Short stories are a great way for novelists to “cross-train” with their craft; I wrote a bunch of shorter pieces for my MFA program. But because these pieces are shorter, their openings have to be that much more enticing. Some takeaways from reading masters of the craft…

As a reader, there’s nothing more exciting to me than a novel which jumps back and forth between two seemingly disconnected stories or timelines, knowing that, eventually, the full story will all come together. But how do writers actually build these tricky narrative puzzles into one cohesive picture?