Anyone who’s ever turned their hand to writing knows this this adage, as well as most who haven’t. “Write what you know.” There are many great writers who have followed this advice. Charles Dickens, for instance. Nearly all of his stories had autobiographical elements, and most of them took place in the nineteenth century London where he lived out his…
There’s a lot of discussion and disagreement among writers about whether a story should have an intentional theme or message, or whether every story even needs to have one. Some say that a story can be more honest and well-crafted without a single, intentional theme, and others say that a unified message makes a story stronger and gives it meaning.…
I just finished writing a short story I started writing almost a year ago. It wasn’t exactly a steady, continuous process, though. It started when I was doing some medical research for another story, and one particular process got my wheels turning, and I started writing. I got about three paragraphs in and there was a problem. I realized that…