In fiction, abstract bits are (ideally) sort of unsual. Not unsual at the level of books or stories, but at the level of sentences or paragraphs. Many stories have some abstract bits. Usually (I think) these bits make up only a small fraction of the overall text. But sometimes these
Writing a "common" or "classic" scene can be tricky. This is the kind of scene you can expect your readers to have seen or read dozens of times before. But maybe more importantly, it's probably a type of scene that you have read dozens
A problem I have tended to run into when editing stories is intending edits that are bigger than they sound. I'll think about, or sometimes write down, a plan for an edit I want to make, and it will be more work than it sounds like in theory.
Surprising yourself is a surprisingly effective way to write more interesting fiction. (At least it seems to work for me; YMMV, n_tries = 2, et cetera.) The key exercise, from Jacob Krueger, is this: You close your eyes and, if you’re a strongly visual person, start looking. If you’
Quantitatively, how is a short story usually split into scenes? How many scenes are they? How long are they? I'm interested in these questions as a way of sanity-checking my scene lengths. To answer these questions, I looked at an arbitrary (convenience) sample of six short stories I&