By Aaron Gansky @ADGansky Maybe it’s a psychological thing, some innate fear that our readers won’t pick up on our subtlety. So we over write. I’m a huge offender of this, but I’ve seen some published works that are pretty bad, too. Have you seen the “almost” sentence? Jake was…

By Aaron Gansky @ADGansky Often, as writers, we tend to take the path of least resistance. We’ll throw in a tired, worn-out cliché because it’s easier than actually thinking of an original description. The result is a lot of the same stories with the same characters and the same “plot-twists.”…

By Aaron Gansky @ADGansky You hear writers often mention the “fictive dream.” John Gardner called it a “vivid and continuous dream.” It’s a term used to describe a simple principle: no one wants to read a book. There, I said it. Man, it feels good to get that off my…

By Aaron Gansky @ADGansky If you’ve followed my blog much, you’ll know how much importance I put on the first line. Just as important, and just as tricky, is the final line. If I could make one observation from my years as a literary editor, I’d say that the best…

By Aaron Gansky @ADGansky Charles Baxter, in Burning Down the House, Essays on Fiction, devotes an entire chapter to a principle he calls “Stillness.” To paraphrase a rather lengthy and well documented argument, he proposes that stillness, a moment in fiction where action subsides and characters/narrators focus on the minutiae of their…

By Aaron Gansky @ADGansky The last class I taught at the Blue Ridge Mountains Christian Writer's Conference was how to write explosive short fiction. It’s a topic near and dear to my heart. As an editor of The Citron Review, an online literary journal specializing in flash and micro fiction,…