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Author: Editor
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Fundamentals of Fiction Writing Online Fiction Writing Course
My new online writing class, Fundamentals of Fiction Writing, is now open for enrollment. This is a self-paced, nine-week course. You may begin the class at any time.
In this course, you will learn how to write a story or novel using the fundamental building blocks of fiction. The course is divided into nine sections. Each craft section focuses on an essential element of narrative craft. Through video and written lectures, you will learn the tools you need to begin writing fiction:
- Characterization
- Point of View
- Setting and Description
- Dialogue
- Plot
- Structure
In the final week, we will focus on revision, a necessary step to getting your work out into the world.
Each section includes writing exercises to help you practice what you’ve learned and deepen your understanding of the material, as well as a discussion forum and suggestions for further reading.
Who should take this class:
If you’ve always wanted to write a story or novel but don’t know where to begin, or if you took a couple of writing classes in the past and want to brush up on your knowledge and reinvigorate your writing practice, this course is for you. Led by a New York Times bestselling author with more than a decade of experience teaching creative writing at the university level, Fundamentals of Fiction Writing provides a great foundation for anyone interested in writing short stories, novels, or novellas.
Although this is not a critique class, your enrollment entitles you to a free one-hour Google hangout, during which I will answer student questions. You can also subscribe to the workshop add-on to get one-on-one critiques from the instructor.
The regular tuition for Fundamentals of Fiction Writing is $79, but readers of this blog can enroll in July for just $49.
Use coupon code serif to get 30% off in July, 2014. (expires June 31, 2014).
Or follow this link to get the discounted rate.
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Literary Contest Winners
Click the links below to see the results from previous Fiction Attic Press contests.
Short Memoir Contest 2 (results pending)
2014 Short Story Contest (results pending)
Flash in the Attic 3 (results pending)
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Announcing the winners of the creative nonfiction contest
We’re delighted to announce the winners of our first creative nonfiction contest.
First place:
Anne-Marie Yerks for “The Electric Discharge Corona.” Yerks will receive $150 and publication.Second place:
Brett Garcia Rose for “The Spoken World.” Rose will receive $50 and publication.Third place:
Sarah Elizabeth Schantz for “A List That Never Ends.” Schantz will receive $25 and publication.Thanks very much to everyone who entered the contest. We were honored to read your work.
Did you miss the deadline? Our second creative nonfiction contest is now in progress. Go here to submit your short memoir or personal essay.
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Childhood Stories: a Memoir of Soviet Russia
by Irina Howell
i.
When I turned eight I joined the “Oktyabronok” league in my elementary school. It is an honor to be a part of this group. The kids wear little red star badges made of metal, a portrait of Lenin carved in the middle. The most intelligent and well-behaved children are among the first to be admitted to the ranks. We are proud. Special extra-curricular activities with music, songs, stories about the little Volodya, as we dearly call Lenin, are organized for us. We are taught to be honest, kind, considerate, along with other well-meant principles. The badges shine brightly against our black aproned uniforms.
My dad is coming back from a trip to Moscow today. I haven’t seen him for weeks. We are very close. In the clean minimalistic kitchen of our apartment my father gives me a present, a new “Oktyabronok” badge, which he brought for me from his trip. It is superior to the one I already own. The red star is made of shiny clear red plastic; the portrait in the middle is an actual photo of the leader. I am simply thrilled with my gift and proudly wear it to school.
A few days later, my mother is going away: she takes university classes in a distant city, so I am left with my dad. It is not a problem, as I love them both dearly. I patiently await my father’s arrival home late in the evenings after work. My homework is usually finished. I manage to make food on my own. Parents are not worried to leave their children by themselves in our happy idealistic state.
My father is particularly excited and happy today. It is Friday, and I don’t have school the next day, nor does he have to go to work. He tells me that he has a great surprise in store for me, and we are going to take a bus trip this late at night. It is winter; New Year’s was here not long ago. Holiday trees are still decorated; the buildings are ornamented with lights. I feel mature next to my father, taking this strange evening expedition. I am also curious. “Why and where precisely are we going?” I keep on asking him.
“There is somebody very special I want you to meet. It is a great secret though, and you shouldn’t tell it to anyone,” he says to me to my delight.
End of excerpt. Read this story in its entirety with your free trial subscription to Fiction Attic.
About the author: Irina Howell was raised in Soviet Russia with a fighter pilot for a father. She later moved to Belarus, where she completed a BA in English. She immigrated to the U.S. in her early twenties and earned a Masters from Columbia. Irina’s life was affected by the collapse of the Soviet Empire, Russia’s economic crisis, and novel ideas of capitalism. In this exquisitely detailed memoir, Howell examines her Soviet childhood—the boundaries crossed and secrets kept within her broken family.
