Posts by Chris Sunami
If you want to publish a shorter work AND get paid for it, then it almost certainly needs to be a complete stand-alone short story, not the first chapter of a longer work. If you can successfully ...
I have my own three-part rubric I've used for years for critiquing any creative project: Craft: How skillful is it? What command of the technical basics does the creator have? In terms of poetr...
The reason your 4th grade poems didn't have any depth is you weren't putting any in there. As you said, they were just fun bits of doggerel that rhymed. If you want deeper poetry, choose a deeper...
If you are writing third person, you can always just provide a brief description up front if you really feel you need one. Otherwise, you'll need to find reasons for your POV character to notice t...
Yes, this is possible. It's called deeply nested fiction (and happens to be a particular interest of mine!). Many of the great classic works of world literature, such as the Arabian Nights, use t...
I believe this character can be redeemed, because I believe anyone can be redeemed. But I don't see you being able to do justice to that story as a sideplot. This character kills a family member ...
First, thank you for asking this question. All too often, I encounter things in the media where I desperately wish people had asked questions like this beforehand. It can be especially painful in...
I think your instincts are correct. This structure isn't going to work as is. But that doesn't mean you can't build a great novel out of these pieces. I'd suggest one of three paths: 1) Drop th...
I recently decided to make a long delayed return to a genre where I had early publishing success, upper-level picture books. Given that I now have school-aged children, I have a number of stories ...
This is also my problem. The trick to solving it is to understand WHY description is necessary. You're not just checking a box or jumping through a hoop. Description puts the reader inside the p...
What about using synecdoche (a part for the whole)? Doctor X was a polymath, who invented the Y medical procedure and composed the epic opera Z. He was just one of the 300 people, representi...
You're forgetting the power of contrast. What makes a grim or bleak story compelling is the moments of hope, the flashes of humor, the unexpected kindnesses, the oases of calm in the middle of the...
It could be a good thing, if it means that you bring a fresh take and new ideas to a well-traveled genre. It's often NOT a good thing to write in a genre that you don't know very well, just becaus...
Stealing jokes, while not exactly uncommon, is really despised and looked down upon from within the comedian community. It's hard to tell from your description whether you're really just "insp...
Religion is barely mentioned or touched upon in much, arguably most, general fiction. I've even read books like this by authors I know to be highly religious. As a religious person myself, I occa...
What makes this phrase meaningful is that it sums up a particular philosophy --the philosophy of these characters and their subculture --in a form that is both brief and meaningful. If you look at...
This isn't a standard short story, so present it in the most clear and understandable format, so your readers won't have to play guessing games, like so: Mark: I met Jim when we were in third g...
Can you give it a frame story that gives a coherent overarching narrative that these all stories fit into organically? For instance, the POV characters all meet up in a temporary refuge after the ...
While I'm not qualified to advise you on this specific question, I do have some good general advice. Start by doing some research in the form of interviews with someone who resembles your characte...
Using words wrongly or awkwardly sounds much worse than having a restricted vocabulary. Therefore, your best bet is to stick to words you know well and are comfortable with. If that includes a wi...
The Big Bad, by definition, is the primary antagonist of a story built around the defeat of a primary antagonist. If defeating the Big Bad isn't the end of the story, then either that person wasn'...
Audiences always confuse the author with the narrator, and your chosen format makes this particularly difficult. Slam poetry is typically confessional in nature, which means that your audience is ...
Usually, writer's block is a result of your inner editor overpowering your inner writer. This is a very common problem that can especially affect experienced writers, critics, and others with a la...
I think it's fine to have an up-down-up-down structure, but that one of the lows, probably the second one, should be significantly "lower" than the other one. Otherwise it does just feel like a re...
There are better and worse ways to do this. It can be difficult and needlessly confusing to have multiple first-person narrators --difficult to give them authentically different voices, and confus...
