by Susanna Solomon | Apr 15, 2025 | blog post
I am a Genius. You say, how? Because when I write, when I sit down at a café with paper and pencil or peck away at my computer, I make things up. Only then am I giving myself permission to create characters, whole worlds, or anything that comes to mind. A beach in 1909. A monster wave coming into shore where a family is having a picnic. My grandmother at nineteen pining for a boyfriend. My father at six, disappointing his mother, an argument between an old guy and a kid on an e-bike, two women at the beach, a student preparing for an exam and a mom worried about her six-year-old who was bullied at school and hasn’t come home. A college student during exam week worried she hasn’t done enough. A slender man taking a toke on a cigarette, shouting into his iPhone.
Only by making myself the king of my world can I invent it. I can make up whatever I want, I can put people in peril, or save a kid from drowning. Real life doesn’t allow this freedom, at least not often, anyway. But fiction and writing does. This is what makes writers write.
However, this is only the first part.
Being a genius means you have put something down on paper.
Something on paper may need editing.
Some editing is good for you.
Some editing makes you doubt you are a genius.
More editing makes your work sing.
More editing means you have to “kill your darlings.” Some editing makes you doubt what you have written. Some editing may make you want to hide. Some editing makes you want to do the dishes, the cat box, clean the garage, puke, do anything but write. But do not despair. Keep going. After over 250 short stories, I always feel like a hack. Every day.
Some editing may show you have a good sentence or two.
Polishing means you have to look at your work with a steady eye.
Reading your work aloud in public means you have to look other people in the eye.
Reading your work aloud in public can be scary.
Reading your work aloud in public can make people laugh.
And it can make them cry.
I first read my work aloud at an open mic in a Fairfax bar called Pints ‘N Prose. In 2011. Like all good open mics, this one was timed, five minutes (which I learned later was 750 words). I read from my novel. Right away, I could tell I wasn’t making any sense, the audience did not know the characters, didn’t understand the setting, or the conflict. They fidgeted, I was lost and knew it. At five minutes and ten seconds, they blew the horn, which was at least three feet long and loud, kept behind the bar. A person hauled me off the stage and I slinked away.
I found a dark place beyond the stage to sequester my beet red face from public view. I wanted to crawl under my table and die.
What was the problem? Many. My reading had to be short, snappy, have a denouement, an action and a resolution. What my writing teacher calls Slam, Bam, Kablooie.
I scrapped reading the novel, and concentrated on finding that five minute sweet spot. I would beat them at their own game.
I started reading the sheriff’s calls section (actual police logs) from the newspaper, The Point Reyes Light, our local West Marin newspaper. Most every day there were lots of calls, but this particular day, a Wednesday, there was this sheriff’s call.
“There were no calls. Good job West Marin.”
So I decided to write about what didn’t happen. I took citings from other days and made them not happen. Boys at a bus stop, with a bag full of rotten apples, did not throw them at the bus, because one of the boy’s mother called them in for supper. A paragraph.
An unhappy man woke up feeling sick and desperate on the floor by a porcelain throne and did not reach for his bottle of Jim Beam.
No one was camping at Brighton Beach in Bolinas, which was the first time that happened in over sixty days.
Speeding drivers slowed down and did not run into a ditch.
A cow, wanting green grass, did not break the fence, but instead turned around to join the herd.
A desperate Penny Henny, behind in her rent, pleaded with her landlord for more time. The landlord got a text from his mother that she was expecting lunch.
It was a series of short paragraphs, and the story ended with an elderly lady looking for trouble and grabbing her gun.
I knew this story would fit the time. When I read it aloud the whole place erupted in laughter and applause. I wrote another based on another sheriff’s calls, and the audience was close to tears. I wrote and read more and more, hitting that sweet spot. I had found a new voice in my writing. A publisher asked me what I was writing and I sent in one of my stories and received a publishing contract. So you never know.
Reading your work aloud will improve your writing in countless ways. E.g., it can reveal the seemingly poetic sentence as a confounding tongue-twister, the overuse of certain “crutch” words and clunky expressions, an emotionally-starved or unimaginative dialogue, holes in character traits and development, and the lack of storytelling rhythm and pacing. And if you have a live reading audience, the benefits are immediate. Your writing improves. You can hear your audience fidget, or whisper, or you can see them sit up and smile or sigh or burst into tears.
So when you prepare for a reading, look over each word. Does this move the action? Is this the best way to say this? What do my characters want? Where’s the kablooie? And remember, you are a genius.
Susanna Solomon is the author of Point Reyes Sheriff’s Calls, and More Point Reyes Sheriff’s Calls, short stories she first read at an open mic.
