photo stories - max wanger

Max Wanger deals with some pretty interesting characters.
Do any of these raise their hands and volunteer a story for
your writing?

The time will come when your characters will write your
stories for you, when your emotions, free of literary cant and
commercial bias, will blast the page and tell the truth.
Remember:  Plot is no more than footprints left in the snow
after your characters have run by on their way to incredible
destinations.  Plot is observed after the fact rather than before.
So, stand aside, forget targets, let the characters, your fingers,
body, blood, and heart do.

- Ray Bradbury, Zen and the Art of Writing

from unexpected places - pretend vintage magic

These photos - whether real, photoshopped, or manipulated in
some way - are stunning, capturing a vague and compelling
feeling of magic.  Rapunzel, the borrowers, tinker bell, wizards
and witches.  It's interesting to see magical images caught in
photographs instead of illustrations for a change, photos
treated to feign being fished out of your grandmother's attic.
Maybe one of these could inspire a story - what magic and
whimsy is being glimpsed here?

I think, at a child's birth, if a mother could ask a fairy godmother
to endow it with the most useful gift, that gift would be curiosity.
- Eleanor Roosevelt

By Charles B. Carma

By Joanna Pallaris

the well written - caitlin r. kiernan

And across the space within her, as my arm bridges countless
light years, something brushes against my hand. Something wet,
and soft, something indescribably abhorrent. Charlotte pushed
me, and I was falling backwards, and now I’m not. It has seized
my hand in its own—or wrapped some celestial tendril about my
wrist—and for a single heartbeat it holds me before letting go.
…whatever it is, it’s been there since before there was time. It’s
been there alone since before the universe was born.

- Caitlin R. Kiernan, "Tidal Forces"
(Full - and amazing - short story available here.)

By Brett Marlin

illustration - tatka

Tatka's work is very much about the wonder secreted and
reserved for those on the fringes, for those who go off on
their own and find some special part of the world that few
others know about.  I love the bits of stories she puts before
us and am immediately provoked into daydreaming about
their ends and beginnings.

I learned about the sacred art of self decoration with the
monarch butterflies perched atop my head, lightning bugs
as my night jewelry, and emerald-green frogs as bracelets.
- Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Women Who Run With the Wolves

a dreamer's wisdom - on writing - william h. gass

The true alchemists to not change lead into gold; they change
the world into words.

- William H. Gass

on writing - short stories

Short fiction seems more targeted - hand grenades of ideas, if
you will. When they work, they hit, they explode, and you never
forget them. Long fiction feels more like atmosphere: it's a lot
smokier and less defined.   - Paolo Bacigalupi

When well told, a story captured the subtle movement of change.
If a novel was a map of a country, a story was the bright silver
pin that marked the crossroads.   - Ann Patchett

The short story form allows evocation, suggestion, implication.
Its potency often lies in what it does not say.   - Isobelle Carmody

By Janice Wu

on reading - marina tsvetaeva

There are books so alive that you're always afraid that
while you weren't reading, the book has gone and changed,
has shifted like a river; while you went on living, it went on
living too, and like a river moved on and moved away.  No
one has stepped twice into the same river.  But did anyone
ever step twice into the same book? 

- Marina Tsvetaeva

By Tula Pink