Who Left the Dishes in the Sink?

I have no idea who left the dishes in the sink in yesterday’s episode of A Story of Winter. This doesn’t mean I’m stuck. It just means that I try not to get ahead of myself.

That’s a lie. The truth is I don’t know what I’m doing.

Yesterday’s post was the first part (or first act, reference my white board) of my three-part short story. Earlier in the decade otherwise known as the pandemic, I took a six-week “Write Fiction Like a Pro” class through the Milwaukee Public Library. The class was packed with great information and insight and it was way more challenging than I’d planned. You see, I don’t write fiction. Some of my essays occasionally nose around fiction because, you know, creative nonfiction is like that, so if you don’t like the color of your hair or what your mother said that made you so mad, you just adjust.

Before I took the class, I had no idea that there was a science to writing a short story, a structural framework that generally follows the dynamics of a three-act play (see white board). There are many variations on this structure, I’m sure, but remember here that I am a knitter just learning to cast on and haven’t yet learned the distinction between knit and purl. Before I learned about this structure, I thought great short stories just came to writers like magic and that the fact that a great short story had never come to me just meant I wasn’t a fiction writer.

A few weeks ago, I published The 12th Street Bridge. That was my first story written using the structure taught in my little class. A Story of Winter will be my second. What I can tell you about this effort is that it is amazing fun to create characters and think about what they would do. It’s really challenging to create a plot that keeps people reading. And it’s a little dicey to kill off the character who seems a lot like your living husband while changing his name from Howard to Jerry.

Meanwhile, the living husband wants to know why our beloved dogs, Swirl and Punchy, aren’t in the story. Oddly, he seems more bothered by that omission than the fact I killed him off. It’s just a story, I tell him. Fiction.