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My
Most Innovative Work Archive
The
following pieces are both fiction and non-fiction. Most of them use an
interesting structure to shape the story's drama, or use a unique voice
and sentence style. I include them here as samples for students of
writing.
A
Prayer Before Dying
This article uses frequent section
heads, creating a Question & Answer rhythm. It also
buries the lead, which means that the most sensational part of the story
is not hinted at, at all, by the article's title, subheads, or opening
paragraphs. Rather, the lead comes at the reader as a surprise. Getting my
editor to agree that this story should intentionally bury its lead was not
easy. But in doing so, I let the article be a story of life and death, and
a story about a unique woman, before it turns into a story about scientific
research being manipulated. This article won a couple awards and it caused
a firestorm at the NIH, which commissioned a panel to investigate their
funding of paranormal research. While you might assume this article angered
the Spiritual/New Age audience, it actually did not. The tenderness of the
way the story was told disarmed would-be critics. No less than Andrew Weil
came out publicly and announced, "Bronson's right. We can believe in
the power of remote prayer and other mystical phenomenon, but we should
stop trying to invoke scientific methods to prove our beliefs." Read
The
Tornado
This is a nonfiction story told much
like a work of fiction - told from a single character's point-of-view,
inside his head, with just the right amount of rich scene-setting detail.
It's a beefy story, 40 pages long, but a page-turner. Everything about it
feels like fiction - except it's real. Enjoy. Read
Quality
of Life
This is a short story. In the story,
two potential futures are opened up for the narrator, and he lives out
both futures, trying to decide which woman is right for him. It's unclear
whether he's envisioning these futures in his imagination, or whether he's
actually living them - until the end. It's also a story about life and
death - or about death, and what cancer scientists call "quality of
life." Palliative treatments don't extend a patient's life, but they
improve its quality until the patient dies. Read
A
Fragile Blow
This
is a story about a man changing his life after his brother commits
suicide. In pursuing this story, I was wandering into Kurt Slauson's very
personal realm, his most private horrors and guilt. So when a writer goes
after a story like this, the reader can balk - the reader might feel,
"Hey, you writer! What right do you have to call up this total
stranger and ask about his dead brother!?" I felt I needed to
incorporate the details of my gradual admission into Kurt's life. I also
enter into this story, just slightly - my conversations with Kurt were
therapuetic. Deciding when to include yourself in a story - and how much
of yourself - is a controversial and difficult decision for writers. I
like how this one came out. Read
Tracking
the Family Beast
This is a story with a unique voice.
I wrote it in an age when "minimalism" was still the vogue in
fiction. It was a fashion, but it was regarded as "best." That
snobbery made me angry. I call this voice "maximalism" -
sentences packed with elaborate details and asides. But not to the point
of overloading or slowing down the story. When done correctly, maximalism
feels like an urgent rush, with a breathless forward lean. Read
Bombardiers
Bombardiers
was written in an amalgam of styles that paid tribute to the greatest war
fiction ever written, including the best-ever war novel, Catch-22. You'll
notice traces of Tim O'Brien here, and Thom Jones. However, this is not a
war story at all, but rather a story of two bond salesmen who hate their
jobs. Back in the early 90s, I found it hilarious how businesspeople liked
to invoke war imagery and the language of war to describe their workdays.
So I took that idea and ran with it. If you're a prose stylist, also
note the way paragraphs open and close - while the customary method is to
finish a paragraph when you finish a train of thought, Bombardiers breaks
paragraphs in such a way that you feel like you're on a treadmill -
mid-thought, you have to read on to the next paragraph. Sort of like each
paragraph is a mini-cliffhanger. Also note that there is no white space in
the text - no line breaks. Line breaks as "pauses" are another
fashion of contemporary American fiction, and I wanted to write something
that broke every dumb rule of fiction. For instance, these sentences are
heavily loaded with adverbs. Adverbs have been attacked and criticized by
minimalists for thirty years, and they are only beginning to find their
way back into the sentences of fiction writers today. Read
The
Trial
This
is a beautiful profile told in a fairly straightforward way - until near
the end. It's the story of a Mexican-American woman who never wanted
children, and ended up with a son by accident. The son turns out to have
special needs, and this mother, Rosa Gonzalez, makes endless sacrifices
for her child until he blossoms. The trick to this story is that the
reader can probably see that resolve coming - it has to come, right? -
because where else could this story be going? So at the very point that
resolution does, indeed, arrive, the story has to leap in a new direction
- one the reader doesn't see coming. The point of the story is that
raising a child is a mystical experience that can't be measured
rationally. In that sense, the piece promises a "mystical
experience" to the reader. Structuring the story so that it presents
a kind of "aha" - and right at the end, not a moment earlier -
was the trick. Read
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