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Eternity Along the Strand
an Account of Bloomsday 2013, Dublin
a short memoir by Becky Boncal
Becky Boncal retraces the steps of Stephen Dedalus on Sandymount Strand. Photo by Brandan Cadran. I went to Dublin as a writer, a tourist, a teacher with twenty-four college students who understood, through a series of lectures I gave before the trip, that this was, for me, a holy pilgrimage. A cooler June than that of 1904 when Nora first walked out with James, when Dignam was buried, and Dedalus was taken in by Bloom. During our four days in Dublin, we wore our legs sore walking between museums, parks, and theatres. Now and then, my students and I dipped into dusty little bookshops hidden at the tops of winding stairs, and I debated whether or not to buy another copy of Ulysses. I had three on my shelves back home—left there when I decided to download it to my iPad and leave room in my suitcase for the books I would bring back from Ireland. But the iPad, I realized, stepping into line in the bookshop, would not compliment my Bloomsday costume.
“The book opens at 8:00 a.m. tomorrow,” I told the students before I let them loose in Temple Bar for the night. The walk to the DART station would take fifteen minutes and the ride out to the museum at Martello Tower about twenty, so if they wanted to join me, they had to be in the lobby by of the hostel by 7:30 a.m. (I’d promised extra credit to anyone in my class willing to wear a t-shirt printed with the words Worst Man in Dublin.) Bloomsday would be our last day in Dublin before we took a bus to Galway—the students’ only free day in the city—and I was under no illusions about their commitment to my plans. I was actually looking forward to walking alone to the station in my velvet jacket, ruffled blouse, gauzy skirt, and straw cloche hat, gazing out the windows of the train with the book open on my lap, but I was surprised the next morning to find seven teenagers dressed in jeans and parkas waiting for me in the lobby, cameras strapped around their necks.
Though I’d assigned only Dubliners and Portrait as required reading in my 20th Century Irish Literature course, I’d taught them the novel’s inside jokes—What is home without Pumbtree’s Potted Meat? Incomplete!— showed them old maps of Dublin, (on Nabokov’s advice) marking out the characters’ paths. The word “beach” had enticed a few of them who were not in my literature class to join us, though, as we paraded through the empty city streets, my legs cold in the wet morning air, the sky grey and weepy, I worried I had overbuilt their expectations.
My worry turned to certainty when we found the gate at the DART station padlocked. No Sandymount tram. It was a Sunday, and in all my months of planning, it had not occurred to me that public transportation might be shut down (not on his day!). Even the bus station was closed. The students huddled on a corner amid the closed up shops, rubbing their arms in the chilly air, looking just sorry enough for me not to be irritated at having woken up so early for nothing, when I spotted a taxi. I flagged the driver and asked if he might call a second cab to shuttle out group out to Sandymount.
The strand glimmered silver outside one window as a crammed row of colorful cottages dipped up and down in the other. At a roundabout, in a quaint, unassuming beach neighborhood, the tower appeared from behind the trees—Kinch ahoy!
“Looks closed,” the Bahamian cab driver said as we pulled up.
It was smaller than I’d imagined and partially surrounded, I realized with an ache in my heart, by a moat of orange cones and a chain link fence where a sign was posted.
No Hat
No Boots
No Job.Posted nearby was a picture of the planned renovation. A description of the project said it was to be completed by next year. I stood starting at the heavy, locked door of the tower.
At the foot of the ladder Buck Mulligan asked:
—Did you bring the key?
My students were quick to recover from their disappointment, rushing from the cabs to the beach. I asked the drivers to return for us in an hour. The only other people around were joggers and dog walkers in sweats, some of whom waved at me or nodded, or looked the other way. My students took pictures of each other looking contemplative or dancing around in the cold, shallow water as I walked along the shore, Mary Janes under my arm, staring to the distance beyond the factories, imagining the view as it had been in 1904.
End of excerpt. Read this essay in its entirety here.
Becky Boncal with John Joyce, grand-nephew of James Joyce, in Davy Byrnes Pub in Dublin, photo by Nicole Joyce Becky Boncal is a graduate of the MFA program at George Mason University. She teaches writing at John Tyler Community College and at The Visual Arts Center in Richmond, VA. Her fiction, poetry, and essays have appeared in The Copperfield Review, The Menda City Review, Everyday Genius, Hoot, and The Buried Letter Press. She was chosen as a finalist for the 2013 Fulton Prize in Fiction for her story published in The Adirondack Review.
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The Barbershop Quartet
a short memoir by Eileen Shields
The barbershop quartet had been my idea.
