Writing Stories

I'm one of 284 writers who didn't make it into the winners' circle for Short Shorts. Reading through these, I learn something about writing fiction.....the contemplative mode doesn't work unless for a specific type of fiction; one needs characters and conflict! This takes imagination that reaches into another life rather than navel-gazing. The inner-life blog's gotta be the navel-gazer and outward the direction for other writing. I remember sitting in the Luxembourg Gardens and looking at people and writing details about the characters in my novel. But even in what I wrote in the early chapters, the dilemma took away from the people, even though some of the people are pretty cool as characters. And, the scary thing is that the dilemma is the same one as in the inner-life blog.