Anecdote or Story?

Mike Cooper – September 2026

There is an old rule in writing: “Write what you know.”

Whether you’re writing fiction, nonfiction, or poetry, you’re writing based on experience and observation. Bear in mind, though, that “what you know” includes everything you can possibly imagine. Look at the work of Stephen King or H.P. Lovecraft, for example.

Regardless of whether you’re reporting or inventing, if you want to publish (make public) your work, you’ll want it to come out in the form of a story. We expect story. We learn from story.

We share what we call “stories” with friends and family all day long, which is great—it’s how we communicate and bond—though a lot of the things we tell each other aren’t full-on stories:

·      My teacher brought a snake into class today and Alex Johnson fainted!

·      I opened the cupboard and your favorite wine glass fell out, but I caught it just before it hit the counter! My heart was racing.

·      They didn’t have any ramen in the pasta section, but then I was walking through the Asian aisle, really by accident, and lo and behold, there was an entire section of it.

·      I met your mother when we were at school: she was going up the stairway and I was going down. Our eyes met and we both smiled at each other. The rest is history.

An anecdote (from the Greek anekdotos, meaning “unpublished”) is “short narrative of an interesting, amusing, or biographical incident.” An anecdote is something that happens.

Stories, on the other hand, have structure: beginnings, middles, ends—inciting incidents, complications, climaxes, resolutions, meaning, and significance.

Often, anecdotes lead us to stories. Our memoir about a challenging time, or a thinly disguised short story written by a narrator that is really us but younger and with two different colored eyes and possibly set in a place we’ve only researched on Google (still “what you know”) often starts out as anecdote or “plot”: i.e., this happened and then this happened and then this happened.

That’s a great way to start. It’s what some folks call the “triggering subject,” or the thing that gets you wondering about the human condition—the thing you want to share with others. So we write that, and when we’re done writing it—if we want to “publish,” or make available to a wider audience—we try to figure out what it’s all about and how best to share it with others. That’s what some folks call the “generated” or “real” subject. In The Forge, we call it “aboutness.”

Now our job is to look at what we’ve written and become the editor, or as Zadie Smith says: the reader. And we make it into story.

That’s what we teach in The Forge. We’d love to have you join us and go through that journey with you. Classes start January 2027. Send us an email at theforgewriting@gmail.com and we’ll be happy to get you started.

The Importance of a Creative Writing Cohort

Irene Cooper

Photo by Hannah Busing on Unsplash

Etymologically, the word cohort is a bit at odds with itself, linked to both war (Roman infantry) and peace (farmyard or garden). As creative writers, we’re typically pretty comfortable with tension and juxtaposition. There is energy in difference.

One of the core tenets in The Forge is community. Community—check out all those m’s. We dip briefly into the emotional impact of linguistics in the early weeks of The Forge program, wherein we learn that the pronounced ‘m’ is a voiced bilabial nasal, a sound that can evoke calm, imply intimacy, or express sympathy. Think: yummy; think: Om. It’s a great word, community, but does not perhaps get directly at the concept of cohort. Both words share a sense of commonality, of purpose; community and cohort are not at odds, of course, but cohort carries, I think, a whiff of competition. It gives edge.

Competition is not a word I love, to be honest—too susceptible to narrow binaries of win and lose, and too often an instigator of zero-sum thinking in art. Alone with our keyboards and the internet, writers can begin to believe that there are only so many slots for success, that one writer’s success means another’s failure. But creative writing is not a lottery.

It is not that luck—or timing, or some other serendipity— has no bearing on your writing success. I’d like to propose, however, that good fortune favors the writers who have prepared for success in concrete ways—practicing the art, reading reading reading, and yes, building a cohort of creatives with whom they can take the journey, fellow writers and artists who share a common vocabulary and support one another’s goals.  

Famous Cohorts

The Algonquin Round Table. Members: Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley, Ruth Hale, George S. Kaufman, Edna Ferber, Noël Coward, Harpo Marx, and others. Genres: playwriting, journalism, poetry, criticism, fiction, composing, illustration, performance.

The Bloomsbury Group. Members: Virginia Woolf, E.M. Forster, John Maynard Keynes, Clive Bell, Vanessa Bell, Bertrand Russell, Aldous Huxley, T.S. Eliot, and others. Genres: fiction, essays, economics, art, criticism, poetry, philosophy, publishing.

Stratford-on-Odeon, or the Shakespeare & Co. group on Rue de l’Odéon, Paris. Members: Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, others.

The Inklings included J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis.

The Harlem Renaissance included Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Jean Toomer, Claude McKay, and many others.

