As usual, I found Burroway's technical review of writing, in this case fiction, an excellent read. English teachers in primary and secondary education rarely do more than teach how to write essays, so the idea that a story and a plot are two separate concepts was foreign to me. I found a number of other little insights within the chapter useful. The first would be the idea of where to start the story; as a dedicated employer of [i]in medias res[/i], I've utilized backstory and flashbacks a number of times. However, I've never considered that the story may need to be located at another point in time if the action is occurring elsewhere. This also really brought the distinction between summary and scene to bear, as I've sometimes found my writing to ramble as I attempt to force my story into a scene, when that portion would likely do better in a summary.
As for the stories, I still find Hemingway to be a dull and unrewarding read, and Beattie's "Coping Stones" was disturbing, to say the least. I was much more taken by Hempel's "San Francisco", which managed in two pages to not only convey the death of her mother, but also the alienation and maladjustment of her older sister. It wasn't particularly subtle, but at the same time the speaker allows the scenes speak to the truth of his or her family, rather than explain the complexities and loss that they feel.
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