My mother-in-law lives in an elder care home located on a quiet, tree-lined street in a Northern California suburb. Her constant complaint is that she is bored. I feel sorry for her because she is a widow with three sons and no daughters. Whether through love or guilt or decades of female submission, daughters generally make more reliable caretakers than sons. For example, a daughter probably would not, as Jean’s sons do, point out that the reason she is bored is that she is disagreeable and grouchy and therefore has no friends. Granted, the boy’s opinion is hard to debate—even her own grandchildren refer to Grandma Jean as Grandma Mean.
The boys’ solution for Jean’s boredom was to hire a paid companion, a middle-aged redheaded woman who takes her on outings and then dutifully sends us photos of these excursions—to the museum, to the aquarium, and once, shockingly, on a helicopter ride with a helmeted and goggled Jean posing at the controls. When my husband asks Jean about her adventures, she does not remember them. The fact is, these days Jean does not remember much, but she does remember she has three sons, and wants nothing more than to spend time with them, because she is bored.
I know how lucky I am to have a daughter. I love my son and am confident he loves me back, but I can’t conceive of him volunteering to trim my toenails in the autumn of my life. He only moved out of the house about a year ago, and already great swathes of his life are a mystery to me. Unlike my daughter, he does not call frequently just to chat about the minutia of his day.
I try not to let more than a week pass without calling my own mother, but I have to twist my spouse’s arm to get him to phone Jean. Like Jean, my mom is a widow, but she is still independent, so she still has things to talk about. Like the hospital she volunteers at in the neighborhood where I grew up, where there are always people dying, many of whom I might possibly have met, briefly, thirty years ago. The deaths of people you barely know is a topic that never exhausts itself. But my husband’s mother responds to every call like a crabby twelve-year-old. I’m bored. The people here are boring.
So a few months back, when my husband had to go to Northern California for business and asked me to accompany him, I said, “Sure, and maybe while we’re there we can take your mom out.”
He said, “Sure, we can take her to brunch.”
I said, “No brunch.” Reminding him that brunch implies champagne or Ramos fizzes or Bloody Marys. Jean is forbidden alcohol—doctor’s orders. She has some liver damage from decades of ‘high living.’ Watching everyone around you gaily imbibing while you abstain could make even the most even-tempered person unpleasant. Jean has been known to threaten the waitstaff…
Sometimes I wish I’d met Jean in her heyday. I’ve seen photos and heard stories (over and over the stories) and it sounds as if, in her youth, Jean was something like the Dorothy Parker of the midwestern burbs, funny and witty and full of vinegar. Dorothy didn’t age gracefully either. It was her friend Edmund Wilson who wrote of Parker in her dotage, “She lives with a small and nervous bad-smelling poodle bitch, drinks a lot, and does not care to go out.”
Read this story in its entirety with your subscription to Fiction Attic.
About the author: Eileen Shields is an MFA candidate in fiction at the University of California Riverside Palm Desert. In 2013 she was runner-up for the Bechtel prize awarded by Susan Orlean for an essay to be published later this year in Teachers & Writers. Her work has previously appeared in The Los Angeles Review.
Submit your creative nonfiction, short stories, flash fiction, and novellas to Fiction Attic.
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Indian Classroom
a short story by Darlene P. Campos
students in the choir at Flandreau Indian school. Image courtesy of the Library of Congress I avoided going to Flandreau Indian Boarding School for a long time because I was great at faking sickness and death. If Ate ever said, “Son, you throw up right here,” I could. And if Ina ever said, “Son, you play dead right now,” I could. My older brother Gray Mountain was sent to Flandreau when I was 10 and never came back. He died of tuberculosis and we didn’t know until two months after his burial. He was 17.
The bus stopped in front of our house and I watched through the window, seeing the school officials shout they were here for students. Isabella Little Elk lived next door to me with her grandparents. Her ina worked in Rapid City and her ate ran away, so she was almost an orphan. I saw Isabella step out of her house with her hands up, saying she was ready. If the beautiful Isabella was going, I was too.
“James Eagle, you’re supposed to have typhoid,” Ina said when she saw me get out of bed. She tried to put me back down, but I shoved her out of the way and ran outside. I told the school officials I was ready too.
“Son, you’re going to that place over my dead body,” Ate said when I went in the house to grab some clothes. I told him I’d kill him if he wanted me to and he slapped me.
“I’m going,” I said. I swung my bag on my back, said goodbye to my parents, and went out to the bus.
When I got to Flandreau, my hair was cut short, my clothes were taken away, and I was told to speak nothing but English. My family only knew Lakota, but they knew a few English words like ‘Mother,’ ‘Father,’ ‘and of course, ‘Beer.’ My English wasn’t perfect, but it was better than theirs.
“James Eagle Red Wolf?” the administrator said. “That’s no name for a boy.”
