“I like your look,” you say, cradling your laptop, maneuvering past the jutting armrests to sit next to me. “Thanks.” I put a limp bundle of shoestring fries into my mouth. The armrests, you explain, are to keep people…
By Joseph Young • Writers are often told, whether by their instructors or about the internet in general, that in their finished stories, there should be no wasted words, no extraneous sentences, no details or lines of dialogue, that…
In this new interview, Editor in Chief Courtney Harler corresponds with Laura Spence-Ash, author of one of this year’s most-anticipated debut novels, Beyond That, the Sea. Spence-Ash is also a former editor and cofounder of CRAFT, and we’re thrilled…
By Sarah Twombly • I am at work on a novel, and have been for more than a decade. It is autobiographical fiction, which is to say it’s about me, but also, it isn’t. The same way Einstein might…
Sibling Circus My brother was addicted to dog biscuits and this might have been how our act started. When our mother arrived, he’d pop one in his mouth, throw one to the real dog and then toss one to…
I think it matters that her husband was older. He owned his own house when they met. He also owned a coffee shop on Lattimore. And Mrs. Haverhill, then—to distinguish herself from the other long-necked, loose-sweatered girls in the…
After three gin martinis, my mother-in-law spits out her teeth. “You’re a cannonball with a credit card,” she hisses. Her dentures glisten like pearls in her palm. Never, she likes to remind me, did she foresee her sweet son…
CRAFT is delighted to share a triptych of humorous microfictions by Grant Faulkner, previously included in Best Microfiction 2022. The following pieces take on the subject matter of craft and critical essays from the perspectives of three fictional individuals,…
My father, after slipping backward on a stretch of rooted Alaskan ice and hitting his head, miraculously walks the three miles to get back home—heavily concussed and alone—with our two unleashed labs directing him in the winter dark. He…
People will say Ry must have planned the robbery for weeks. They’ll want purpose and emotion and strategy. They’ll say she had a gun tucked into a pocket. They’ll say she must have been desperate: four kids at home…
I’ve struggled with writing this author’s note because it’s easy to feel like a big fraud as a writer, as in who am I to talk about craft? I drafted several versions and deleted them. Those versions included ideas like: stories have to make you feel something (I mean, of course); write the things that stick with you, that won’t go away (also not that revelatory); don’t write the static stories that are pretty but lack tension (also not particularly earth-shattering craft advice).
I think the biggest thing that I have to say about writing as it relates to this story is this: shut down your impulsivity as much as you can when you are drafting something. Quiet whatever Submittable forces are conspiring to make you think you have to SUBMIT RIGHT NOW and let a story sit. Draft and then think about it a few weeks from now. Read the draft on your phone while you’re walking, or print it and read it on paper if that helps you. Wait for the next submission round if needed.
Anyway, because I’m a slow learner, I wrote a draft of this story and quickly, impulsively submitted it immediately after three things happened:
I knew right away these three events were somehow going to go together in a story, so, in an excited fever, I wrote a draft and submitted it immediately to a few magazines, and it was, over the next weeks, rejected. I went through the usual, “I’m a terrible writer, I suck, this will never be anything” reactionary response. Then I reread the draft and saw all the holes and all the places that needed revamping and tightening and connection and emotion and different words or fewer words and more tension.
I rewrote it about ten times, and still, in editing, CRAFT’s amazing editors found about ten times when I said “things” instead of something more precise and about ten “blah blah blah, which” sentence constructions hanging around in annoying ways. My point, I guess, is something we all know but don’t always do: think about process as much or more than product. Slow down. Wait. Enjoy writing. Enjoy revising. Take your time. That’s all.
AMY STUBER is a fiction writer living in Lawrence, Kansas. She edits flash fiction for Split Lip Magazine. Her work has been published in or is forthcoming in Flash Fiction America, American Short Fiction, Copper Nickel, The Cincinnati Review, West Branch, New England Review, and elsewhere. She was the recipient of the Northwest Review Fiction Prize (2021) and a runner up for The Missouri Review Editors’ Prize (2022). Find her on Twitter @amy_stuber_.
