Karen E. Bender once told a class of fiction students to stop thinking about nouns and adjectives when building characters. "Think verbs," she said. It was a small instruction that carried a large idea: that character lives in motion, not in description. That a woman who saunters into a room is a fundamentally different person than one who hurries. That the right action, chosen precisely, can do the same work as a paragraph of careful physical detail.

That insight comes from Bender's essay "The Emotional Power of Verbs," published in The New York Times. But it also captures something essential about how she teaches and writes fiction. Across three acclaimed story collections, two novels, and fiction published in The New Yorker, Granta, Ploughshares, and Zoetrope, Bender has built a body of work that demonstrates what happens when a writer pays fierce attention to the mechanics of the sentence and the architecture of the scene. Her collection Refund was a finalist for the National Book Award and shortlisted for the Frank O'Connor International Story Prize. The New Order was longlisted for The Story Prize. And her newest collection, The Words of Dr. L (Counterpoint, 2025), was named a Kirkus Reviews Best Fiction Book of the Year, a Chicago Review of Books Best Story Collection, and has been longlisted for The Story Prize, joining a field of twenty distinguished collections selected from 114 entries.

She is, as the Chicago Review of Books put it in a recent interview, a "writers' writer," the kind of author whose work other writers return to not just for pleasure but for instruction. And through her ongoing series of master classes at WritingWorkshops.com, she makes that instruction available to anyone willing to sit with a story and take it apart.

What follows is a guided tour through the essential dimensions of short fiction, organized around the craft concepts Bender teaches in her master class series and illustrated by her own published wisdom. Whether you are trying to finish a first story or revise your fortieth, these are the problems every short fiction writer must solve.

Where Does a Story Begin? (And Why Most Writers Start in the Wrong Place)

One of Bender's most popular master classes is Exploring Strategies for Story Beginnings, a day-long intensive in which students read openings by Raymond Carver, Jamaica Kincaid, Miranda July, and Jhumpa Lahiri, then identify the types of urgency each beginning creates. Her key teaching insight is disarmingly specific: a strong opening establishes two questions for the reader, and the relationship between those questions generates the tension that propels the story forward.

Think about how differently that framing works than the advice most writers receive about beginnings. The standard counsel is vague: start with action, start with conflict, hook the reader. Bender's formulation is diagnostic. Two questions. Not one (which often produces a gimmicky opening that burns out fast) and not three or four (which fragments attention before the reader has a reason to care). Two questions, in productive friction with each other.

Consider the opening of Jhumpa Lahiri's "Interpreter of Maladies." A family arrives at a tourist site in India, and their hired driver, Mr. Kapasi, observes them. The first question is situational: who are these people, and what is the dynamic between this couple who seem to barely tolerate each other? The second question is emotional and arrives through Mr. Kapasi's attention: why is he watching Mrs. Das so carefully, and what does he want from her? Those two questions interlock. The answer to the first keeps modifying the second. The story earns its length because the reader needs both questions resolved, and the resolution of one complicates the other.

In Bender's class, students don't just analyze these mechanics in published work. They write. The second half of the intensive is generative: participants produce new openings using the techniques they've studied, then share and discuss in the Zoom chat. As one student described it: "I found Karen's approach of writing an opening that set up two questions extremely valuable."

If you're stuck on a story's beginning, try this exercise drawn from Bender's teaching method: write five different first paragraphs for the same story. In each one, change which two questions you're asking. You'll likely find that one pair of questions feels more alive than the others, that one opening makes you want to keep writing while another feels dutiful. The pair that creates genuine friction is your beginning.

The Interior World: Building Characters from the Inside Out

Bender teaches an entire series of seminars on building interiority in characters, and the fact that she devotes multiple classes to this single craft dimension tells you something about its importance. One seminar focuses on fantasies and theories (the stories characters tell themselves about what is happening to them). Another examines perception, specifically how characters express judgment, envy, and admiration toward the people around them. These are not interchangeable seminars using different labels. They represent genuinely distinct techniques for conveying what is happening inside a character's mind.

