Mistakes.

Douglas H. Glover, in his excellent book "The Attack of Copula Spiders" listed four common mistakes that writing students make in their stories. Darin Strauss reminded the class of them earlier this month in Paris, at the NYU MFA residency. The mistakes are:

a. the partial story - a couple of thousand words, give or take, which introduce a situation  and a conflict but which end after the first major scene. the story doesn't develop through a series of actions;
b. the broken-back story - the student loses confidence in his/her ability to move the conflict forward and shifts to another conflict;
c. the bathtub story - a story which takes place almost completely as backfill in the mind of a single character (who often spends the whole narrative sitting in a bathtub - I  am only being slightly facetious);
d. the victim story - the student fails to generate true conflict because the protagonist refuses to speak up for himself, fight back, take a stand, get angry, etc.

With the exception of b., I have committed all of the above in the handful of stories that I have written. Sigh.

On a happier note, yesterday I sent "Dr. Bluebird" to Ars Medica for their Fall Issue. We'll see if they like it.