She is also the author of Paris Beckons, a short story collection based in Paris. At the moment she is at work on another collection tentatively called A Garden of Misfits. From an alien to a time-traveling cowboy to a not-very bright guy wanting to be a “made” man, Susanna tells stories about people who are different.
by John Byrne Barry | Mar 26, 2025 | blog post
How Memorable Setting Can Advance Plot, Reveal Character, Echo Theme, and More
How do you know how much setting to include? What do you mean by “setting that works?”
Two elderly couples are taking a walk, the women in front, the men closely behind. One man says to the other, “We went out to dinner last night and had the best grilled fish ever —”
The second man says, “What restaurant?”
The first man slaps his forehead. “Damn. Senior moment. Help me out here. You know that flower, the fragrant one with the thorns?”
The second man says, “Rose?”
“Yeah, Rose,” the first man says, then shouts to his wife, “Rose, what was the name of that restaurant we went to last night?”
Notice anything about that story? No setting. None needed. Readers can picture the setting in their own way.
This is not to say that setting isn’t important as much as that if all it does is its primary role — immersing readers in the scene, so they can visualize it, feel it, smell it — it’s a missed opportunity. Even the most elegantly written setting can slow your story down.
The best and most memorable setting is lean and strong because it’s working multiple jobs. It advances the story, or sets the mood, or echoes the theme.
One of the most powerful jobs setting can do is propel the story. For example, in John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, the setting is central to the plot. The Joads, a family of farmers, are so poor they have to leave drought-stricken Dust Bowl Oklahoma (the first setting). They drive to sunny California, seeking new opportunities only to find low wages, an oversupply of labor, and exploited workers (the second setting).
The most common side gig for setting is defining or revealing character. In many novels, the camera sits on the character’s shoulder. The reader sees what the character sees. If I’m walking in my neighborhood in Tam Valley, I might notice how flowers are bursting out all over. Someone else might notice the Teslas and Mercedes. What the character sees shows the reader who he or she is. I notice the expensive cars too, not because I care about cars, but because they remind me I live in a community where many people have more money than I do. That’s revealing my character too.
What books, and which authors, would you say provide good examples of setting done well?
Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day comes to mind because the setting there is so much about describing a culture and tradition more than a place. The story follows Stevens, a middle-aged butler in 1950s England, who takes a motoring trip to the West Country, where a former housekeeper lives. He’s hoping he might rekindle a connection with her.
But most of the novel is his reminiscence of the time between the wars, when he presides over a large staff at Darlington Hall, a Downton Abbey–like estate and strives to be the best butler ever. He’s so obsessed with loyalty to a stuffy and antiquated tradition that he doesn’t allow himself an emotional life. He leaves the bedside of his dying father to take care of “critical matters” in the household, like polishing the silver.
The setting reveals Stevens’ character — not Darlington Hall as much as the devotion to “dignity” that sadly limits his life.
Then there’s Prodigal Summer, by Barbara Kingsolver, set in the fecund forests of Appalachia. Deanna, a wildlife biologist, is studying a den of coyotes that recently migrated into the region, and she falls in love with a young man who’s come to the mountains to hunt the coyotes.
The setting here is the opposite of The Remains of the Day — it’s humid and lush and bursting with procreating plants and animals. I read it long ago, and still remember the rowdy, sexy natural environment, the birds and bees writ large, and how that seeps into Deanna’s complicated relationship with the hunter.
How important is setting to a story? What about books where setting is like a character? Is that possible?
Consider The Perfect Storm, a true story about the crew of a fishing boat caught in a vicious Atlantic storm, which escalates the way a character might, and is described with adjectives you might use with people — angry, fierce, relentless. Severe weather, because it changes, can be like a character. In The Perfect Storm, the setting is the story.
There are plenty of books where cities are like characters. Think 1980s New York City in Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities, with its go-go greed-is-good bond traders and its polarizing racial tensions. Or Dickens’ London, with its prisons, workhouses, and “misanthropic ice.”
How else can setting strengthen your story?
Setting can also convey mood and tone. If you were to describe a committee of vultures perching on a tree branch, studying the ground, that certainly communicates an ominous feeling. Or it’s a metaphor for what’s happening in the story.
In The English Patient, Michael Ondaatje’s desert setting and the hot winds evoke mood, character, tension, theme, story.
“The desert could not be claimed or owned—it was a piece of cloth carried by winds, never held down by stones, and given a hundred shifting names long before Canterbury existed, long before battles and treaties quilted Europe and the East.”
One of my favorite uses of setting is in All the King’s Men, where Robert Penn Warren echoes his main theme — how the past impacts the present — on the very first page. He describes driving fast down a heat-dazzled white slab of Louisiana highway that hypnotizes drivers to sleep and how the highway department marks the location of accidents with a cross along the side of the road with a skull and crossbones, to warn drivers, but then the kudzu vines cover up the crosses. We don’t learn from the past.
John Byrne Barry is a writer, actor, designer, director, and crossing guard. Also a former board member of California Writers Club Marin. He is the author of three plays and four novels. Find out more at johnbyrnebarry.com.
