Last weekend I attended agent and writing lecturer Don Maass’s High Tension Workshop in Austin, TX. His whole “tension” idea is to make every paragraph in a work, of any type of narrative, so compelling a read that the reader can’t put it down. I found his strategies immensely interesting, partly because he presented them as a tool to be used wherever the writer sees fit. Some of them were based on anticipation or playing with reader expectations. Many others were rooted in the character, which is my favorite aspect of fiction.

Maass was a very engaging lecturer and knew his material thoroughly, using many examples from best-selling novels. Austin was also quite cool–we were at the north end of town, but I still found a cool brewpub called North by Northwest and a sampler six-pack of local ales from Blanco, TX. All in all, a damn fine weekend.

Mike DeLuca, my colleague in both writing and drinking fine beers, wrote a neat blog post last week about the feeling of having your work enjoyed by people you’ve never met. Every writer has friends and family who love their stuff, but there’s something both neat and odd about getting that from people you’ve never met.

I just had my first experience with this. My literary story “A Brief Swell of Twilight” won the 2006 Fiction Award from the Briar Cliff Review. Last week I got a nice e-mail from a freshman at Briar Cliff University who’s taking a lit class taught by one of the faculty advisors for the magazine. They were assigned to write a character analysis paper, and one of their choices was the protagonist in my story. This student said he wasn’t allowed to ask for any extra information about the character; he just wanted to tell me that he enjoyed the story.

Which was all very cool, but still made me feel odd. All my characters are based on myself, in different ways and varying amounts, but this particular character was close to home in a few. And, of course, completely fictional in others.

I’m very glad this student enjoyed that synthesis of me and very much not-me, combined in an interesting story. It does seem especially cool that it resonated with him even though he has no idea who I am. Which I think is the ultimate goal for all of us striving to be read–it must resonate with as many people as possible.

And it was a bit more interesting a comment than the extended family readers who read the rescue climax of that story and asked, “Did that really happen to Scott?” :)

I just finished a spate of writing deadlines last weekend. Given how slowly I work, usually six weeks or more to write a short story, I grudgingly find that deadlines often are a great motivation. These were only critique group deadlines, not real deadlines for anyone wanting to buy my fiction, but they still often produce work that is quite solid. Not that it’s still not a struggle leading up to them…. :)

I got another call from the Writers of the Future admin lady last week. I did not win First, Second, or Third Place among the eight Finalists selected in February. Matt Rotundo, a fellow Odyssey grad, won First Place, so congratulations to him! The admin lady did ask if they could hold onto my story for possible inclusion in the annual anthology as a Published Finalist. It will be a while until they make that decision, but I’m happy to have them consider my story.