"The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" is one of my all-time favorites, too...I have so many all-time favorites, but that's way the heck up there on the top of my list.  I've recently discovered a new writer...well...new for me: Aleksandar Hemon.  He writes non-genre fiction, but he's brilliant.  I think I have to now rank him up there with LeGuin.  And his work is extremely inventive (and quite literary in that the manner of its presentation is as important as the story itself).  Hemon is probably a good writer to look at if you're interested in seeing how the short story (or novel) form can be played around with.

One of my favorite "unique punishment stories is "Cage of Brass" by Samuel R. Delany...in which "getting better" is the punishment.  Essentially, the central character was convicted of a crime and placed in a life support vat but with full sensory deprivation.  He essentially went crazy and that was the punishment, if he did anything to harm himself, the life support system would simply kick in and fix him.  In the logic of this story, mind-numbingly boring immortality was the punishment, as it led to a kind of self-aware insanity.  Basically it was a story looking at the psychological and emotional implications of extended solitary confinement.  That's an idea that hasn't really been pursued very much, and some element of that is likely to work in what you're interested in.  I guess, the main question is: what element of the plot is best served by a non-typical punishment?  Because I have my doubts about the whole crime/punishment thing, I'm always interested in how the two things don't really match.  I mean, what if a person is innocent and there's a flaw in the system?  That question has served me in all 1 or 2 crime/punishment stories I've written, but again, it all boils down to what you want to say and what best helps you say it.

Heh, I just saw your question about outlines and 3 act stories...

I think outlines are unavoidable, but my approach is usually to just write myself out of a pickle.  I never come up with stories in a liner fashion: I often know the middle of a story before I know the beginning, and so I simply ask myself a series of questions and outline in my head...it's kinda like doing algebra and finding "x" or some boring thing like that, only algebra in real life is far more fun than in some stiff clasroom.  I'm more like Ursula K. LeGuin and Harlan Ellison (in terms of short fiction) in that I often just look around and listen for inspiration, which usually comes if I hear something wrong, or don't see something correctly.  Ursula K. LeGuin came up with the idea for her story: "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" simply by seeing a highway sight for Salem Oregon in a rear-view mirror.  "regon" was cut off, and so all she saw was O melaS...and because of a rear view mirror speeding away from a highway sign, a great story was written, sans outline.  The same happened with Harlan Ellison's famous "Jefty is Five" which came from him mis-hearing a conversation.  Two people were talking about some guy named Jeffrey and one asked, "How's Jeffrey?"  the other person responded: "Oh, Jeffrey's fine...he's always fine."  Only Mr. Ellison mis-heard it as: "Oh, Jefty is five...he's always five..." and thus we have another brilliant story.  I suspect outlines really come in handy in terms of longer works.  Short works are often their own outlines.

Yeah, wolfenshire hit the nail on the head; basically do what works for you, but also stay active.  The only problem I see with the How To books is not the books themselves, but a potential reader's approach to them.  You're already the expert on your own writing, and so no book is going to tell you anything useful.  You probably have more of an idea of what you want to accomplish or what you want to avoid, and so books on how to do it, will be redundant or unnecessarily intimidating.  And besides, most of the "great" writers probably had no clue what they were doing.  You can always look at those flow chart/story outline things, that DIY books love to throw at you but are all stories really like that?  And if you're writing post-modern fiction, then you can throw those "story structure" diagrams out of the window, or turn them over and scribble notes on them, since a lot of post-modern stories are non-linear with no rising action (and in some cases, no action at all...back in the 70s, in New Wave science fiction, there were whole 20-page stories written in which the characters never moved a muscle, not even to breathe) and in terms of flash-fiction or micro-fiction (really, really short stuff under 250 words) any story-movement is likely to be emotional or psychological rather than physical...and so...there's another story diagram out the window.  So in short, trust your gut.

As for what books tell you: if they make writing easier, they're working, and by "easier" I mean, less of an odious chore.  Writing is never "easy" but it shouldn't be impossible either.