He is available to present “Setting That Works” to CWC branches.
by Michael J Coffino | Feb 24, 2025 | blog post
The novel opens in the kitchen of a New York City tenement. The husband has returned after an exhausting day manning a newsstand in frenetic Penn Station expecting to decompress first with a cold beer and then a homecooked meal. Instead, he finds his wife seated at the kitchen table, eyes fixed on an open Daily News, on the verge of an emotional breakdown. Earlier that day, the news reported that a ten-year old girl had been raped, brutally beaten, and left for dead under a staircase in a neighboring building.
The couple are Irish immigrants who came to America in search of a better life. But during the last several months, the wife had begun a slow simmering crusade to return to the homeland, a campaign rooted in the rapidly changing ethnic mix of the neighborhood.
The opening scene kicks off the racial narrative of the book.
Acutely aware of what’s at stake, and noting that dinner has not been prepared, the husband forgoes his customary respite and joins her at the table. Before taking a seat, he grabs a can of beer from the refrigerator, doesn’t open it, and braces for an emotional tsunami. After a short while, however, as his wife emotes, he longs for a pull of the brew and pries open the pop top with painstaking gentle precision to stifle the potentially disruptive “pop.”
The tender opening of the beer is emblematic of the fragile situation.
One more thing: the year is 1959.
Two separate readers of the novel pounced on the pop top reference as historical inaccuracy. Emil Franz patented the pop-top in 1963, years later than depicted.
Was that fair criticism or was the “revisionist” history fair creative license?
Elsewhere on the spectrum, consider the field day critics had with the 1998 film Armageddon. As but two examples of absurdity, Roger Ebert lambasted the portrayal of astronauts literally walking on an asteroid headed to destroy Earth under the power of the same gravitational forces we experience day to day and NASA training oil drillers to be astronauts instead of training astronauts to drill. Ebert summed up his litany of criticisms this way: “Armageddon is an assault on the eyes, the ears, the brain, common sense, and the human desire to be entertained.” Matthew Rozsa of Salon.com commented: “From a scientist’s point of view, (Armageddon) is a complete fallacy . . . [its] animus toward . . . science runs . . . deep.”
Sometimes storytelling absurdity mocks public intelligence.
To be sure, most if not all of us, writers and non-writers alike, have rolled our eyes, shaken our heads, and muttered under our breath, “oh, come on,” at scenes in books and movies we deem too farcical for our discerning tastes. The challenge for writers is easily stated: veer too far into the surreal and lose reader engagement or tow too closely to the humdrum of reality and lose intrigue and reader interest.
There is no easy answer, especially if the baseline is, as it should be, that novelists and screenwriters are entitled to unfettered license in honing their craft without worrying about self-appointed critics deriding their work because of far-ranging imagination.
Where is the balance? Here are some considerations.
First, be consistent. Whatever the genre, improbable coincidences should ring true to the narrative. For example, the fantasy magic in Harry Potter has rules. Spells require wands, students have to learn proper technique, and lo and behold, powerful wizards have boundaries. When the story honors the rules, it has credibility and meets reader expectation.
Second, know what works in the genre. The freedom to push the envelope in a thriller or court scene is less elastic than in speculative or dystopian fiction. Each has its own leeway. The Da Vinci Code often takes liberties with religious and historical facts, invoking hidden codes and ancient conspiracies, among other extraordinary devices. It works because readers of the genre expect a mix of mystery and action. Similarly, in Slaughterhouse Five, Kurt Vonnegut’s use of time travel works because it occurs within the context of a reality-based anti-war message. Events can be extraordinary so long as they are grounded in recognizable and accepted themes of the time.
Third, characters must be emotionally authentic. That means emotive extremes must make sense within the storyline. Consider Handmaid’s Tale, where the setting is a disturbing and extreme dystopian society, but the emotional core of the narrative—fear, resilience, and survival instincts—rings true and is relatable notwithstanding the over-the-top setting. The most shocking episodes convey imaginative realism to readers inside historical events. They don’t feel like “fiction.” They feel like real threats and incite emotional reactions in readers.
Fourth, be measured. Don’t inundate readers with a steady diet of episodes that stretch authenticity. Weave them into the narrative like crocheting well-placed threads of color into a large blanket. One effective example is Jurassic Park with its wild theme of dinosaurs roaming freely. The story sprinkles small mysterious events into the narrative, like strange fossil discoveries, unusual animal attacks, and clandestine corporate machinations. By the time those creatures of a time-gone-by dominate the screen, readers are invested and the story holds together in a natural way.
There is no bright line marker, like a check list of ten reader eye-rolls. It reduces to judgment. Professional input helps, whether from a literary agent, book publisher, developmental editor, book coach, or a well-vetted beta reader. Listen to the advice from a source you trust and never forget it is your creation. Err on the side of imagination.
