Again, anything can be done. But this move is usually cheap and irritating. If your character knows something relevant, and we have access to their interiority, the reader should know it too. At the very least, you need a strong character-based or at least in-universe reason for the information to be hidden. Ishiguro earns it by having his characters be so repressed and restrained that, yep, you believe those buttoned-up Brits might block things out of even their own thoughts. If your only reason to have, say, a murderer who avoids thinking about the crime they just committed is because you don’t want to spoil the reveal of the killer, well, you might need to rethink your POV character.

What are good reasons to avoid interiority? (When there is truly no interiority in a third-person narration, this is called third-person objective6.) Since we relate to characters through their thoughts and feelings, a lack of interiority can productively distance readers from the characters. Make their actions seem more ambiguous and the story colder and meaner. Raymond Carver’s “Popular Mechanics” is a classic example. You most commonly read third-person objective storytelling in non-fiction, in journalism. Reporters craft a narrative by their selection and ordering of details and quotes, but they don’t editorialize and directly state their feelings. That is also an effect a writer can harness. Shirley Jackson’s infamous “The Lottery” would not have such a shocking ending if the story didn’t lull you into complacency with the removed, journalistic narration:

The morning of June 27th was clear and sunny, with the fresh warmth of a full-summer day; the flowers were blossoming profusely and the grass was richly green. The people of the village began to gather in the square, between the post office and the bank, around ten o'clock; in some towns there were so many people that the lottery took two days and had to be started on June 27th. But in this village, where there were only about three hundred people, the whole lottery took less than two hours, so it could begin at ten o'clock in the morning and still be through in time to allow the villagers to get home for noon dinner.

Interiority also isn’t a matter of yes or no. Interiority can be strategically added and removed to create interesting effects and moods. Another favorite very short story is John Cheever’s “Reunion.” It’s two pages, so go read it. But I’ll describe it too. This story opens with a long paragraph where the narrator, Charlie, relates how excited and invested he is in a visit from his father during a train layover:

He was a stranger to me—my mother divorced him three years ago and I hadn't seen him since—but as soon as I saw him I felt that he was my father, my flesh and blood, my future and my doom. […] I hoped that someone would see us together. I wished that we could be photographed. I wanted some record of our having been together.

After this wide window into Charlie’s feelings, his interiority drops out. The rest of the story relates scenes of his father being an asshole to a variety of waiters—Charlie doesn’t even speak—and getting them kicked out of restaurants. It is all action, description, and dialogue.

“I don't like to be clapped at,” the waiter said.

“I should have brought my whistle,” my father said. “I have a whistle that is audible only to the ears of old waiters. Now, take out your little pad and your little pencil and see if you can get this straight: two Beefeater Gibsons. Repeat after me: two Beefeater Gibsons.”

This goes on for some time until finally his short window time is up. Charlie says, “I have to go, Daddy, it’s late.” He leaves. The final clause is simply “and that was the last time I saw my father.” Although Charlie’s interiority isn’t related after the opening, you can sense his thoughts and the emotional devastation of realizing his father is a drunk asshole who can’t even make a real effort for his own child. But, you only feel that because of the interiority groundwork laid in the opening paragraph.

How Is Interiority Deployed in Fiction?

There are lots of ways to relate interiority, and most probably do not need much elaboration. A first-person narrator can simply speak in a monologue, state their thoughts and feelings, or describe their memories. A third-person narrator can either directly or indirectly7 relate their interiority. Plenty of famous works of fiction even open this way: “I am an invisible man” (Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man). “If I am out of my mind, it’s all right with me, thought Moses Herzog” (Saul Bellow’s Herzog). “The grandmother didn’t want to go to Florida” (Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man Is Hard to Find”).

Even the “show don’t tell” tyrants are able to use interiority since it can involve action or dialogue. You can do this in memory:

In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since.

“Whenever you feel like criticizing any one,” he told me, “just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.”

(The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald)

Or in fantasy:

She nearly stopped forever just outside Ashton, because she came to a tiny cottage buried in a garden. I could live there all alone, she thought, slowing the car to look down the winding garden path to the small blue front door with, perfectly, a white cat on the step. No one would ever find me there, either, behind all those roses, and just to make sure I would plant oleanders by the road. I will light a fire in the cool evenings and toast apples at my own hearth. I will raise white cats and sew white curtains for the windows and sometimes come out of my door to go to the store to buy cinnamon and tea and thread. People will come to me to have their fortunes told, and I will brew love potions for sad maidens; I will have a robin…But the cottage was far behind, and it was time to look for her new road, so carefully charted by Dr. Montague.

(The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson)

When writing in third-person POV, you can also use a technique called “free indirect discourse,” which is the writing program jargon for moving into the thoughts or voice of a character without direct signaling like she thought or he felt. Direct: “I hate that stupid, ugly dog.” Indirect: She glared at Barkles and said he was a loathsome cur. Free indirect: She glared at the ugly mutt. What kind of idiot names their dog Barkles in the first place? To pick a real example, consider this passage from James Joyce’s “The Dead”:

He would only make himself ridiculous by quoting poetry to them which they could not understand. They would think that he was airing his superior education. He would fail with them just as he had failed with the girl in the pantry. He had taken up a wrong tone. His whole speech was a mistake from first to last, an utter failure.

So, I’ve said a bunch about what interiority is and looked at some specific examples of various types of interiority. How specifically do you deploy these? The possibilities are endless, but a few starting points:

• Contradiction. Show that your character says one thing while they mean another. Explain how they hide their feelings, perhaps even from themselves. Reveal what they are behind the facade they show the world.

