Butler called the real-time composition “an extended teaching moment” in an effort to provide insight into the creative process. The result, This is Earl Sandt*, is set in 1913 and centers on a man and his son watching a bi-plane crash during an air show following Sunday morning church services. Story to check out: In 2001, Butler composed an entire short story in real-time during a series of 17 webcast sessions called Inside Creative Writing, all of which are available via iTunes. Known as something of a shapeshifter in terms of literary styles and aesthetics, Butler’s characters and themes vary widely from project to project as he draws from his own experiences growing up in rural Illinois, serving as a counterintelligence officer during the Vietnam War, and working odds jobs as a taxi driver and mill laborer before turning to fiction. Robert Olen ButlerĪuthor of the Pulitzer Prize winning short story collection Good Scent From a Strange Mountain (1992), Robert Olen Butler’s work has confounded readers and critics for years. Okay, so it's not quite a Tweet, but it's not War and Peace, either. So here are eight recommendations for some of today’s most innovative, exciting short story authors you should check out to help you get down with your story-self in roughly 3,000 words or less. If you only have thirty minutes a day to devote to literature, the short story provides a complete, encapsulated narrative experience to scratch your literary itch. But even with these time-saving gizmos, a large percentage of the population still cannot dedicate the time and energy to a 200 page novel at the end of a 9 to 5 workday that includes commuting, chores, and family time. These advancements are designed to help readers immerse themselves into fictional characters and worlds with more ease and expediency as the pace and rigors of everyday life in today’s society make it more and more difficult to pull-back from reality and allow our imaginations to explore and expand. Sure, studies and surveys continually show the ways in which today’s average reader experiences literature are changing, from e-readers, smart phones, and tablets, to podcasts and other subscription-based audio book websites and services. That’s the death-cry heard time and time again about the state of 21st Century reading.
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