Jill Kelly has been writing fiction for the last decade, primarily short-short stories and flash fiction. Her first novel, Witnessing the Creation, is in the final editing stages. Her memoir, Sober Truths: The Making of an Honest Woman, was a finalist for a prestigious Oregon Book Award for literary excellence.

Moving from Memoir to Fiction

A lot of years went by between my first attempts at fiction at age 10 and any serious undertakings in the genre: years I spent first as a college professor teaching fiction, critiquing fiction, and writing about fiction; then as an editor, working with other people's fiction. It wasn't until I was working on my memoir that I seriously began writing fiction to improve my skill in dialog, description, and narration. My first guide was Judy Reeves' book, A Writer's Book of Days. Her many writing prompts set me off on an adventure of writing fiction for 10 minutes every day. I did that for nearly 20 months, filling four large notebooks with very short stories.

After the memoir was published, I harvested the best of the 10-minute writings. There was an awful lot of junk, stories that went nowhere, days I hadn't felt inspired—lots to discard. But there were quite a few keepers—some stories were complete and others made great starts for longer pieces. One of them, written on November 8, 2003, was called "Witnessing the Creation." In the last several years, it's become a growing-up novel that involves a love triangle gone bad, a cross-country road trip, and witchcraft among its adventures.

Click here to read a chapter from Witnessing the Creation.

Catch my blog at http://thewritingwheel.blogspot.com/