The classroom standard for readers and aspiring writers of fiction, The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction offers the most comprehensive, engaging selection of classic and contemporary stories in the field.
Selected from a survey of more than five hundred English professors, short storywriters, and novelists, this revised and updated second edition features fifty remarkable stories written by a wide spectrum of stylistically and culturally diverse authors...
This book is an exceptionally wide-ranging alphabetically arranged collection of stories spanning all genres of short fiction. It includes myth, fairy tale, humor, western, detective, Magic Realism, gothic, fantasy, folktale, and film...
5 1/2 X 8 1/2 In, 280 Pp, Appendix < Here Are 70 of The Very Best Short-Short < Stories of Recent Years Including < Contributions From Such Contemporary < Writers As Raymond Carver, Leonard < Michaels and John Updike; A Few Modern < Masters As Hemingway and Cheever; and An < Assortment of Talented New Young < Writers...
A definitive collection of the very best short stories by contemporary American masters Edited by Joyce Carol Oates, "the living master of the short story" (Buffalo News), and Christopher R. Beha, this volume provides an important overview of the contemporary short story and a selection of the very best that American short fiction has to offer.
All new, with more great writers than ever—these tales told quickly offer pleasures long past their telling. Responding to America’s love affair with the short-short, editors Robert Shapard and James Thomas searched thousands of books and magazines to select these sixty stories—each under 2,000 words, each with its own element of surprise, whether traditional, experimental, humorous, moving, or magical...
How short can a story be and still truly be a story? This volume of 75 very short fictions, none more than 750 words in length, demonstrates that less can be more. Here are short pieces by masters such as Raymond Carver, Margaret Atwood, and Tim O'Brien, as well as fiction by newer talents.
The stories in A World of Fiction, Second Edition, by Sybil Marcus, embrace a variety of themes, literary and linguistic styles, and time frames. Advanced students will sharpen their reading, speaking, vocabulary, and writing skills as they discover the pleasure and reward of reading fiction...
Distilled from decades of teaching and practice, this book offers clear and direct advice on structure, pacing, dialogue, getting ideas, working with the unconscious, and more. Newly revised and expanded for this Third Edition, Creating Short Fiction is a popular and widely trusted guide to writing short stories of originality, durability, and quality...
Selected from a survey of more than 200 English professors, award-winning short-story writers, novelists, and fiction workshop directors, a remarkable collection of North American literature written since 1970...
The best key for locking story elements together is the right pacing. If a writer wants to offer his readers a perfectly constructed story after he has set up the conflict, theme, characters, and plot, he needs to concentrate on pacing. Pacing has to do with a writer's manipulation of the time in the story as he tells the story.
When something is happening slowly, lyrical prose, long sentences, and more narration can be used. When something happens fast, then short, choppy sentences and excited dialogue are in order. Consequently, when these fast and slow sections alternate in a plot, rhythm is created.
Rhythm is one of the elements that cause the readers to get emotionally involved with the story. Rhythm not only happens with the entire story, but also within its parts; chapters, scenes, paragraphs, and even sentences. In most dramatic and exciting stories, the faster paced scenes concentrate at or toward the end. This does not mean that a writer should heap all the exciting parts together. Even at the end of a story, these action-filled scenes should have slow pacing sections in between them.
If too many slow sections follow one another in a plot, the writing gains a monotone effect and lulls the readers to sleep just like the lullabies do with sounds, but slowing the pacing has its uses, too. When a point has to be emphasized, slowing the pacing helps.
As such, narratives slow the pacing. If the main character has a limp and the writer wants to slow the pace, he can show it by describing his character's shoes, legs, how he actually steps on cobblestones, how his body twists as he steps etc. If the same character is running away from a man with a gun and the writer wants this section to be fast paced, then he should not go into detail about his limp, but indicate it in a short sentence with an action verb that pinpoints the idea. This could be something like: He rushed around the corner, then hobbled into an alley...
On the other hand, when an entire section of a plot is too fast-paced, the readers will feel dizzy as if they are in a speeding car. After an exciting, active scene with dramatic impact, the reader should be allowed to rest a bit. Here the writer needs to slow the pace down. If all your scenes have the intensity of a fast pace, the reader will eventually tire out, and his mind will feel numb to the power of the writer's words.
If a story has a time frame in it where nothing involving the central conflict happens and the characters are living ordinary lives, the writer should not linger in that time frame. In other words, a short transition needs to be written to move through that time frame quickly by saying something like: Ten days passed without any incident or any call from the man with the gun.
Proper pacing keeps the reader's attention on the story by keeping the tension up while still giving the reader a breather in between fast actions. Whether the work is a short story or a novel, a balance between slow and active scenes is needed the success of the work. When writing a novel, pacing the events in such a way that an important incident takes place in each chapter is the way to go.
Pacing usually comes to a writer after a lot of experience. Once in a while, pacing happens to some writers intuitively. Others have to take extra care during the process of writing and especially when revisions are made. This way, in time, proper pacing will start happening naturally. As in everything, practice makes perfect.
