Story Excavator is the product of one of those “I wish I had been taught like this back when I first started decades ago” thoughts. It’s my take on what makes for good fiction writing and ways that it can be learned. It’s also an approach for writers who believe that the best stories are engaging to read and have something meaningful to say about what it means to be human.

​

In general literary fiction is regarded as the vanguard of big ideas that plumb the infinite complexities of the human psyche with gorgeous prose. It’s art! It’s also often associated with the adjectives “boring” and “difficult”. On the other hand, commercial fiction—also often called popular or genre fiction—stands for plainly written page-turners that are “formulaic” and “entertaining” and widely read.

​

However, I suspect if I gave you a minute, you could easily think of at least one novel that transcends these categories. One with big ideas that is nevertheless entertaining to read, one with beautiful sentences that dive into the soul of humanity and also construct a riveting plot. Those that come to mind for me include Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir, Those Beyond the Wall by Micaiah Johnson, and Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes, to list only a few. Many more books blur the lines of this artificial divide and are better for it. I've long been drawn to the idea of writing like that, but found no one-stop-shop where I could learn it. Instead, my journey was more of a meandering road with many potholes and detours. 

​

Though things are slowly changing, when I went through my Masters of Fine Arts (MFA) program in fiction (now nearly two decades ago), it was very focused on the literary side of things. I enjoyed beefing up my grasp of literary devices and discussing how to transmute the depths of human yearning into words, but the many workshops I took were hit or miss in terms of usefulness. Neither the professor’s feedback nor peer feedback was systematized and the helpfulness of the class came down to, more or less, luck.

​

At the same time that I was completing my grad thesis, I was also studying to become a college writing professor. (Because I love teaching and was under no delusion that I would make a living writing fiction.) The pedagogy I learned was much more hit than miss and greatly improved my own writing as I was exposed to tons of remarkable scholars and theories on how to reach and teach a wide variety of audiences. 

​

In fact, after finishing my MFA, I saw many of the approaches to college writing–such as awareness of genre conventions–used in books and classes that aimed to teach commercial fiction writing. They offered clear how-to guidance on what beat/element/complication should be written when and as you can imagine, that's very helpful–I even took a couple of classes and found their concreteness refreshing. But just like the 5-paragraph essay is highly formulaic and prescriptive, most commercial fiction instruction I encountered was too. I’m not saying formulas are inherently bad. The formulas can work, but if you don’t want to write the story the formulas are designed for, they can be actively stifling. 

​

The bottom line is that in my experience, there seem to be two fiction teaching camps. At the one extreme is the fiction-as-art approach that goes off vibes and that sometimes makes me think its practitioners don't believe “literature writing” can be taught. At the other extreme is the fiction-as-product approach that is the writing equivalent of paint by numbers. (I've also found that these camps snipe at each other weirdly often.) When I tried to get an MFA professor to give me concrete structure advice, I got a vague non-answer about the importance of character wants. When I tried to discuss the merits of the philosophical motivations of my character with a commercial fiction coach, I got nothing. I would have loved to have a resource for both my questions. 

And that, dear reader, is the long version of why I created Story Excavator. 

​

Over the years of teaching and writing, I've refined my approach to crystallize the underlying principles of writing--their how's and why's. The explanations and techniques Story Excavator offers draw on that experience.  They might be up your alley if you want to craft stories that are eminently readable yet also communicate a vision of what it means to be human and which decisions are worth making in life. If that is you, I do hope you’ll find the resources helpful.

​

If you’d like more personalized help for your project, here are the services I offer.