• Variation. Most good scenes—though, as always, exceptions exist—offer a variety of narrative elements. Some combination of action, dialogue, description, interiority, etc. If you have a section of dialogue you want to break up, add some interiority instead of just action. If you want to pause the physical action, explore the mental action. Mix interiority in with description, dialogue, and everything else.

• Addition. There’s no reason to think of interiority as separate from other elements. It can be interwoven with them in a paragraph or even in a sentence. We think while we act, remember while we look, and feel while we talk in the real world. Our characters can do so on the page too.

• Tension. The stakes of the story depend on the emotions of the characters, and every scene will be more tense and dramatic if we know what the characters want. A long passage of increasing apprehension can also make the moment or revelation all the more powerful.

• Information. If showing is often more emotionally powerful, then telling is often more intellectually powerful. If you are dealing with ideas, you probably want a lot of interiority. And in any event, telling can be a more efficient means of imparting information—whether about characters, plot, the world, or anything else—to the reader than showing something in scenes.

• Immersion. We experience the world through the narrative perspective, which means interiority is an ideal place to immerse the reader in the tone and world of the story.

The Character Filter

There is another level of interiority that is the most interesting to me, which is using your character’s subjectivity as the filter for the entire story. Interiority isn’t merely the character’s thoughts and emotions. It is also how they see the world, summarize events, interpret actions, and describe settings. We all have different interests, ideologies, and identities. We can look at the same event and single out different details or eat the same food and prefer different dishes. Two roommates might describe the same living room in contrasting ways that reveal their different characters and feelings. “A cluttered, depressing mess filled with Jessica’s tacky trinkets and ‘inspirational art’” vs. “A cozy, peaceful place where you just feel relaxed…at least when Cheryl wasn’t moping about or reading aloud from one of the angsty poetry books she left strewn around the apartment.”

The point is we all experience the world filtered through our own interiorities. If your passage is in first person or close third, then everything from descriptions to summaries should be viewed through both that character’s physicality (e.g., what they can see) and the character’s interiority (e.g., how they see it).

This is something most writers know, but can easily be forgotten when writing. Even in first-person stories, I often see passages of summary that read more like a Wikipedia entry than a character speaking. “I drove into the town of Townville, which had a population of 40,000 people and was located between South River and North River outside of Centerville. Founded in 1934 by Edward Town, the town of Townville had once been home to a miniature town model factory that employed one third of the town during…” Unless your character is a local historian, that’s probably not how they think about the town.

A particularly amusing manifestation of this habit is when a writer gives extremely specific details about things like the makes of cars, the types of wood used in various furniture items, or the brand names of clothing pieces with no regard to the character’s mindset or knowledge base. I assume this stems from the idea that concrete details are always stronger. But details only work if they make character sense. “Tom was panicking. Someone had just stolen his dog! Poochie! No! Tom sprinted after the dognapper past a 2022 Ford F-150 in Carbonized Gray, two silver Kia sedans, a 2024 Lexus ES in Moonbeam Beige Metallic, a 2019 Chevy…” Unless Tom works in automobile manufacturing, then he is probably not aware of specific car models much less clock them as he sprints after his stolen dog. (On the other hand, the obsessive listing of designer clothing items in American Psycho fits into the shallow and status-obsessed mind and world of Patrick Bateman. It makes character sense and thematic sense.)

Filtering through your character’s interiority allows for much richer prose because the sentences are doing double duty. They’re conveying setting information or advancing plot or establishing atmosphere and they are deepening character. If you use your character as the filter through the world—and summarize and describe from their minds—you achieve the richest interiority. Make your character’s mind be the brush that paints the world.

My new novel Metallic Realms is out in stores! Reviews have called the book “brilliant” (Esquire), “riveting” (Publishers Weekly), “hilariously clever” (Elle), “a total blast” (Chicago Tribune), “unrelentingly smart and inventive” (Locus), and “just plain wonderful” (Booklist). My previous books are the science fiction noir novel The Body Scout and the genre-bending story collection Upright Beasts. If you enjoy this newsletter, perhaps you’ll enjoy one or more of those books too.

1. The ordinary caveat: Every writer’s process is different, so attending a session such as this is not about finding “the answer” to the question of how to write short stories. It’s about being exposed to another writer’s approaches, and even for that writer, those approaches can vary from day to day.

• Writing a short story is like creek fishing. Sometimes you do everything right: you have the proper equipment, it’s the right time of the day, you’ve approached the creek with the wiliness of a fishing veteran, your technique is perfect, you’re persistent, but at the end of the day you’ve caught nothing. Not even a strike. You might have seen a fish dash under the bank. That’s the closest you had to success that day.

• The next day you a bent paperclip through a piece of week-old sausage that has been sitting on the table in your kitchen, tie it to an eight-foot long piece of twine, toss it into an irrigation ditch where no one has ever caught a fish, and you walk away with a trophy.

• You just don’t know.

• So, keeping that in mind, here we go.

• I’m a pantser, generally. So beginning a short story is hardly ever about having the whole story in my head. I begin with an interesting image, action, character, mood, situation or just a fun first line. Everything boils down to language eventually (or immediately) so for me, putting down the first sentence is my springboard into the story.

• Remember, all decisions when writing are fungible. That first sentence can change later to set up the ending better, but I’m surprised how often my choice of the language to begin remains.

• Here’s three of my first sentences. Each came with no story attached. I barely had a whisper of where I was going afterwards:

1. I’d assembled my time travel device of circuits, microchips and clever wiring, but the gods or magic or fate controlled it. 

1. Willard was day dreaming about Elsa when the shark caught Benford, the new mail boy, directly in front of Willard’s desk.

