Nina Schuyler

1 week ago | ninaschuyler.substack.com | Nina Schuyler

Audio playback is not supported on your browser. Please upgrade. In this short story, the narrator explains how to write a true war story but within this expository structure, there’s a recurring story about the Vietnam war and the death of Curt Lemon. Every image has a built-in paradox, writes Catherine Brady in Story Logic and the Craft of Fiction. An image focuses the reader’s attention in a highly specific way and also generates a profusion of implications and associations.

2 weeks ago | ninaschuyler.substack.com | Nina Schuyler

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2 weeks ago | ninaschuyler.substack.com | Nina Schuyler

Audio playback is not supported on your browser. Please upgrade. In this short story, Joanna and her son, Leo, have gone to Denmark, ostensibly to give her common law ex-husband (or is he a “ex-common-law husband”) a wristwatch from Joanna’s deceased father. She’s also there to see if there’s still a spark, a little fire between them. But nine-year-old Leo wants to do other things.

2 weeks ago | ninaschuyler.substack.com | Nina Schuyler

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3 weeks ago | ninaschuyler.substack.com | Nina Schuyler

This semester, I’m teaching alternative plots, and I recently introduced the digressive plot, or to use Daniel Mendelsohn’s terminology, rings, in which a plot deviates from the strict, straight line of causation. Then I was driving along, listening to Ross Gay on City Arts & Lectures podcast when he began talking about the digressive sentence and how he loves them.