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.
Susan Alice Bickford returns to the First Two Pages today with another story from The Saturday Evening Post. (You can find her essay on the earlier story here: “The Lucky One”.) Her new story, “Trust,” appeared a few months ago, but as we were emailing about a couple of her stories and which she should focus on, I appreciated her reflections on this one: “‘Trust’ is a bit more interesting in terms of analyzing my process in that I realized that if I mapped out a timeline, I had two ways to tell it: police procedural mystery or thriller/suspense suspense structure.” You can read below more about how she worked through the process of the story—and also read the full story here, a bonus!
Susan’s novel A Short Time to Die was nominated for a Left Coast Crime Best Debut Novel, and Dread of Winter was nominated for an Edgar. Her short stories have appeared in anthologies and The Saturday Evening Post. Find out more about her work at her website: https://susanalicebickford.com/.
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.
I enjoyed this story and Susan’s explanation of the choices she made. The opening scene makes a great hook for a complex plot.
I learned from this. Thank you.