Yeah, that happens constantly, especially if a story is strong enough to be considered "alive" in that metaphorical way.  The thing with the protagonist: he/she doesn't have to be the central character, but he/she does have to be the character whose viewpoint the story is told from.  That's really all that makes the protagonist.  I guess you could say it's just a matter of page-time.  Protagonists don't have to be the "central" character; I've read some stories in which the protagonist was simply the observer.  I've read others in which the protagonists are passive characters and the other characters get to have all the fun.  I've certainly written stories in which the protagonists were passive, and the only thing they offered was a way for the reader to enter the world of story and care about the events and characters depicted.  If your story does that, it doesn't really matter who the protagonist is (on one level).  The thing to consider is how the story is written: even if your protagonist is not  the main player, the Top Dog or whatever, he or she should be the one that provides the context of the story.  If written in first person ("I") then it's a lot easier for the protagonist to be someone other than the alpha-male or whatever.  From 3rd person ("he" or "she") it's just as easy, but the viewpoint should probably be 3rd Person Limited, which just means that as the writer of the story, you limit insights, perception, actions, etc. to that character, and so the reader wouldn't know any more than the protagonist knows.  And that's the funny thing about protagonists, they aren't always the central characters, but they are the central viewpoint characters.  A perfect example would be Moby Dick.  Captain Ahab was the guy that got all of the action, but Ishmael was the guy telling the story, thus Ishmael was the viewpoint character, but Capt'n Ahab was the protagonist.  In a later novel, The Scar, by China Mieville, the central character, Bellis Coldwine, was immensely passive; she went along with the main-stage players, existing as the conduit through which the readers were able to enter the world of the novel, but everybody else got the juicy, dramatic bits, and she existed simply as either an observer, or the person who actually survived the whole thing simply because she wasn't constantly risking her life.  Now, in my own writing, I sometimes consciously avoid letting my protagonists and central characters be the same person, but all in all, it depends on what you want your story to be.  If your protagonist differs from your viewpoint character, this opens up emotional possibilities that simply don't exist if the viewpoint character and protagonist are the same person.

OK...I'm gonna get ONE of these Challenges...I'm still working on "Kindness to Animals!"  Jeez...this employment thing sucks.  Oh and this is apropos of nothing, but did you know that in the ancient Egyptian language, the word for "cat" is simply the sound they make.  Onomatopoeia at its best.  So, if I write a story about a meow hunting mice, then you'll know that I'm channeling my inner-ancient-Egyptian.

Interesting topic! 

I don't know if I have a paradigm, per se, but I do have a few habits that I've cultivated. 

One thing I noticed is that I actually avoid the How To books...I suspect this is largely due to the fact that I majored in English/Fiction Writing in college, and so take that aspect of things with a grain of salt.  I spent years at a time (cumulatively) doing writing exercises and stuff like that.  I still do them, and so the How To books are outside of my field of experience.  Having said that, I'll add that you should take ALL How To books with a grain of salt.  They're useful, but only up to a point. At times, they're likely to intimidate you OUT of writing rather than helping you to become a better writer: don't throw them out of the window, but if you're able, find other writers (especially published writers) that you can talk to and interact with.

The other thing is simple.  Read.  Read.  Read.  And when you're done reading, read some more.  The best way to learn HOW to write fiction is to read tons and tons of fiction.  The best way to learn how to write poetry is to read tons and tons of poetry.  Of course you need to learn forms, genres, and all of that good stuff, and this is where the How To books can help immensely, especially in terms of teaching you the necessities of grammar and syntax and how those effect style and type-of-story.  Ultimately though, half of writing is reading.  As for me, I with science fiction and fantasy, I found that the more of it I read, the more driven I am to interact with other writers, even the dead ones.  Some writers inspire me, others disgust me.  I find that the writers who disgust me are the more helpful ones in terms of pushing me to come up with ideas. I don't "rewrite" their stories, but I do rebut them.  I won't name names or point fingers, but find a genre that you like and then a writer within that genre that you hate.  Even if you don't read their full novel/story, etc...learn about it.  Dissect it.  Look at what it is that you absolutely loathe about it, and then figure out why you loathe it.  For me, it always boils down to ideology. I can point out a dozen (and more) ideologically-offensive stories within the science fiction and fantasy fields.  Because of this, I'm also aware of the more subtle things that I want to depict in my own fiction.  OR, conversely, I'm also aware of how I can actually play with those offensive things and offer a critique, even though I'm writing fiction.  And so I guess, in a nutshell, I'm saying that it probably helps you to find your passions in regular non-writing life, and import those into your writing, no matter what the genre is and use THOSE things as the fuel for your stories, and if not fuel, then at least spice.  Ultimately, however, read other writers (especially those who are doing what you want to do.)  That and interact with other writers.

There's actually more that I could say, but I'm gonna shut up for now.  I hope this was at least partly coherent and partly helpful.

There are so many directions to go in...I think anything with organ harvesting, disease-cure testing, etc. will keep things somewhat current in terms of what a lot of more contemporary sf/f readers are looking for.  And it doesn't have to be limited to organ harvesting, you could go the Frank Herbert route and with some female criminals (for high crimes at least) they could function as...well...birth machines.  It's a bit grim and I suspect that is something that could open a whole 'nother pandora's box.

