From the Tip of My Pen

A Writer’s Tip of the Month – August 2007

by Fran Stewart

Precision Postcards

Browsing through treasures at Coffee Buy the Book in Roswell, I came across Robert Olen Butler’s had a good time: stories from American postcards. I’ve always been a sucker for a well-written postcard. Butler, according to the book jacket, collects early twentieth century picture postcards, and had a good time is a collection of short stories, each based on one of the cards. We even get photos of the cards—front and back.

There is an art to writing a postcard, one that we writers would do well to hone. My newest project—don’t I need another one?—is to write postcard-length stories, as a number of writers have done before me. Reports from them suggest that this is harder to do than one might think. How does one get a beginning, a middle, and a satisfying end, into a square that measures three inches on a side?