Ross Raymond Nunamaker

This year I went beyond my Tolkien study and decided to do creative writing. I’ve always enjoyed it and decided it would be a great way to expand my engagement in scholarship. 

I began by writing a contemporary retelling of Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent and joining the Greater Lehigh Valley Writer’s Group (GLVWG), which led me to find a fledgling writers group at my local library.

I soon hit a crossroads with the novel. It was part literary and part crime novel. I decided to put it aside for a little and try short form to hone my craft at the suggestion of a friend from GLVWG..

In doing this I wrote five pieces, two were creative non-fiction and three more traditional short fiction. Two of the short stories were written from characters I considered for novels. One was based on my recent novel, the Grit Girl, and the other was based on a fifteen year old novel I started and never came close to finishing.

Through the writer’s group, I started reading my work at their Wednesday events. It is scary and fun. It is hard to put your writing out there for spontaneous critique, but I find that at the least people often identify things I struggled with or nagged at me. 

Using their feedback along with my own and listening to other people’s writing, I realized my writing was good, but not good enough for publication.

So I took the most common writer’s advice possible and decided to read more short stories and learn from them.

In this series of posts, I’m going to address each one I read.

Enjoy!