I'm still working on "Kindness to Animals" or is it "the nests of unkind animals"...?  Oh, my brain is all a muddle.

The thing about space stuff is always the expense (even rich cultures have to expend money or its equivalent on moving mass from one gravity well to another, and if not money then at least energy.)  One of the things that could make such a penal system interesting would be something that would justify sending prisoners out there.  Asteroid mines and such don't make sense because robots are cheaper and you don't have to feed them or keep them alive in order to work.  There could be such places that don't rely on mining.  One possibility is to maybe send criminals somewhere far enough to be "safe" but close enough to justify the expense of sending them there.  Maybe criminals can become involuntary organ donors, but not in the traditional sense...maybe they can be sent somewhere, hooked up to super-advance "galactomatic" technology that keeps them alive while organs are harvested: one criminial, can--for example--be placed in a kind of regeneration vat that's programmed to keep that particular criminal on the kidney assembly line for the length of their prison term...whenever one of his/her kidneys is harvested, he/she begins growing a new one (which gets harvested in turn, and so on and so on and so on).  Just an idea.  Such technology can, after all, be fiddled with in such a way as to cause all kinds of nefarious derring-do; maybe a particular criminal or group of criminals can figure out a way to fiddle with the machinery from inside and thus, escape, and give bounty hunters a reason to get up in the planet-relative morning...

WOW!

Thank you very much and I have to definitely say congratulations to everyone selected.  It's always a treat to see the whole LWITG feature.

Shakespeare gave my my favorite one:

Scurvy knave

I can't think of any others, but I'll let you know if I come across any.  I know a few doozies in Russian and Czech if those would help.

A good blush in the writing forums is always fun.  Still working on the Kindness to Animals thing...I keep wanting to put a cockroach in it, but I think the cockroach might actually deserve a separate story.  Kindness to unkind cockroaches?  They are very particular about where they live.  They require clean filth and fresh moisture.  Who knew?  If something is too dirty for a cockroach, humans had best steer clear too...but yeah, I really do think that's a different topic...

Great topic!  I love talking about writing or writing about writing, almost as much as I enjoy writing.  As for serializing, well, that's eaiser said than done, but it's pretty easy to do.  Ray Bradbury made a career out of it, and many of the most famous, classic novels in the SF genere were actually serialized.  I've seen old, old, crumbling pages of some SF magazine I can't remember, with Dune serialized.  It was serialized before it was published as a single, coherent novel that gave rise to the whole Dune mythos, now shamelessly raped by Frank Herbert's son and that other writer whose name I refuse to mention.  (Ah, but most Dune readers consider the non-Frank Herbert chapters of the Dune continuation, and prequels, to be little more than cheap fan fiction.)

Anyway, the whole point of serializing is to present a long story in short chunks, and the only real way to do that is to make sure that each section you write has an inherent beginning and middle, but an open end leading into the next chapter or next few chapters.  I look at chapters and serialized sections of larger works as self-contained pieces in that they function like short stories.  They focus on one thing, and one thing only: one particular plot-moving action, one particular character development, one particular nodule of story-ness, but when they end, they do so in a way that leads directly into the next piece, even if that next piece doesn't immediately follow what's been written.  A good study in serilalization is Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, or the re-imaginded Battlestar Galactica.  Though those are television shows, they form a distinct narrative arc and then spend their entire run mapping out that arc...sometimes in a linear fashion, and sometimes with apparent jumps in action, but the final episodes bring everything together in interesting, not-so-neat ways.  You can tell that the people who wrote those shows spent a lot of time reading, because they're like um...well...telenovelas.

Also, if you're really interested, Renderosity's direct competition has a positively enormous community of writers, and whole galleries dedicated to serialized works in just about every genre you can imagine.  They even have a section called "Series Unknown" which is essentially serialized work by writers who aren't really that "famous" on the site; the stuff they present is generally pretty good and occasionally knock-your-socks-off brilliant.

Eh, it's not creative thinking: it's just reading something the wrong way (accidentally).  But see, I like the idea of "Unkind Animals" as a topic now, but what I'm writing stays on-topic.  It'll be ready once I actually sit my bony-butt down and actually write; at the moment, I just have scraps of random things wrtten on a receipt from Taco and Burrito King, three-quarters of a receipt from Walgreens, and half of a memo from work.  (Plot ideas and random doodles don't really go together, in case you were wondering.)  the Taco and Burrito King near my job is really nice.  90% of the guys behind the counter are hotties, and two of them are major readers.  The hottest of the hotties is reading Octavia E. Butler now.  Yeah.  Looks like I should go get another recepit.  I won't have to order anything, just get a recept.