The die is cast now : I submitted my short story yesterday afternoon.

I’ll take this opportunity to sum-up my thoughts about writing short stories here.

First, it was something I had never considered doing : I write in long form (my last book is more than 430 pages long), and I thought that I would be constraining myself too much if I had to write this type of story. In the last book, I had barely begun to say anything at the time I hit the 10 000 words mark, so how was I to be able to write anything at all in 7 500 words (25 pages) or less? Well, it appears that short stories are different : I don’t need all the character development I’m putting in a novel, and there are like only 3 to 4 scenes to write, so I can keep the word count to a minimum – well, almost.

Second, short stories are a work of editing, and I hate editing. Editing is difficult for me, and I usually think that I’m not very good at it (part of me says that I write good enough first drafts that they don’t need much editing anyway, but I shouldn’t listen to those lies my ego tries to tell me to get out of doing something I don’t like). I’ll try here to show you what happened this time:

 

  • Once I’d written the whole thing, I found out that of course, I was over the limit (though by not that much), so I had to edit heavily.
  • At this point, I needed external input, so I gave the story to alpha readers, and they hated it. Turns out that I forgot some things altogether, and that those missing parts made it that the story didn’t work at all for the readers.
  • So, I got back to the word processor for story edit. I cut, and cut, and cut to remove entire paragraphs. At that point, I was happy, because cutting anything out is usually so difficult for me (changing a few words here and there is all very well, but cutting out work? It’s like axing my own children).
  • Then, I added the new scenes required by the story fixup I had to do : bam, I end up at roughly the same word count I originally had. All this work, this gut-wrenching cutting of my words, and nothing to show for it! Well, it was not for nothing, since the story has improved, but still.
  • Then, I went to line edit : there, you look at each phrase, and try to tighten it, replacing some words, removing some others. The end result (about 2% cut) might be less spectacular than story edit (about 8% cut before adding the new material), but let’s face it, the heavy cutting was done during story edit.
  • Then, it’s back to alpha readers, dreading their verdict. Guess what? They like it this time!

 

All in all, the story hasn’t changed that much : still the same characters and ideas, but somewhat, it’s more palatable after the editing process. The good point here is that I was able to edit without too much fuss, and correct the story. Maybe it’s because I’m evolving as a writer and now I can kill my darlings, maybe this short story wasn’t one of my darlings, so I didn’t have any trouble gutting it, I don’t know. Come to think of it, I might have to write more short stories to get better at editing. More of that later.

Third, the research for this story. I think it’s because I had to work within a franchise, but I found that research for this story took out much more time than for my novels. I had to research cultures, places, events, names. Even speech patterns. As I said another time, research is my weakness, so this took up much of my time. In the end, I had to stop it, and go to writing, only allowing myself to search limited topics once I hit a wall and wasn’t sure if what I was going to write was true to the franchise or not.

Fourth, the characters. This is where I find the experience to be somewhat lacking. I love the fact that I know my characters in a novel, and that it’s their inner workings that give fuel to my stories. In short fiction, I’ll never be able to know the characters as much as I did in the novel. As a result, the characters in this short story didn’t surprise me (they never took the story where they wanted it to go). It’s one of my greatest pleasures when a character does that, and not having it here felt like I was missing something.

 

Now, was it worth it?

I really think so. A short story allows to experience the whole writing experience in a much more compressed amount of time than a novel (about a month here). As a result, I feel like I’ve learned maybe as much in this month as I learned in 3 or 4 months of novel writing. I’ll grant that I’m still at a stage where the learning curve is steep, so each different project will bring me new skills fast.

And of course, if I win a prize (one can still hope), I’ll get to add a writing credit to my novel cover letters (even if it might be considered as a lame one : “Third place in the 2010 Blizzard Writing Contest”, or something like that).

Will I do it again?

Well, I need the experience, and it was fun wrapping a project in under a month. It allowed me to actually write, instead of working on the next novel’s outline (which is stuck at the time. Looks like I have a strong case of Outliner’s block). The thing that bugs me is the characters thing. I need this “the characters hijacked the story”-feeling, but how to reproduce it in short fiction?

Here’s a thought : what if I wrote short stories based on my first novel’s universe? I love this setting, and felt like I never told enough about it in the novel. It could be fun to derive short fiction from my own work (for those who didn’t know it, the hugo winner “Ender’s game” started as a short story, and was turned into a book because the author needed an introduction for the next novel he wanted to write).

So, maybe I’ll write a short story again shortly. If I don’t it will be because I caved in, and abandoned the “outline the next book”-concept, and went straight to writing it (much more likely to happen).

 

 

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