The distinction matters because "interiority" is one of those terms that gets invoked constantly in writing workshops but rarely broken into usable parts. A teacher says "we need more interiority here," and the student nods and adds a paragraph of reflection that slows the story to a crawl. Bender's approach is more precise. A character's fantasy (the daydream of quitting a job, the imagined confrontation with a parent, the scenario of how a first date might go) reveals their desire without stating it directly. A character's theory about why something happened (she left because she was afraid of commitment; he lied because he's always been a coward) reveals the character's worldview and biases. And a character's perceptions of others (envy toward a colleague, admiration for a stranger, snap judgments at a party) reveal the internal landscape through external observation.

In an interview for WritingWorkshops.com's Meet the Teaching Artist series, Bender described her classroom approach: "In my classes, writing is a conversation with reading. Great writers show us how to do it." Each seminar opens with close reading of published fiction that demonstrates the technique, then moves into generative exercises so students can practice it in their own work. The chat function becomes part of the pedagogy. Students share new writing in real time, and the group can see different approaches to the same technique emerging simultaneously.

For a practical experiment: take a scene you've already drafted and remove every instance of direct emotional statement ("she felt sad," "he was angry," "they were nervous"). Now rewrite the scene using only one of Bender's interiority tools. Give the character a fantasy about how they wish the scene would go. Or give them a theory about why the other person in the scene is behaving a certain way. Or let them perceive something specific about the other character (the way they hold their coffee cup, the shoes they chose to wear) and filter that perception through judgment or admiration. You'll find the character becomes more vivid not by adding more psychological narration but by making the psychology do specific, observable work.

Verbs, Action, and the Sentence-Level Life of a Story

Bender's New York Times essay on verbs is worth reading in full (you can find it on her website's On Writing page), but the central argument is one that reshapes how you read and revise. She noticed that her students' characters were beautifully described but static, "perfect as a photograph." The fix was not to add more description. It was to shift the unit of attention from what a character looks like to what a character does.

The example she uses is from John Cheever's "O City of Broken Dreams," a story whose opening sentence puts a train and a family into motion simultaneously. The verbs in that sentence (the train pounds, the breathing quickens) do double work: they describe physical action and they convey emotional states. The Malloys' quickening breath tells us they are anxious, yes, but the specific verb, quicken, carries a different charge than catch or halt or race. It implies acceleration, something building, a body responding to an experience it hasn't yet fully processed.

Bender's relationship to Cheever's prose runs deep. In a conversation with Jane Ciabattari for Literary Hub, she described first encountering his short stories in graduate school and learning from them that tenderness and darkness could occupy the same sentence. Cheever, she observed, could compress into a single paragraph what most writers need an entire story or novel to convey: love, longing, loss, the strangeness hiding inside the ordinary. That compression is, in part, a function of verb choice. Each action implies a world of feeling without pausing to explain it.

This is why the revision advice to "cut the adjectives" is only half right. The deeper move is to replace static description with specific action. Not just fewer adjectives but more precise verbs. A character who folds a letter is doing something different than a character who creases one. The first might be automatic, habitual. The second suggests deliberation, even aggression. In a short story, where every word bears more structural weight than it would in a novel, that difference can shift the meaning of an entire scene.

The Octopus Moment: Making a Short Story Feel Bigger Than Its Pages

One of Bender's most distinctive teaching concepts is what she calls "The Octopus Moment": the point in a story where the narrative extends its reach beyond the immediate scene and makes the reader feel the story exists outside its own borders. A story with octopus moments feels larger than its word count. It implies a world, a history, a future that continues beyond the final paragraph.

This is one of the central challenges of short fiction. A novel can build its world across hundreds of pages, layering character history and thematic resonance through accumulation. A short story has to create the sensation of depth in a compressed space. The octopus moment is how.

In her seminar on this concept, Bender examines how writers like Lahiri, Carver, Yoko Ogawa, Cheever, and Denis Johnson achieve this expansion. The techniques are varied. A sudden shift in temporal perspective (a sentence that leaps forward or backward in time) can crack open the story's frame. A detail that belongs to a world outside the story's immediate situation (a news broadcast playing in the background, a childhood memory triggered by a smell) can extend a story's reach without requiring additional scenes. A character's perception that generalizes from the specific moment to a larger truth can make a ten-page story feel novelistic.

Bender's The Words of Dr. L demonstrates these techniques at the highest level. The New Yorker noted that the collection's speculative stories take place in worlds where troubling features of our own reality are amplified, but beyond the political commentary, what most animates the work is familial heartache. That observation pinpoints the octopus moment in action: the stories use speculative premises (a woman learning secret words to terminate a pregnancy, a couple encased in globes orbiting Earth, a society preparing to abandon a burning planet for Mars) as vehicles for emotional truths about parenthood, separation, and the desire to protect the people we love. The science fiction elements extend each story's reach. The family dynamics give each story its core.

