Why do writers write? What advice can they offer us on the art of writing? The quotes of writers from ancient times up to the present can teach us a lot about writing.
Folklore can include popular stories characters pass on to one another, like bedtime stories for children. Maybe parents tell hyperbolic warnings of why someone shouldn’t go into a scary forest on the edge of town. And if a scary forest is mentioned, it’s kind of a Chekhov’s gun—y...
Revising is just as important when writing short stories as it is when writing novels. A polished story greatly increases your chance of publication. While revising your short story, see to it that: The expectations set up on the first page are dealt with subsequently (see ‘Chekhov’s Gun’...
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Many short story authors (such as Anton Chekhov) are good at compressing character detail into shorter passages. Here, for example, is Chekhov describing his character Mihail Petrovitch Zotov, an old man, through dialogue and action tags in his story ‘The Dependents’: ...
new Twitter seemed for months to ship things before having thought them through or even QA’ing them. Random bugs seem to pop up in the app all the time, and changes were pushed out and then reversed within the day. Many a day this past year, Twitter has been the main character of ...
The passage in question comes in chapter 3 in Shklovsky’s classicTheory of Prose, “The Structure of Fiction.” There, Shklovsky relates the plots of a number of Chekhov’s short stories, demonstrating how they are based on “error.” That is to say, Chekhov delighted in presenting...
Different formats of stories have different structures. For example, many plays, films, and novels follow a three-act structure that suggests placing specific plot points, or “story beats,” at specific points in the story. If you’re writing a short story, on the other hand, you have muc...
Scott Sherman:You’ve published more than five hundred books. Why, in 1999, did you choose Edmund Wilson’s edition of Chekhov’s late stories as the first book in the series? Edwin Frank:It was a small nod, a tribute, to Anchor Books, the first trade paperback imprint in the States,...