1. The women I’ve loved are all decades dead.

1. Look for beginning sentences. Read a bunch in a row. I like opening an anthology so I can see a bunch of them at once. I also, when I’m in a bookstore, open a dozen books in a row to read their first sentence.

1. The important tip is to begin. A first sentence is like the first step when you start a hike. You have to take the first step to get to the last one. As reluctant or nervous or insecure as you might be about that first step, the resistance to begin can only be overcome by taking it. The second step in a hike is almost never as difficult to take as the first one. A first step gives you momentum. Write a first sentence.

1. By the way, this is the exact advice to write a novel.

1. Also, by the way, if you’re sitting at a computer right now, or you have a notebook you’re writing in, you could begin a new short story in the next thirty seconds. All you have to do is write your first sentence. It could be anywhere from two words to dozens, but that’s all you have to do. Starting a story is always a first sentence away. Easiest thing in the world.

1. Remember that the first sentence and the sentences that follow are a move, like in chess. They’re the opening gambit. Also, remember that the beginning is the setup for your ending. Whatever you begin with leads to the ending. Often the ending echoes something from your beginning. Keep that in mind.

1. You have choices that generally fall into these categories:

1. Begin with setting. Here’s a good setting beginning:

1. “No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.” The Haunting of Hill House, Shirley Jackson.

• A setting beginning tells the reader that the setting is important to the story. The setting can immediately establish mood. Imagine you wanted to write a story that takes place here at the K Diamond K ranch. Go outside and wander around a bit with your senses open. Surely you can see (and feel, smell, hear, taste) the story potential in this place.

• Writer Brenda Cooper encouraged me to go outside last night and look into the moonless sky. The milky way stretched above us, a lazy river of stars. You don’t get that view in the city! Settings can be powerful!

• Begin with a character description:

• “MR. UTTERSON, THE LAWYER, was a man of a rugged countenance, that was never lighted by a smile; cold, scanty and embarrassed in discourse; backward in sentiment; lean, long, dusty, dreary, and yet somehow lovable.” From Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Lewis Stevenson.

• A character introduction starts the process of getting the readers to sympathize with a person in the story. The best stories often contain sympathetic characters. A sympathetic character doesn’t necessarily have to be one we like. To be “sympathetic” in this context means that we understand why the character is the way they are. If we care about the characters, we’re likely to be involved in the story and wonder what will happen to them next. It’s a weird way to think about it, but characterization is a writerly trick to keep the readers involved.

• Eventually every single problem in writing a story is a technical one. How do we get the readers to care? How do we get the readers to forget they’re reading? How do we create language that is memorable? How do we fulfill the promise to the reader that if they’ll give us their attention, that we will reward them with an experience that is worth their time?

• Begin with action:

• “I was surprised to see a white man walk into Joppy’s bar.” Walter Mosley, Devil in a Blue Dress

• An action beginning is sometimes called in media res, which means in the middle of the action. This is the most often recommended beginning. People are naturally drawn to movement, to action, to something happening. I grew up in a home with a party line—that’s how old I am! When we picked up out phone, we might hear the conversation a neighbor was having. Etiquette of the time was to hang up quietly, then make our call later when the line was open. But you know how people can be—how tempting it might be to cover the microphone part of the phone and listen. Here’s what’s interesting about that once you get past the creepiness factor: you have stepped into the middle of a conversation. The neighbors don’t know you are present. They don’t stop to give you any background information, but you can inevitably figure out what it going on in a minute or so. Starting in media res can be like that. Your reader will figure out pretty quickly from the action everything you might be tempted to tell them as a writer. Figuring things out is half the fun of reading.

• A hallmark of an inexperienced writer is a tendency to stop the story to tell the readers facts the author is sure readers need to know to understand what’s going on. Try to resist doing that.

• Begin with a distinctive, interesting voice:

• You don’t know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; but that ain’t no matter. That book was made by Mr. Mark Twain, and he told the truth, mainly. Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain

• You better not never tell nobody but God. It’d kill your mammy. DEAR GOD, I am fourteen years old. I am I have always been a good girl. Maybe you can give me a sign letting me know what is happening to me. The Color Purple, Alice Walker

• First person narrated stories are always, inevitably about the narrator, no matter what else they might look like. The Great Gatsby, for example, looks like it must be about Gatsby, and it is, but Gatsby dies well before the end of the book (sorry, plot spoiler). The last chapters are about how Nick Carraway, the narrator deals with this death, and the end is about how watching Gatsby and what happened to him changed Nick.

• There are other ways to begin, like with an odd statement the reader wants clarified, like “Once a guy stood all day shaking bugs from his hair” which is from Philp K. Dick’s A Scanner Darkly.

• You could start with dialogue (that’s a variation of in media res) like when Charles Wallace says, “There are dragons in the twins’ vegetable garden” to start Madeleine L’Engle’s, A Wind in the Door.

• The point is that multiple kinds of writing exist, and you can begin with anyone of them. Think of the types of writing that go into a story: setting, character, dialogue, description, action, flashbacks, exposition, etc. Anyone of them is potentially an opening move.

• Remember, when readers pick up your story, they want you to succeed. They want to be entertained or informed or moved. They’ll cut you some slack, but you can’t waste their time. Give them interesting stuff at the beginning. Throw your heart into it and give them your best.

• This chat is about beginnings and ends, but I also said I’d offer “tips and tricks.” For me the middle of the story has three requirements:

• Very early on I need to establish the conflict. Conflict is a character wants something, something stands in the way, and something of value is at stake. Once I know those three things, I can progress. What does my character do to get what they want? How does the result of their action change the situation (most of the time what they do makes things worse)? I keep writing my character trying until they do or don’t get what they want, and that’s the ending.

