Fiction Consultations with Dana Diehl

I’m drawn to fiction for its ability to make the familiar feel unfamiliar. I love work that is inventive, prose that electrifies, and stories that transport and reveal.

As your consultant, my goal is to meet your writing where it is. I want to identify what makes your writing stand out—what makes it you—and to help your work become the best version of itself. I will do this by looking at how story elements such as plot structure, characters’ emotional arcs, setting, and language work together to realize your vision. My focus will not be on copyediting, but on identifying how your writing works on a macro level. I will ask questions that may help you tighten your plot structure. I will ask “what if?” questions that, if necessary, may help you expand it.

I love speculative writing, magical realism, genre-blurring work (particularly work that draws from horror, fantasy, and sci-fi), and realism. However, I enjoy reading in any genre. Some novels and story collections I’m into right now are The Antidote by Karen Russell, Exit Zero by Marie-Helene Bertino, Meet Me at the Crossroads by Megan Giddings, and What We Fed to The Manticore by Talia Lakshmi Kolluri. I enjoy these books for their immersive details, sense of wonder, and use of speculative storylines to reveal emotional truths.

In my own work, I often take inspiration from the natural world, fairy tales, film and TV, and sometimes video games. I write stories that are often rooted in setting and explore themes such as climate change, motherhood, and transformation. I have published a chapbook of flash fiction, TV Girls, exploring the tropes of reality television. I’ve also published two short story collections, Our Dreams Might Align and The Classroom, the latter of which is a collaboration with Melissa Goodrich. I have a third short story collection, The Earth Room, forthcoming from Black Lawrence Press in early 2026.