South-Side Writers Group included Richard Wright and Frank Marshall Davis, Arna Bontemps, and Margaret Walker.

Also: the Beats; the Black Mountain College…the list goes on.

Find Your Creative Writing People

These literary and artistic cohorts read and listened to each other’s work and nourished each other’s art and careers. Many of the more famous cohorts pushed art and literature outside of their own circles and into the mainstream and collective consciousness. Did these artists all write the same things in the same way? Absolutely not, and that’s a key to their achievements, both individual and collective.

(Did many if not all of these groups bring the drama re: drinking, drugging, and assorted mayhem? Sure. Are we still reading and enjoying and talking about the work? Yes, yes we are. Was the mayhem instrinisc to the art? I can't speak for other artists, but in my view, art does not require self-annihilation, quite the reverse—another blog for another time...)

As the Romans might have said, ex unitate vires: in unity, strength. Find new strength in a writing cohort that cares about your work.

Ready to light a fire under your creative writing? Get in touch for a chat to see if The Forge 10-Month Online Creative Writing Program is for you. New cohort convenes in September 2026.

Happening Now: the power of the present tense

by Ellen Santasiero

July 2026

Photo by Vanja Lazic

I’ve been thinking about the present tense lately because I just finished reading Amy Lin’s Here, After, a grief memoir written in a series of present-tense vignettes. The book offers a way for certain memoirists to make a manuscript more of a page turner. “Certain memoirists?” you ask. “Which ones?”

The ones who do not live a celebrity life, and the ones who do not have a cataclysmic external event to recount—a skirmish with a polar bear, say—that will help propel the tale along. (Wait! I have to see how the hell she's going to get her head out of the bear’s mouth.)

Ordinary people writing stories of inner (and therefore abstract) journeys worry about how to keep readers interested. Poets who write such stories have a leg up, for as practitioners of the supreme art (in my opinion), they can use language to beguile readers from chapter to chapter.

Thankfully, for the rest of us, there are a few craft tools at our disposal, that, when used judiciously, can make our stories crackle. One of those is the present tense, a choice that Lin makes, which in turn makes her book hard to put down.

If I write, “I eat a peach,” I signal to the reader’s brain that said peach-eating is happening right now (as opposed to “I ate a peach.”) And the brain thinks that whatever is happening right now is important. The reader watches more keenly for what happens next.

In Lin’s memoir, the use of present tense helps the reader register the shock and suddenness that Lin feels when her husband dies (it’s happening now!) and, Lin says, it also reflects another, more nuanced aspect of her experience.

“The thing about grief,” said Lin, “for me, certainly, was that when I entered into it, I fell out of time. Which is to say, the ways in which we tend to quantify established time—past, present, future—completely eroded for me. … That’s what grief does, it completely deflates these realms.”

Of the present tense, Peter Selgin, the author of Your First Page, writes, “For a sense of immediacy, nothing beats it. Screenplays traditionally avail themselves of it. It is the most cinematic of tenses.”

The present tense is much maligned in some quarters for being banal at worst, and limiting at best. Selgin claims it restricts the writer’s movement between the past and present, and allows little, if any, space for reflection. OK, I say, but a writer may want the limitations inherent in this tense. The thing to know is what you want in a piece of writing and to use any or all tools to achieve it.

It turns out that Lin’s use of the present tense did not limit her in the ways Selgin laid out. She moves seamlessly from her present-day grieving to present-tense flashbacks of courtship and married life. It only takes a signal phrase at the beginning of each flashback to orient us in time:

“On our second date, he spends an hour making elaborate grilled cheese sandwiches …” and, “During our honeymoon in Japan, I climb the stairs of our ryokan …”

As for reflections, the use of present tense did not preclude them:

“I am not going to do any of those things. It is not just because he is dead. I have never been the kind of person that can jump for joy—I want to but I am always too afraid. I need him to feel it for me. Jump for me.”

And, “Understand: I have never known how to love something in moderation.”

Of course, it is not the choice of present tense alone that makes Here, After so effective and affecting. All literary techniques swirl in concert with and in the context of other craft choices, in an alchemical medium where each multiplies the others’ effects. Lin’s sense of urgency, disorientation, and dislocation also come from her precise language and images, detailed scenes, and well-considered line, section, and chapter breaks.

If energy is low in one of your passages, try rewriting a past-tense scene in present tense. What does that do to your reading experience? Better yet, join us this fall at The Forge, where we help students experiment with all craft techniques till they find the best ways to tell their own stories.

We’re accepting applications now for our 2026 class. Email us at theforgewriting@gmail.com