• Remember in the middle that your character isn’t alone. Sometimes other characters do things that change the direction of the story. Sometimes there’s bad weather. Sometimes there are accidents. Sometimes a messenger doesn’t get Romeo’s letter with his plan to save his love by faking his death to Juliet in time, and Romeo and Juliet turns into a tragedy instead of a comedy.

• I compose a story almost entirely of scenes or episodes (if you prefer). A very short story might only have one scene. A longer one could have a bunch. A novel has a bunch of bunch more. (these are very technical writing terms).

• So, oh my gosh, my time is more than half gone and I haven’t talked about how to end stories yet. But as you can see, you can’t talk about a single element in writing short stories without eventually talking about the rest of them. A story is a combination of all the parts.

• Sheesh.

• To talk about the end I have to talk about the author’s intent. Why do we tell stories in real life? You’ll notice often when friends get together, they often tell little stories. Maybe somebody had an uncomfortable experience at the dentist office. Someone else had an amusing encounter at the farmer’s market. A third received a troubling phone call from a distant relative. The thing about these stories is that you hardly ever think when they’re done talking, “Why did that tell me that? What’s the point?”

• There’s always a point unless you have a friend who does tell you pointless stories, but they’re almost always damaged in an unidentifiable way, and you are kind enough to not tell them so. The point might be “dentist appointments can be scary,” or “people in farmer’s markets can be ridiculous,” or “I’m lucky my life isn’t like my distant relative’s life.”

• The stories you tell have to end in such a way that their point is revealed. I have to use an English-teacher word here—I apologize—but the point of a story are its themes.

• I told you at the beginning that I’m a pantser. I often don’t know why I started or where I’m going, but sometime in the process of writing the piece I ask myself, “Why does this story matter to me?” “Why am I attracted to the material?” Until I answer that question, the writing will slow down. I need to think about “what is the point?”

• The conflict of what my character wants, what stands in the way, and why is it important ends at the climax. My character has won or lost or some weirdly appropriate alternative occurs that isn’t a win or loss but is satisfying has occurred, but that’s hardly ever where the story ends.

• The end is sometimes called the denouement. It basically means in French, “the action of untying.” It’s the walking away from the climax. It’s what your characters are left with when it’s all over. The climax of Star Wars: a New Hope is the explosion of the death star, but the denouement is the awards ceremony where Han and Luke get medals. The point is something like “the brave and bold are rewarded at the end,” or “a good cause prevails,” or “white guys get medals, not wookies.” Sorry, couldn’t resist that last one.

• The end of John Steinbeck’s The Pearl ends with the peasant throwing an invaluable pearl back into the ocean. The point might be something like “greed and great wealth can destroy our lives.” Of Mice and Men ends with a farmhand commenting, “Now what the hell ya suppose is eatin’ them two guys?” as George and Slim walk away. The farmhand might not know, but we know George had to execute his friend and ward, Lennie, to save him from a lynching. We know the grim point of the story, even if we can’t say it, that maybe life is too cruel for our hopes to come true, at least for some people, or that the American dream isn’t for everyone, or you don’t know anyone until you have walked in their shoes.

• Stories have points, so your ending should give the reader a chance to see your point. You don’t need to spell your point out, unless you are writing fairy tales for children that end with “the moral of the story is . . .” But the story needs to take the readers to the place where they can see a point, and where they see the point is in what you tell them of the character’s reactions or fate after the climax.

• You have tons of choices in your ending, just as you did your beginning. Here are some options:

• Significant or meaningful dialogue

• A symbolic action

• A repetition of the beginning which will read completely differently now that the story has ended

• A symbolic scenic description

• A narrative reaction like the conclusion of Wuthering Heights that ends with “I lingered round them, under that benign sky: watched the moths fluttering among the heath and harebells, listened to the soft wind breathing through the grass, and wondered how any one could ever imagine unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth.”

• Or the end of Huckleberry Finn when Huck says, “Tom’s most well now, and got his bullet around his neck on a watch-guard for a watch, and is always seeing what time it is, and so there ain’t nothing more to write about, and I am rotten glad of it, because if I’d a knowed what a trouble it was to make a book I wouldn’t a tackled it, and ain’t a-going to no more. But I reckon I got to light out for the Territory ahead of the rest, because Aunt Sally she’s going to adopt me and sivilize me, and I can’t stand it. I been there before. THE END. YOURS TRULY, HUCK FINN.”

• For me, I think endings can be tough. They’re delicate constructions because they carry the weight of the story on their back. I’ll tinker with the ending more than any other part.

• An ending is like a poem where the impact has to be greater than the sum of its parts. I’m looking for resonance at the end

• Final thoughts,

1. You have multiple options to begin a story.
   1. The beginning sets up the end. One of your first editing tasks should be to read your beginning and then your end to make sure it’s clear that they’re part of the same story, and the beginning knew were you were going to end up.
   1. In general, stories are told in scenes with action, appeals to the senses, and time passing. Essays give a lot of information, but they’re hardly ever stories. Write a story, not an essay.
   1. Revise the story with the point of your ending in mind. Reinforce the thematic points. Remember, when you’re writing you’re the writer. You may not know where you’re going. Writing is often an act of discovery, even if you are a planner instead of a pantser. When you’re revising, you’re transforming yourself from the writer to the storyteller. The story teller knows the middle and the ending and everything else. The storyteller knows where the story is going. Everything points to the end. Everything is a strategy or technical decision or a “move” you make on the page.
   1. Oh, and when you’re writing your first draft, don’t worry about much of this talk. Write to a conclusion. Finish the darned thing. You can’t make the decisions I’ve talked about here until you’ve really reached the end and go back to work your changes.
   1. Start as the writer and end as the storyteller.

