Eric James Stone

I had one of my stories critiqued today, and the feedback was generally positive. I feel like it’s one of my best stories overall, so after I fix some of the weaknesses identified during the critique, I’ll send the story out.

This week is different from the other weeks of Odyssey. For five of the six weeks, Jeanne Cavelos is the instructor, with a guest lecturer brought in for one day. This week, the instructor is the writer-in-residence, Nina Kiriki Hoffman. (I’d actually met Nina a couple of times because she’s a judge for Writers of the Future. In fact, she presented me with my published finalist award back in 2004.)

Today, she conducted an exercise called “Outline a Novel in One Hour.” As a result of this exercise, I’ve come up with a character and plot for a science fiction novel that I’m actually pretty excited about. While I generally have enough short story ideas to write about, I’ve struggled a bit with ideas for novel-length stories–particularly science fiction.

In this case, because the exercise was focused on creating a character and then creating obstacles for the character to overcome, I ended up creating a plot based on an concept that I probably would have rejected if I had come up with it without already having the character in mind.

It looks like this whole “plotting based on character” thing may be very useful to me.