Approaching the end of our second week and here’s our second storyweek story, John Brantingham’s The Monkey Trials. Keep on keeping on, as they say. The story is short and spare and very dry, which is how John writes ’em. If you skim it, you’ll miss it. We should mention that it also appears in John’s recently published collection of stories, Let Us All Pray Now To Our Own Strange Gods, and we sure appreciate John and his publisher sharing it with us.
Lars Peterson
Posts by Lars Peterson:
Zero to a Hundred-Fifty: Send Us Your Short Fiction
Think you can write a story in 150 words or fewer? We think you can — and we think you should! All a story really needs is an exposition, a character with a motivation, a complication or two, and a resolution. Surely all that can be crammed into 150 words? Try it and then send us the results. We’ll collect them, collate them, sort them, and eventually publish them, with your byline. A lucky few will even receive a recycled book from my own personal library. You could win a college linguistics textbook, an Alton Brown cookbook, or maybe even [Read More]
So’s the Pie
A couple of years ago I purchased three “How To Write Fiction” books from Amazon.com. They’ve been resting on my shelf, untouched, since they arrived 3-5 days later. I’m digging in, one random exercise at a time. Writing Fiction Step By Step by Josip Novakovich Chapter One: Ideas Exercise #1: If you have experienced an unrequited love, write a scene in which your love is requited. But since there is no story if there is no major problem to be solved, imagine some new obstacle for the relationship. Perhaps the lover has recently accepted a new job in a new [Read More]