edited by Ziv Wities The shop fronts glitter along Dreamwright Street, where all the best people come to buy their dreams. Sunlight winks off polished glass, clear as crystal; off the lovingly applied varnish of the wooden window frames; off fragments of mica embedded in the very cobblestones. The customers, too, sparkle. Light leaps from … Continue reading DP FICTION #114B: “Dreamwright Street” by Mike Reeves-McMillan

Submission Window: July 8 We are delighted to announce our next general submission window! Submissions will be open for two weeks, from July 8 through July 22, via our submission portal. We consider one story per author, with a wordcount of 3,500 words or less; we pay 10c/word; and simultaneous submissions are fine. See our … Continue reading Announcements! (Submission Window, First Reader Applications, Staff Changes)

edited by Ziv Wities Content note (click for details) Content note: Grief, fraught family relationships, gaslighting. [user graciegirl2006!? is logged in] [Guide]Welcome to this interactive guide! I understand from your About Me profile that you have an issue with a brain that needs killing. I’m here to help! [graciegirl2006!?]I can’t believe I found this. [Guide]Actually, … Continue reading DP FICTION #111B: “How to Kill the Giant Living Brain You Found in Your Mother’s Basement After She Died: An Interactive Guide” by Alex Sobel

edited by Ziv Wities My name is Yasuko Nagamine and I work for the employment bureau. There’s a monster destroying the city. It used to be the mascot for the organ rental service, Sensation. I guess it still is but I don’t think it’s doing much for their bottom line anymore. Today I’m filing electronic … Continue reading DP FICTION #111A: “Ketchōkuma” by Mason Yeater

edited by Ziv Wities .3. At this age, on the planet of Orvalho, Alberto is conjoined with the ship called The Offer of Peace Between Two Worlds. They’re engulfed in the Mezelões’ unifying mix, a tank where a swirling brackish secretion flows through their pores and recesses, nanoscopic spidery bots tying their espírito together—parts and … Continue reading DP FICTION #109B: “The Offer of Peace Between Two Worlds” by Renan Bernardo

edited by Chelle Parker Content note (click for details) Content note: This story contains depictions of risks to a child’s safety. Usually Friend gives me three food pouches after sportsgames, but today only one. He spits it out of his chest slot, and I kick off the bulkhead to snatch it before it gets caught … Continue reading DP FICTION # 109A: “Level One: Blowtorch” by Jared Oliver Adams

Every Friday night the angels came, and every Friday night they freaked me the fuck out. Which is probably why I didn’t get a million-eyed, one-footed guardian of my own like the rest of my family. This was totally fine with me. I was in no way jealous that my siblings had angels to accompany … Continue reading DP FICTION #102B: “Shalom Aleichem” by Y.M. Resnik

This week, Fantasy magazine announced it was shutting down three years after it rebooted. Fantasy did great work in those years and their stories were regular SFF award contenders. Still, editors Christie Yant and Arley Sorg wrote “People will want to know why, of course, and the answer is the expected one:…

Read more

WE The airplane is gray and gleaming, rising off the ground into the fog of early morning like a magic trick, obscured and then revealed, impossible. The engines roar too loudly, like they will tear down the sky. They roar and roar, and then— The transformation. The wind under the airplane’s wings buckles as the … Continue reading DP FICTION #102A: “On a Smoke-Blackened Wing” by Joanne Rixon

Diamondback v. Tunnelrat et. Axeteeth Parish Court of Quan, 3rd District Ignatious P. Fizzlewig, Esq. Presiding Cite as: Diamondback V. Tunnelrat, 245 3rdPar (1107) The case before us concerns questions of property, ownership, and personhood. It also concerns the sale of an ear. The plaintiff is one Mr. Trawler A. Diamondback, member of the Diamondback … Continue reading DP FICTION #99B: “Diamondback V. Tunnelrat” by Nick Thomas

1. They think they know everything. Like your twenty years of mining experience is useless compared to a high-acting neural processing drive. Like you’re nothing but a softer, weaker liability, and the only thing you’re good for is greasing their joints and blowing out their compressors. Just one bot and one human to babysit them. … Continue reading DP FICTION #99A: “Six Reasons Why Bots Make the Worst Asteroid Miners” by Matt Bliss

 

The artwork for this roundup includes a detail of DM7's art for Lightspeed #155. More about the artist at https://www.deviantart.com/dm7

From: sisyphus.ephyra@hadescorp.com To: human_resources@hadescorp.com Hi HR, Just letting you know: I moved the artwork “Higher, Faster, Boulder” from the ground floor lobby up to the Second Floor Cafeteria as per Asset Movement Request #5340 from Asset Management, could you please let me know why it’s been moved back to the ground floor? Thanks, Sisyphus *** … Continue reading DP FICTION #98A: “Re: Your Stone” by Guan Un

Big week for me: DIABOLICAL THOUGHTS is live!

This is the special telepathy issue that I’ve guest-edited for Diabolical Thoughts. Four stories about sharing minds and thoughts — and, as is Diabolical’s wont, these stories zip between the surreal, the delightful, the unsettling and the intimate. Or all of them together. They’re all wonderfully strange and unexpected, and as you might imagine, I love them all dearly.

You can read the entire issue right here.

Here’s the full table of contents:

Editorial: Thoughts on Thoughts, by Ziv Wities, 410 words
The human brain has got a lot to answer for.

Rattenkönig, by Jenova Edenson, 3650 words
Three tangled teens on a road trip have nothing but each other.

The Hivemind’s Royal Jelly, by Josh Pearce, 860 words
BEES

The Desert’s Voice is Sweet to Hear, by Carolina Valentine, 3870 words
The desert had been trying to kill Zazy for two days. Gently. Lovingly.

