In April 2015, B.K. Stevens debuted the blog series “The First Two Pages,” hosting craft essays by short story writers and novelists analyzing the openings of their own work. The series continued until just after her death in August 2017, and the full archive of those essays can be found at Bonnie’s website. In November 2017, the blog series relocated to my website, and the archive of this second stage of the series can be found here.
In her email back in October proposing the First Two Pages essay below, Susan Alice Bickford caught my attention about three times over. First, her story was published in the digital edition of The Saturday Evening Post, not only a distinguished publication but also a chance for readers of the blog to go straight from essay to the full story, available for free at the website here. Second, Bickford has earned great success outside of short-form fiction, including being named a finalist for the Lefty Award for Debut Novel for A Short Time to Die and then being an Edgar finalist for her second novel, Dread of Winter—not hardly a bad track record! And then, at the intersection of long-form fiction and short fiction… Well, I don’t want to spoil her essay too much, but her email explained how her short story for the Saturday Evening Post originally began its life as “a 90K+ novel”—at which point I was trebly intrigued to see what the behind-the-scenes of that process might have been like.
Do enjoy the essay below, then check out “The Lucky One” in full at The Saturday Evening Post website. And be sure to check out more of Bickford’s work at her own website here.
Please use the arrows and controls at the bottom of the embedded PDF to navigate through the essay. You can also download the essay to read off-line.
Susan-Bickford-The-Lucky-One-First-Two-Pages
