Category: Qualities of Good Fiction

Percy’s Six Elements of Story: Create Lower-Order Goals

[This is the fourth in a series of six posts started on December 2, 2020. We’re exploring Benjamin Percy’s foundational elements of story as found…

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To Wrangle and Capture

The poet Billy Collins’ latest book was released in September, Whale Day. As I do with every new Collins collection, I’m reading it slowly, treating…

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Sunday Word Choice

Early Sunday morning, while working through edits to The Confessions of Adam, I came across a passage where one of the central characters uses the…

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Style Is Content Is Style

Tone. Voice. Color. Style. These are four of the many terms that we toss about when attempting to describe the qualities of a piece of…

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The Power of Place

Among the elements of fiction - conflict, character, and place - I could argue for any one of them being the more palpable, the key…

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