A Step-by-Step Process to Writing a Quiet Story
Lesson 4 of Quiet Writing: Crafting Stories from Everyday Moments with Andrea A. Firth
Week 4—it went so fast! I hope you’ve made progress on your quiet stories and essays. But there’s more. Like in our previous Readings, the short story and essay in today’s lesson connect with everyday moments (a museum visit, cooking for the family) but each adds complexity and nuance to its approach—something new for us to explore. And we’ll get some parting advice from Abigail Thomas, whose craft essay we read on Week 1.
Here are the Readings for this week:
The Museum by Olivia Schwartzman, Smokelong Quarterly, 9/18/23
Let There Be More Spices by Carrie Gaffney, Brevity, 1/25/25
My Whole Life Has Brought Me Here by Abigail Thomas, Oldster, an excerpt from Still Life at Eighty: The Next Interesting Thing, 3/1/23
But before we get to that, let’s do some review. And note that after the Readings, I’ll talk about editing and revising too.