He has work forthcoming in Reunion: The Dallas Review. For me, I seem to have the most success creating lively characters when I allow the writing to shape them a little spontaneously: for me, what makes a piece of fiction or a fictional character seem alive is that small element of surprise. Steve Adams lives in Austin, Texas, where he is a writing coach. His plays and musicals have been produced in New York City. By the circling, as you noted, I think I was instinctively trying to circumvent being locked into strict chronology.
I wanted the reader to pull up at that moment, to look back and instead of seeing those moments as separate and linear, to see them as a whole. I also wanted the reader to stop and consider what it might mean that as a child I carried a lethal firearm beside my father and knew full well it was lethal, as well as that if I did something really stupid I could accidentally take his life.
Tristan Ahtone is an award-winning journalist and member of the Kiowa Tribe of Oklahoma. Born in Arizona, raised across the United States, and educated at the Institute of American Indian Arts and the Columbia School of Journalism, he has worked as a door-to-door salesman, delivery driver, telemarketer, and busboy.
One of the nice thing about long-form journalism is that you have the opportunity to see and write about details like that and offer them to the audience. So the direct thought of a character will pop up at a given moment in the story, along with asides, ideas, song lyrics, biblical verses and other texts, questions and doubts, alternatives, flashbacks and other kinds of voices and materials that may or may not derive from this character.
A million embedded stories. Sam Allingham grew up in rural New Jersey and Philadelphia. After graduating from Oberlin College, he worked for many years as a music teacher for adults and small ish children, before receiving an MFA from Temple University in He currently lives in West Philadelphia and teaches at Temple University.