As a revision exercise: identify the moment in your draft where the story feels most contained, most locked into its immediate scene. Now write a single sentence at that point that reaches outward: a memory, a premonition, a perception that connects the present moment to something larger. That's your octopus moment. If it works, the entire story will feel as though it has expanded around it.

Creating Characters Readers Can't Look Away From

Bender's Creating Difficult Characters master class addresses a problem that plagues many early drafts: the protagonist who is too easy to like. A character who is wholly sympathetic, who makes good decisions, who sees the world clearly and acts with integrity, is paradoxically less interesting on the page than one who is contradictory, self-deceiving, morally compromised, or difficult in ways that make the reader uncomfortable.

The challenge is craft, not just temperament. Writing a difficult character well means making the reader want to spend time with someone they might not want to befriend. That requires giving the character an interior logic that feels coherent even when their behavior is objectionable. It requires distributing sympathy unevenly, offering the reader enough understanding to stay engaged without enough resolution to feel comfortable. The reader should be slightly off-balance throughout.

In her Chicago Review of Books interview, Bender described her creative process as following whatever interests her, both internally and externally. She wrote the title story of The Words of Dr. L during the confirmation hearings of Amy Coney Barrett, wondering what it would feel like if someone could have an abortion secretly, using only certain words. Then she followed that premise into its opposite: how words could be used to convince women to have children. Then further, into the characters' own childhoods and their relationships with their mothers. Each turn brought her closer to a more difficult, more contradictory set of human motivations.

That willingness to follow a character into uncomfortable territory is what separates interesting fiction from fiction that merely confirms what the reader already believes. Bender has called this process "going down rabbit holes," and she has described it as the fun of fiction. The fun, notice, is not in having already arrived at the right answer. It is in the pursuit.

Dialogue, Scene, and Summary: The Structural Decisions That Shape a Story

Beyond character and interiority, Bender's master class series addresses the structural machinery of short fiction. Her Deep Dive Into Dialogue seminar examines how dialogue reveals character and how to give spoken language more urgency on the page. Her Show and Tell seminars separate the distinct functions of scene and summary, helping writers understand when to slow down and dramatize a moment and when to compress time and move quickly.

These are not separate skills. They are parts of a single decision-making process. Every moment in a story, a writer is choosing: do I render this in scene (with dialogue, physical action, real-time pacing) or in summary (with compression, narration, a quicker temporal movement)? The choice determines the story's rhythm, its sense of pacing, the relative weight of its different parts. A story that renders everything in scene feels exhausting. A story that summarizes everything feels distant. The art is in the alternation, the way a story breathes between the two modes.

Bender's teaching on dialogue specifically focuses on what people say as a craft technique, which is a subtly different framing than "how to write realistic dialogue." Realistic dialogue reproduces how people actually talk, with all its redundancy and filler. Effective fictional dialogue distills speech into something that sounds natural while performing specific narrative work: revealing character, advancing conflict, withholding or disclosing information. The gap between those two things is where the craft lives.

Revision as Discovery: Finding the Story Inside the Draft

Bender's Ten Ideas for Revision, available on her website, reframes revision as an act of exploration rather than correction. Her first principle sets the tone: "it's better to have a few pages of something rather than no pages of fear." The draft already exists. Revision is finding the story inside it.

Several of her revision ideas are worth sitting with. She asks writers to find a "clear line of desire" in the story and to simplify the characters' main urges before building complexity around that spine. She asks writers to think about compression: can one scene do the work of several? Can characters be combined? She asks writers to distinguish between what they included because they wanted it in the story and what they included because they thought it should be there.

That last distinction is crucial and rarely discussed. Many drafts carry dead weight not because the writing is bad but because the writer was performing a version of what they thought the story required. A scene that exists because "there should be a scene where the mother and daughter have a conversation" is different from a scene that exists because the writer felt compelled to write it. Bender's advice is to notice which is which, then cut the dutiful material and keep the compulsive material.