A Girl With a Planet in Her Eye, by Ruth Joffre, 870 words
At first, the planet in the aqueous humors of her left eye was silent. And then: music.

Welcome to Diabolical Thoughts. You have one (1) transmission pending. To receive this transmission, please hold still, and visualize the following items: A roadtrip in an Oldsmobile.A faint buzzing sound.Sand; so much sand.The entire world. Thank you. Beginning transmission; please stand by. ~Diabolical Thoughts~March 2023 Editorial: Thoughts on ThoughtsZiv Wities, 410 words RattenkönigJenova Edenson, 3650 … Continue reading Issue #97: Our Special Telepathy Issue, Diabolical Thoughts!

I used to think that the Mid-Autumn Festival was simply a pain in the ass. Embodying the popular conception of idealized heterosexual womanhood—even for one night—is an arduous challenge.  That’s still true, of course. But lately it’s been overshadowed by a larger problem: The offerings are dwindling. Two centuries ago, I would’ve built thrones made … Continue reading DP FICTION #96A: “The Monologue of a Moon Goddess in the Palace of Pervasive Cold” by Anja Hendrikse Liu

I often start my MFA courses with a discussion of fairy tales. It seems an obvious place to start, since fairy tales are some of humanity’s oldest stories and likely the first stories that my students remember reading as children. But I also love starting with fairy tales because they violate more or less every single rule of fiction writing that is drilled into us in creative writing classes.

Instead of “show don’t tell,” fairy tales prioritize telling over showing. Instead of demanding “round characters,” fairy tales embrace flat ones. Instead of logical “worldbuilding,” fairy tales operate with a surreal dream logic in abstract settings. Instead of starting “in media res,” they start “once upon a time.” Instead of “telling the story only you can tell,” fairy tales ask you to retell stories that have been told for centuries. So on and so forth.

Almost nothing you are taught about setting, character, voice, or structure in MFA classes or craft essays applies to the fairy tale form. And yet the form endures. Fairy tales still serve as source material for many of our novels and movies, and plenty of acclaimed contemporary writers deploy versions of the form. (I’m currently reading Kelly Link’s forthcoming story collection, White Cat, Black Dog, which opens with a terrific modern fairy tale.)

I’m not suggesting that the traditional writing advice is wrong, per se. Plenty of brilliant stories are written with all the usual advice. But we should always remember that there are no writing “rules,” there are only standards that apply to certain modes of storytelling. Those modes wax and wane in popularity. They chance according to culture and history. And there are infinite modes we can choose from.

So what is the mode of the fairy tale? What is the form? Here I defer to Kate Bernheimer, a great contemporary scholar (and writer) of fairy tales who outlines four qualities in her essay “Fairy Tale Is Form, Form Is Fairytale.” (The essay can be found in the Tin House’s The Writer’s Notebook, which I highly recommend as a craft book.) The four qualities Bernheimer describes are:

Flatness—specifically flatness of character. Fairy tales don’t delve into the psychology or interiority of characters, and typically limit them to one or two adjectives. The beautiful princess. The evil king. Etc. Similarly, fairy tales don’t have traditional character arcs or worry about “dynamic characters.” The evil witch at the start is probably going to be an evil witch at the end.

Abstraction—a general minimalism of description. Only a few colors are used and details are abstracted. “A young woman lived in a small house by the dark woods,” rather than a detailed layout of the house and a catalogue of the the types of trees in the forest.

Intuitive logic—essentially a dream logic or poetic logic, not far removed from what we would call “surrealism” or “magical realism” in a contemporary story.

Normalized magic—probably self-explanatory: magic is normalized. Characters are unsurprised if a cat begins to talk or a mermaid swims by. There is no SFF worldbuilding to explain or rationalize the fantastic elements.

To these four, I would add two more:

Open artifice—fairy tales eschew the standard methods of hiding fictional artifice and instead present themselves as pure story. As yarn, joke, fable. Fairy tale narrators often interject commentary or address the reader. And the classic fairy tale frame tells us we’re entering and then leaving pure story. These days, the classic frame has been reduced to “Once upon a time…” and “…happily ever after.” In traditional fairy tales, the openings and closings were even more overt in telling you “this isn’t real”: “Once there was, there never was” to start, say, and something absurd like the following to close: “I was also there in my red trousers and ate a lentil on a spit and if that lentil fits on the spit then you also have to believe my tale.”

A non-setting—fairy tales typically take place in a vague non-setting, in which we are never pinned down in specific time periods or locations. “Once upon a time a beautiful princess lived in a golden castle” instead of “In the 12th century, the heir to the Hapsburg dynasty lived in a castle by the Aar river” or what not. Specific names, dates, and locations—whether real or invented—deflate the fairy tale mode.

Although Americans raised on Brothers Grimm might think of this non-setting as being always a vague medieval world, the non-setting can take place any time (so to speak) including far future science fiction settings or the present day as long as we don’t pin the setting down too neatly. “Once upon a time a lonely salesman lived in a big city and every day he took a taxi to work…” perhaps, but not “In 2023, an NFT salesmen lived in the Fisherman’s Wharf district of San Francisco and every day he took an Uber to a Starbucks with his laptop to work.”

These six essential qualities of fairy tales stand out first because they, as said, go against all the standard advice of both contemporary literary fiction and SFF writing. We’re told to be specific in our settings, logical in our worldbuilding, and to probe the psychological depths of our characters. That advice works wonders for many types of stories. But the qualities of fairy tales allow for different types of stories and different effects. Fairy tales in their abstractness, artifice, and flatness allow stories to operate on different planes. The philosophical, sexual, or primal fears. They are somehow both more Apollonian and more Dionysian at the same time.

