Category Archives: Your First Page

Among a fiction writer’s greatest challenges: how to evoke chaos while still making sense. The phrase “making sense” here is key, since ultimately the question boils down to whose sense is being rendered. If the chaos confronting the reader is … Continue reading →

Deep into her alcohol-ridden sleep, a woman is summoned by the ringing of her cell phone. Phone calls deep into the night rarely portend good things, and the given scene offers no exception. Here, via her sister, the phone delivers … Continue reading →

How do you generate drama or elicit any kind of interest—let alone excitement —from a scene the main action of which consists of a group of people sitting in chairs? That’s the challenge that the author of this memoir presents … Continue reading →

In these personality-driven times we tend to associate the word “conceit” with its adjectival cousin conceited, meaning (according to Merriam-Webster) “to have or show an excessively high opinion of oneself.” In fact the first meaning of conceited is “ingenuously contrived.” … Continue reading →