JH: Please help me welcome Kathy Leonard Czepiel to the blog today, to chat with us about growing our stories. She offers us a few tips on how to avoid writing stories that feel forced, and she learned them all from some tulips (okay, not really, but it's cute story).
Kathy is the author of A Violet Season (Simon & Schuster), named one of the best books of 2012 by Kirkus Reviews. She is the recipient of a 2012 creative writing fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and her short fiction has appeared in Cimarron Review, Indiana Review, CALYX, Confrontation, Brain Child, and elsewhere. Kathy teaches writing at Quinnipiac University in Connecticut, where she lives with her husband and two daughters.
On a fun note, Kathy has a project underway called 45 Treasures that will result in readers’ antiques and vintage items being included in the pages of her next novel! Here’s how it works: readers e-mail a photo of a household item from the period 1900-1945, along with a brief description, and Kathy posts it in her gallery on Pinterest and on her website. This is crowd-sourced research, one way for Kathy to immerse herself in the period of her as-yet untitled second novel. Eventually, she’ll choose 45 items from the gallery to mention within the story itself. Your treasure could be one of them! The galleries are already filling up with everything from the mundane (a toaster, an iron) to the downright quirky (“cigarette silks,” a 1920s dentist chair, a “Mr. Ree” board game). E-mail your own contribution to KLCzepiel (at) att (dot) net.
Take it away Kathy...