“Yes, I am a boy,” I said, not really knowing what to say. He tossed a uniform at me and showed me my room. There was one other boy around my age in there – Byron Thunderclap from Rosebud Reservation. I greeted him in Lakota and then the administrator grabbed me by my hair and threw me against the wall.
“English only,” he reminded me and left.
“If they want to swing us, it’d be easier on them if we had our long hair,” I said to Byron and he laughed. There was one bed in the room, but he said it was his, so I had the floor. Back home, I had only been sleeping in a bed for a year, so the floor was nothing new.
At six in the morning, the hall monitors woke us up for breakfast – a piece of bread with a cup of water, or so they claimed it was. One of the monitors grabbed my arm and took me to an office where other students were putting a newspaper together.
“You work here now,” he said and left. I looked ahead and there she was, Isabella Little Elk, at a typewriter. She was literate because her ina went to Haskell Indian Boarding School and taught her. Isabella loved writing more than anything else. I always wanted to get a love note from her, even if I wouldn’t be able to read it that well.
“Good morning, beautiful,” I said.
“Go away,” she told me, as usual, and got up from her chair. She’d always stomp her feet whenever I was around her, but to me, her footsteps sounded like they were calling my name. James, Eagle, James, Eagle, James, Eagle.
end of excerpt
Read this story in its entirety with your free trial subscription to Fiction Attic Press.
About the author: Darlene P. Campos is an MFA candidate at the University of Texas at El Paso’s Creative Writing Program. In 2013, her story “The Fork” won the Glass Mountain magazine contest for prose and her story “The Bullet” was awarded the Sylvan N. Karchmer Fiction Prize. She is from Guayaquil, Ecuador but has lived in Houston all her life. Her website is www.darlenepcampos.com.
About the image: Flandreau Indian School choir, photographed between 1909 and 1932, courtesy of the Library of Congress. Photographer unknown. View details here.
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The Crush
flash fiction by A.W. Marshall
“Feel it?”
He had his fingers arranged in a circle, pressing against my chest like a little cage.
“Not yet.”
But I felt something. Kevin was my neighbor, and he said he had Telekinetic powers and wanted to touch my heart. Said he touched a girl’s heart from school last week, and she missed three days of class.
“I have to focus,” he said.
He was three years older and just before the bus dropped us off he plopped down beside me. I imagined he asked to touch my heart because he liked me too. I imagined his fingers reaching in, my heart cradled in his hand, my lips parting just as he gave me my first kiss. We decided on Saturday, while my parents were at Safeway.
“Calm down,” he said.
He continued to bear down on my chest, his eyes flared at his hand. He was pressing hard, and I imagined lifting my shirt later that night to see five small purple planets. I would put my fingers on each one and he’d feel it next door.
“Fuck,” he said, and I craned my neck around nervously. Even with my parents miles away, squeezing plums and fondling eggs for cracks, I worried. But the house was still just the house, the words disappeared.
“I can’t do it,” he said. “Kali was easier. Your heart is beating so fast I can’t center my attention on it. Nevermind, okay?”
“No wait,” I said, “I’m just nervous is all.”
I ran to the bathroom, splashed cold water on my face. I told myself, you have to calm your heart or he will not feel it and then what good would your heart beating so much mean anyway?
When I came back, he was sitting on the couch, wiggling his finger through a hole in the knees of his jeans. His blonde bangs hung down, and I could see the small muscles of his back through his Dwarves t-shirt.
“I’m ready.”
“Close your eyes this time,” he ordered.
His five fingers on my chest. My heart started to speed up, and it felt like my lungs suddenly needed more air. Eyes closed, I tried to picture my grandmother in her rocking chair, the most boring thing I could think of.
“Better,” he said.
And then a weird spreading pinch followed by five worms against my chest, wiggling in. His wrist moved to the side to be free of my sternum. One of my ribs ached upwards. Muscles across my chest bruised open. And I gasped as my lungs pushed back and his fingers squirmed around my heart, and now I couldn’t stop it from fluttering. He slowly cupped his hand around, holding it. The muscles of my heart beat against the muscles his hand, and I parted my lips, hoping.
Then he squeezed.
“Did you tell your parents I was coming over?”
I didn’t.
“Did you?”
“No,” I said. My heart flitted, but it could not escape. His fingers held it firm. I opened my eyes and he was staring into them, an indiscernible look across his face.
“Imagine if I can do this now, what I can do later.”
I could not imagine anything. Then this boy pulled me toward him, mashing my heart against my rib cage, my whole body following. I thought about the girl missing three days of school. My eyelashes quivered under his breath. He smelled like sweat and Froot Loops. His lips pressed against mine, harder than I ever imagined.
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Fiction Attic Press is always looking for thought-provoking flash fiction.