She also offers an analogy from a fellow writer that captures the essential patience revision demands: "Writing a story is like building a boat. I don't want to spend too much time intricately painting a hatch when I don't know if the boat even has a rudder." The instruction here is about sequencing. Early revisions should address the story's fundamental architecture (desire, point of view, which scenes are necessary) before later revisions polish the language. Too many writers reverse the order, spending hours perfecting sentences in a section that won't survive the next structural pass.

The Writer's Obligation to Honesty

In her Ten Commandments for Becoming a Writer, Bender frames the writing life not as a career path but as an ongoing commitment to attention. Commandment seven stands out for the clarity of its ethical claim: when you write something honest, whether funny or sad or angry, it will help the person who reads it, because that person will probably have experienced something like it too.

That is a substantial claim, and it carries a specific craft implication. Honesty in fiction is not autobiography. It is not writing about your own life. It is the willingness to follow a character's logic into territory that makes the writer uncomfortable, to write the scene the story needs rather than the scene the writer finds easiest to produce. In her Literary Hub interview, Bender named her influences in this regard: J.D. Salinger, Philip Roth, and Erica Jong for honesty and voice; Cheever for beauty of prose; Carson McCullers for characterization. What connects those writers, despite their vast differences in style and subject, is a refusal to flinch from what they knew to be true about their characters.

Her tenth commandment puts this more simply: "Only YOU can write down your version of the world." That's not motivational poster language. It's a description of what makes fiction valuable. The specific way you see, the particular details you notice, the emotional logic that makes sense to you and might not make sense to anyone else: that is the material. No one else has it. Your only job is to get it onto the page with as much precision and as little self-protection as you can manage.

Putting It All Together: A Revision Checklist for Short Fiction Writers

Drawing on Bender's teaching and published craft wisdom, here is a set of questions to ask of any short story draft. These are not rules. They are diagnostic tools, meant to help you locate what's working and identify what still needs attention.

On beginnings: Does your opening establish two questions for the reader? Are those questions in productive tension with each other? If you removed your first paragraph entirely, would the story lose essential information or just throat-clearing?

On interiority: Are your characters' inner lives conveyed through specific techniques (fantasy, theory, perception) rather than generic emotional statements? Can you identify the dominant interiority tool in each scene? If every scene uses the same tool, consider varying the approach.

On verbs: Read each scene looking only at the verbs. Are your characters doing specific things, or are they mostly sitting, standing, looking, and thinking? Can you replace a descriptive passage with a precise action that implies the same emotional information?

On reach: Does your story contain at least one octopus moment, a sentence or passage that extends the narrative beyond its immediate scene? Does the story feel like it exists in a larger world, or does it feel sealed inside its own plot?

On difficulty: Is your protagonist too easy to like? Would the story become more interesting if you allowed them to be wrong about something important, or to want something they shouldn't want?

On structure: Have you made conscious choices about when to use scene and when to use summary? Are there scenes that could be compressed into summary, or summaries that would be more powerful rendered as full scenes?

On desire: Can you state, in a single sentence, what your main character wants? If not, the story may lack a spine. Find the desire first. Then build complexity around it.

Learning from the Source

Bender's three-time Pushcart Prize-winning, National Book Award-finalist, Story Prize-longlisted body of work speaks for itself. But what sets her apart as a teacher is the way she translates her own artistic practice into transferable methods. In her master classes, she does not simply talk about what good fiction looks like. She shows students how published writers achieved specific effects, then puts students to work practicing those effects in their own writing.

"Stories are a place where I feel most at home, and free," Bender told Literary Hub, "and the form allows me to try different approaches and topics." Her master class series at WritingWorkshops.com is structured to give students that same freedom: each seminar isolates a specific craft dimension (beginnings, interiority, dialogue, point of view, the octopus moment, difficult characters, scene and summary) so that writers can focus deeply rather than trying to improve everything at once.

All seminars are conducted live via Zoom, with recordings available for those who can't attend in real time. View the full schedule of upcoming master classes here.

Whether you are early in your writing life or deep into a revision that won't resolve, the craft of short fiction rewards close study. The form asks you to make every sentence count, to build characters who live beyond the page, and to tell the truth about the world as you see it. Karen Bender has spent decades doing exactly that, and her willingness to share how she does it is a rare gift to the writing community.

WritingWorkshops.com is an independent, artist-run creative writing school and the official education partner of Electric Literature. Since 2016, we've helped writers strengthen their voice, develop a greater understanding of craft, and forge a path to publication.