B.K. Stevens’ blog “The First Two Pages” has proven a terrific resource for craft essays—focused, as the title make clear, on writers’ artistic choices and preference for the openings of their stories and books.
I’m pleased to have a short essay on my story “Parallel Play” at “The First Two Pages” today. “Slow Beginnings and Lines of Action” analyzes the entire opening scene of the “Parallel Play” and in the process draws on some lessons from Patricia Highsmith’s Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction to counter advice from Chekhov and Vonnegut about starting stories in the middle of the action or near the end of the narrative arc.