Ready for Your Close Up?

What does this photo have to do with writing short stories? It's my metaphor. Bear with me. It's clear that this is an eye, right? You can't see the critter the eye is attached to, but chances are pretty good, even if my focus is pretty bad, that you can tell what kind of critter this is. You don't need to see the whole animal in the picture to see the whole feline in your mind. (Hatshepsut was inside a box peeking out at me through a hole...the murderous intent you may detect is for the feather toy we'd been playing with.)

Short stories are supposed to be like that. They're a snapshot of one single occurrance, one antagonist, one protagonist, one set of stakes. Assuming you're trying to come in at 10k words or fewer, you just don't have the room for anything else. Jeffe's Keep It Simple, Stupid advice gets repeated often - as in mantra often - when I'm attempting to write short.

 

What can I say? I *like* complication and twists and turns. Therefore, novels. However, shorter work forces me to focus in on what makes a story. It's a worth while exercise distilling a character and an event down to the bare essentials. I keep a mental outline for short stories and novellas. It goes something like this:

 

1. Present Protagonist - bonus point if you can present protagonist and conflict, or protagonist and setting all at once. Bonus bonus points if all three happen in those first few lines.

2. Present Conflict: AKA - Get Protagonist in trouble this should give us the protag's emotional investment in the situation

3. Present Antagonist if not already done in number 2 above.

4. Supporting incident raising stakes on conflict - may twist emotional investment

5. OPTIONAL: Offer of help or advice or mentoring - KEEP IT SHORT backstory can go here if needed - but really? Put it in dialog or action and make it raise the stakes further.

6. Get to the face off - this is the arena scene - protag facing down antag (In most short stories, this is where character change occurs and this is usually the longest scene in the story)

7. Resolve in as few words as possible. No dangling threads for the single story question!

 

Mix, match, wash and wear as you like. Or ignore. :D A few months ago, I'd have said I didn't do shorts, but after a novella, one 15k story coming out in January in the Mammoth Book of Futuristic Romance and a 10k story out on submission - maybe I'm learning. Now. I'd like to take the same clean, streamlined story telling back to novels.

 

Anyone have pointers on that??

 

 

 

Who Writes Short Shorts?

by Allison Pang

The short  (ha ha) answer to that question is not me.  Like many of my Word-Whore brethren, the short story is not my friend.

Can I write one? Yes. But it definitely takes a different mind set. When you have a limited amount of space to convey the story, every word has to count. And that probably sounds bad - I mean, every word should count in anything you write...but when you've got a nice blanket of 100k words to sprawl out in, it's pretty easy to slow things down a bit and take your time getting to the destination. Sort of like taking a country drive. The end destination may be the same, but you get to enjoy the journey a bit more.

Or something like that. I'm not great with analogies.

Hemingway supposedly wrote a short story in 6 words. I say supposedly, because there are varying degrees of belief as to whether he actually did pen it:

For sale: baby shoes, never worn. 

And whether he wrote it or not, it's a marvelous bit of prose, simply because it leaves so much up to the reader to determine.

Most of us aren't Hemingway though - and writing short stories requires the word count to be a bit more robust than that. (Except for you flash fiction writers - you people are crazy. I wish I could come up with something awesome in a paragraph or less, but I've failed just about every time I've tried.)

So where does that leave me? I've got a short story coming out in an upcoming UF anthology - Carniepunk will be out in August 2013. But as much as I wanted to write the particular story that was in it, I am NOT good at staying inside a word count. I like room to roam. So I actually rewrote the thing about 7 times over the span of a month, simply because I was so frustrated. I kept changing tense. PoV. Major plot points.

Maybe it was just the pressure of the thing. I don't know.

My other "professional" attempt is actually the short comic story "Comet" coming out in an upcoming issue of  Womanthology: Space.  I haven't seen the art for it yet, so to be honest I'm really not too sure how well I managed to squeeze a retelling of The Little Mermaid (genderbent and with robots in the future) into 6 pages.  Doubly hard for me, because 1) I'm lousy at short stories and 2) totally different media. It's hard to convey everything I wanted to say in the space, especially given that my original idea probably could have been a full on novella, at least.

But I think maybe I sometimes find short stories unsatisfying. (Reading them, anyway). Usually they end just as I'm getting excited about what's going on. It's a tad frustrating.

That being said, I would like to see about increasing my short story output - I do think they can be a great way for an author to help build up a readership and increase writing craft.

Right after I finish up this epic fantasy. ;-)

SHORT, SWEET, AND TO THE POINT (with a bonus cover reveal)

Writing short fiction is something I enjoy and am good at. In my Deacon Chalk series there are the two novels out (BLOOD AND BULLETS and BLOOD AND SILVER)
and also two novellas. (THAT THING AT THE ZOO and SPIDER'S LULLABY)
*all titles are links if you wanted to go check them out at the big online retailer :)

Plus several short stories that are up for free on a few blogs that run from 500 words to just a smidge over 2000. (most of those are linked to on my website www.jamesrtuck.com )

There is one thing that I have found is KEY to writing short fiction.

YOU DO NOT HAVE TIME FOR BACKSTORY.

Seriously. Cut it. You write a 20,000 word novella then you are allowed ONE PARAGRAPH of backstory that can only occur after the first 10 pages. This is the LAW. Break it at your peril. Subject to fines and imprisonment up to 300 years. Possible beheadament ( is that a word?)

Obviously I am joking, but I am serious that in a piece of short fiction you do not have time for backstory. Keep it off the page. Hint at it, work it in with a sentence here and a sentence there, but you cannot have an info dump or an exposition in the form of a chunk of dialog. No one wants that in your short fiction. Editors don't want to buy it and readers don't want to read it.

When you write genre short fiction you are basically taking your characters and dumping them in an extreme situation that they have to react to. The whole of the story is their situation and their reaction, nothing more.

Here is a conversation between a writer and a reader about short fiction.

Writer: Do you want to know how they got in the situation?
Reader: Don't care.

Writer: What made them who they are?
Reader: DON"T care.

Writer: Where the monster/big bad/nemesis/chain of unfortunate events came from?
Reader: DON'T CARE.

Writer: How amazing the world/magic system/political intrigue is that I made?
Reader: OMG I DON'T FREAKING CARE!

Writer: But I did so much reasearch and made some really cool things.
Reader: Don't care.

The point is that in short genre fiction it is all about the entertainment.  The fight, the turn, the moment things go south and how the main character deals. Save the rest of it for your novel. That's where the reader is sitting down to explore your creativity with you.

(And a short story/novella is NOT just something you yank out of your novel and plop it down for the reader. It still has to be complete in itself, not left dangling on both ends.)

So now for some picturey goodness to close us out and send you home, here is the cover for the third Deacon Chalk novel out March of 2013!
Ladies and gentlemen I give you BLOOD AND MAGICK!