Category Archives: Your First Page

Ask four people the difference between a memoir and an autobiography and odds are you’ll get four different answers. For Gore Vidal a memoir is “how one remembers one’s own life, while an autobiography is history.” Will Rogers put it … Continue reading →

In his famous introduction to “The Nigger of the Narcissus,” Joseph Conrad describes his task as a fiction writer thus: “. . . to make you hear, to make you feel—it is, above all, to make you see.” He might … Continue reading →

From up in a dogwood tree a young girl watches her mother weed a garden, while down on the ground below her less tree-worthy friend Peggy watches. This opening scene from a story evoking a young girl’s world, with its … Continue reading →

If plot is the backbone of fiction, that which gives fiction its structure and movement, then scenes are plot’s vertebrae. A concatenation of causally related scenes add up to a plot. But beyond their technical function, scenes are what we’re … Continue reading →