This year, a few members of the Naples Writers’ Workshop launched a podcast focused on analyzing what makes good fiction writing so good. The premise sounds simple, but the takeaways have been surprisingly useful.
On the 1st and 15th of each month, we release an episode of Why Is This Good? taking a look at a published short story. We read a snippet of that story on air, then begin to discuss the tools and devices the writer used to convey emotion, heighten suspense and hook a reader’s attention.
At the end of each episode, we talk about what we can steal or copy from that writer to improve our own work.
All of the stories we read from can be found online for free and in their entirety. We encourage you to read them in advance of each episode, but finding them afterwards also works. And even if you don’t get a chance to read them, the conversations we have about each piece are still easy to understand and digest.
Doing the podcast has been so much fun, and already I’ve learned ways to improve my own writing. Fellow writers and even non-writers — readers, we’ll call them! — have also taken away some valuable lessons.
