Providing advice on writing the short story, chapters are written by Katherine Greer, John Fitzgerald, Dennis Whitcomb, and others. topics are presented in an order that writers are likely to need them, from how to get started to marketing, and each topic is generally covered by several authors. Topics covered include plotting, flashbacks, transisitons, and a story's openin, middle, and end, among others.
Impressions: I picked this up in an effort to get a handle on my one weak point in college creative writing classes: the short story. I've since elarned that short stories don't always have closure, can be as short as 50 words and as long as 10,000, and can be as concise or as verbose as an author wants and still be good, but when I picked this up, my sotries weren't working, not for my professors at least. Unfortunately the professors weren't very good at giving concrete lessons in writing and the books they chose for textbooks were not much better more often than not. This book gave me a good start as a beginning short story writer who had no idea how to trim her description to reasonable means or how to find the closure her professors demanded. I can't say the book gave me everything I needed or that it fixed every wrong in my writing, but it certainly gave me a start!
Now I just have to figure out how to get my nopvel voice back after aiming my writing for the more concise short story that actually has a better chance of publication (i.e. under 4500 words whenever possible).
Update: This book works particular well when read in conjunction with The WD Handbook of Short Story Writing Vol. II.