Listing the features of fairy tales in the way above, you can probably can see the different ways fairy tales overlap with other modes of storytelling. The normalized magic and intuitive logic is present in magical realism. The non-setting is present in a lot of weird fiction. And the open artifice and flatness is a frequent feature of postmodern fiction and metafiction.

Of course, as writers we can always pick and choose what we want. A lot of the best fairy tale-inspired fiction takes most of these features but completely ditches one or two of them. Angela Carter’s brilliant collection The Bloody Chamber hits most of these points yet in place of the minimalist abstraction she substitutes her lush, Gothic prose. Helen Oyeyemi’s many fairy tale retelling novels keep a lot of the fairy tale style, but probe the psychology of her characters in specific settings. Postmodernists like Robert Coover and Donald Barthelme—both known for fairy tale retellings—tended to keep the flatness and artifice yet write in their own playful styles full of details and lists.

So, when I suggest fairy tales as an MFA antidote I don’t mean that you must use all six of these features—although I certainly wouldn’t mind if you did. The world can always use more fairy tales. As writers we always get to mix and match, pick and choose. If one of your stories is feeling stale, perhaps try using an old fairy tale technique. Embrace your artifice, flatten your characters, or make your worldbuilding a bit more nonsensical. And don’t believe anyone who tells you that all stories “must” have round characters or logical worldbuilding or anything else. Stories come in infinite forms, which is as true once upon a time in a land far far away as it is today.

UPDATED 2/9: Since this post was so popular, I’ve written a follow-up post with some recommendations for contemporary fabulist books:

If you like this newsletter, consider subscribing or checking out my recent science fiction novel The Body Scout that The New York Times called “Timeless and original…a wild ride, sad and funny, surreal and intelligent.”

Other works I’ve written or co-edited include Upright Beasts (my story collection), Tiny Nightmares (an anthology of horror fiction), and Tiny Crimes (an anthology of crime fiction).

On a sunless morning, in the city of Astor, the word ‘caulk’ vanished. The word didn’t announce its vanishing with trumpets or a booming clarion call. It faded away slowly in the middle of the night, like the last lyrics of a difficult song. The ones who didn’t use the word ‘caulk’ could not even … Continue reading DP FICTION #95B: “Tell Me the Meaning of Bees” by Amal Singh

This morning I stumbled across a Reddit thread with a familiar question:

As an author, what novels should I read?

Like a lot of questions arising in casual writing talk, and especially the “should I” questions, this is almost certainly the wrong thing to ask. There’s no one answer, no one path. But it does make sense to wonder how you might read more deliberately, broaden your horizons, read in a way that strengthens your craft — which, overall, is what the original poster was after, and is what most of the responses dove into.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, my own contribution was this:

Read short fiction as well as novels.

Here’s what I wrote:

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Read short fiction as well as novels.

Short fictions is a different form, with different constraints. Different strengths and weaknesses — and learning those, at least learning how to recognize the range and versatility, will give you a lot.

Short stories do cool stuff. A great short story can make you love a protagonist and then kill them off in the space of 25 pages. A great short story can pull off things you could never sustain for the length of a novel, like being written from the POV of a sentient refrigerator, or as the transcript of a YouTube channel, or where linear time is not actually a thing. Short stories can also focus on something really small, intimate, or odd — a single date; a snapshot of one compelling character; a single captivating thought-experiment. So reading a diverse array of short stories will keep setting off lightbulbs of "I didn't know you could do that" — and those lightbulbs will carry over to your novel-writing as well, because you'll have all these tools and tricks and techniques in the back of your mind. You'll know a hundred different ways you can stretch your writing to be different, and to accomplish different things.

Short stories are a masterclass in compactness. In getting information across really quickly and smoothly (and also, knowing what information is worth getting across, and what's better left as vibes-only); in favoring scenes and substance over preparatory conversations; in cutting right to the heart of a story and also convincing readers this is a story worth reading all at once. In a great short story, most every paragraph is doing double or triple duty, establishing character and introducing the setting and rules and moving the plot forward, all at the same time.

That's all craft you absolutely want and need in novel-writing as well. You want your novel to feel tight, not flabby; you want your big overarching story to be full of scenes and subplots that function very similarly to the way short stories do; you want those sub-stories to be compelling, and you want not to feel like the same thing over and over, or like one big thing that just keeps stretching on and on interminably.

Short stories teach endings. One of the great strengths of novels is a sense of immersion, of going on a journey with particular characters or in a particular setting. But there are so many novels where the ending is lackluster, or just... y'know, fine, but not the high point of the book. The journey was worth it in its own right. That's why you can still pick up Song of Ice and Fire or Name of the Wind and enjoy what there is of it, even if the next installments never materialize. The anticipation can be better than when it actually arrives. But short stories are tight, and focused, and bound to their endings in iron. They're too brief for the separation between "middle" and "end" to feel like two different things. If you read one anthology of a dozen stories, then congrats: you have read a full dozen endings, each of their own shape and type and style. Pay attention to what makes something feel and function as an ending, and you'll learn a lot.

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Where novels are a commitment, short fiction can be a playground, a gallery tour, a lab for glorious experimentation. If you want to know what's out there, and see the full range of what this craft can do, I strongly advise you not to miss out on it. :)

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Here's a little grab-bag of stories from all kinds of different types and styles:

• "Magic for Beginners," by Kelly Link, eerie, ethereal magic in the mundane.

• "Please Undo This Hurt," by Seth Dickinson, sorrow and existential horror.

• "A Fine Balance," by Charlotte Ashley, swashbuckling and intrigue.

• "Who Will Greet You At Home," by Lesley Nneka Arimah, literalized metaphor and social inequality.

