Gloria Frym

New Book by Gloria from Spuyten Devil 

Dear Larry, Here's something for the blog. A brutal something.

Gloria

Fiction

If you create a man at the door with a gun and he fires at the person behind the door, he’s fulfilled his fictive role.

If he fires into a crowd, he’s a different character than the one you had in mind.
It’s worth investigating this character.  

If he kills ten people by firing a gun into a crowd, he may be a character in another story.  He may loom too large for the story you had in mind.  If he kills fifty, he may require an essay.

If another character declares, It’s opened my eyes, I want to keep a gun in the house to protect myself and my family, this character needs a course in reasoning.

If this character needs a course in reasoning, you might send him to France to learn pure and applied logic and new depths of deadpan.  Or you might want to open a
whole new aspect of the narrative featuring this second character.

If it’s tempting to create an interlocutor who asks, and what kind of gun would you
keep? And if the answer is an AK 47, this character could well belong in another story.  This character doesn’t work in fiction, only in America.  

If the man fires into a classroom where he assassinates the teacher
and nearly all the children, then turns the gun on himself after firing several
rounds at the police who enter by the same door, you have the beginning of
a Great American Novel.

Gloria Frym