• "Lies I Never Told You," by Jaxton Kimble, sweet, gentle, affirming.

• "The Long Way Up," by Alix E. Harrow, mythology retelling from a relatable, intimate, contemporary POV.

• "A Strange and Muensterous Desire," by Amanda Hollander, wonderfully ridiculous character humor.

• “How Music Begins,” by James Van Pelt, familiar people placed in strange and desperate circumstances.

Hope this helps whoever stumbles across it, and hope you enjoy!

So you want to determine whether dogs still exist. First, our association of dogs with obedience. Is obedience dog-like? Or is it to do with horses now, or children, or hamsters. “Hamster-like obedience.” Dogs have retreated into the bodies of hamsters, maybe. They have a real knack for learning, we’re told, and for evolving themselves. … Continue reading DP FICTION #95A: “Dog Song” by Avi Naftali

I'm not sure I've ever told this story anywhere in public. Forgive me if I have…and please, as you read it, keep in mind that I was eighteen or so at the time. At any age, it's possible to say something off the top of your head that comes across as rude (when you didn't intend rude) and/or seriously meant (when you intended it as a joke). And it's more likely at that age when you're kind of an adult and kind of not-an-adult and not quite sure how to be either.

People always ask me what my pal Steve Sherman and I did on those comics where we "assisted" Jack Kirby, as on his Fourth World comics and Jimmy Olsen. The honest answer is "very little." We did some production work. We wrote some storylines, a few of which he used some of. Our greatest contributions might have been when we listened to him describe a story he was about to start working on and we said something like, "That sounds great, Jack!"

Once in a while, when he then wrote and drew that next story, it would even wind up resembling the story he'd told us.

I sometimes had an added duty. If Superman was in the story, Jack would usually not draw in Superman's chest insignia as he went along. He never quite "got" the way it was supposed to look. It was not the kind of thing Jack Kirby could have cared a lot about and the folks back at DC Comics in New York treated it as a major defect in the work. The inker or one of the guys they had on staff back there could have fixed all the emblems in one story in, literally, about three minutes but this was somehow a big issue.

At times, it felt like given the choice of an exciting, dynamic story with chest emblems that needed some correction or a boring, hackneyed story with proper emblems, they'd have preferred the latter. So Jack would leave Superman's chest barren until such time as he was ready to send the story off to New York.

If — and only if — it would not delay delivering the job much, he would wait for a day when Steve and I were there and Jack would have me draw in all those "S's" throughout the story. It was the only thing — and I mean the only thing — I could draw better than Jack. He'd go outside for a breath of canyon air, I'd sit at his drawing table and do it, and by the time he came back in, it would all be done.

If, however, we weren't coming out to work in the next day or two, he would draw them in by himself, ship the story off to New York and then brace himself for the inevitable phone call from someone: "Jack, you're getting Superman's emblem wrong again…"

So one day, Jack was an hour or two from finishing a Jimmy Olsen story and we were there. I was doing busy work, waiting for my moment, sneaking glances at whichever page he was working on. Jack did not do his best drawing when someone was watching. I noticed he had drawn Superman in a certain pose I'd seen him use many times before. It was the pose on the two images below and every Kirby fan reading this can probably recall other places he used it.

I opened my big, fat mouth and said, "Oh, you're using that old pose again!" It sounded funny in my head, but I realized as I said it, it sounded pretty damned smartass rude coming out of my mouth. If I'd said that to Alex Toth or a dozen other great, experienced comic book artists I've known, I would have gotten and probably deserved a scolding that began with something like "Who the f word are you to…?"

Jack said nothing of the sort. In fact, he said nothing. He just picked up his eraser, completely eradicated that lovely drawing of Superman and replaced it with another equally as fine (or maybe better) of Superman. In a different pose.

An hour or two later, I'd done my little insignia-drawing and Steve was packing the artwork up to go to the post office the next day. Jack came over to me and said in a sincere tone, "Thanks. You helped me there."

I said something like, "Hey, if you're ever ready to end your career, we could trade jobs. I could draw the story and you could draw the Superman emblems! We'd both be out of the business within a week."

Jack chuckled and said, "No, I meant about telling me I was overusing that pose. Any time you see me doing something like that, please let me know."

I think that says a lot about Jack Kirby as a creative force. There are lot of things one could nitpick about his work — the way he drew fingers, the way he drew women's hair, the way he even drew Superman's chest emblem when he drew Superman's chest emblem. But if you understood the way he approached that work, you could never say that he did the minimum effort necessary to get the check. The job did not leave his studio until he was satisfied he'd done his best work.

I learned a lot of things about comics from Jack but I'd like to think I learned even more about being a person.

written by David Steffen It has been a very eventful year, both for Diabolical Plots and for me specifically. A Diabolical Plots story was a Nebula finalist for the second time: “For Lack of a Bed” by John Wiswell. In the longer list of Hugo Award nominations, Diabolical Plots was on the longer list of … Continue reading 2022 Retrospective and Award Eligibility

Introduction Long have midwives passed on their knowledge of birthing: proper positioning, how to turn a babe, breathing techniques, and so on. Some guides, such as Kailiona’s Extraordinary Births, cover the delivery of a demigod from a human and a human babe from an animal. Little, however, has been recorded of the most uncommon births, … Continue reading DP FICTION #94A: “Midwifery of Gods: A Primer for Mortals” by Amanda Helms

Look, I was not expecting this. Two years and more than a dozen shows into the Disney+ experiment, I think we've all developed a decent enough sense of what to expect from the television incarnations of the two biggest entertainment franchises on the planet. And for the most part, these shows have been fine. Some fun moments. Some actors who are better than their material. Maybe a hint of a