Why Write Short Stories?

Guest Post – Seana Moorhead

Confession: For many years, I didn’t like short stories. The concept conjured memories of high school English classes where we were required to create short stories, filling lines with sweet teenage angst like a Boston cream pie donut. I used to like those donuts when I was nine. I also adored pink and blue bubblegum ice cream at that age. There are some things you grow out of and I had put short stories into that category.

Then I started taking my writing more seriously and I’ve come around to admiring the short story format, especially those under 3000 words. And I discovered there’s a reason why many short stories don’t work well for me. It’s very hard to write a good short story. You have to pack everything you could put into a novel of 70,000 words: break it down to the essential, still write beautifully, and make sense so you don’t lose your reader for lack of words.

When you find a good short story, it is like the Scotch whisky of writing. There’s depth and multi-layered flavours from the first sniff to the last lingering taste in your mouth. Like a good Scotch, you don’t need a lot to appreciate its beauty.

Here’s my list for why every writer should strive to write a short story:

It’s Short

By definition, it’s short. You can practice the craft of writing without committing to an entire novel. If it doesn’t work out, you probably haven’t invested years of work in it. You can burn it, eat it, or recycle it and start something new. Basically, it’s like only committing to a first date. Unlike a novel, you don’t need marry your story and then later have to suffer through a nasty divorce when it doesn’t work out.

*Yes, I dare you to write a short story on a slate!*

Finding Readers

You can get other people to read it because it’s short. Getting someone to commit to reading your mega three-inch tome can be difficult. Much easier to get feedback by having your friends and family read your 1000 words of prose.

Reworking

Despite No 1, you can invest years into perfecting your short story, and it’s easy to go back and pick up and re-work it because it’s short. Try doing that with your 120,000-word novel stuck in your bottom drawer with your socks.

Hone your skills

You will become a better writer. Being forced to keep your story to only 2000 words means you have to make every word count. You don’t have the page space to tell us about the entire history of your character or about the Napoleonic wars before the plot begins. Learning how to tell a story with only a few words will make you a better writer.

Rejection Training

You can enter short story contests and learn how to handle failure. Learning how to accept rejection will be valuable when you try to publish your novel later. This is an important life skill for a writer. Or really anyone willing to be brave and try something new.

The Short List Creds

You can enter short story contests and get short listed. This will be a boost to your confidence and morale. You are a writer! Even better, you might actually win. You are definitely a writer! You can celebrate with cake and ice cream (but please, not bubblegum flavour).

Publishing Creds

You can get your short story published in a magazine or anthology. Maybe even earn cash (or at least a free copy of the book). You now have publishing credentials to add in your pitch to agents when you finish that novel.

Experiment

You can experiment with POV, tenses, blending genre, trying a new genre (like a paranormal western). Go crazy! It’s only a short story. If it doesn’t work out, remember no 1.

Editing Skills

You can improve your editing skills. For most writers, learning how to hone editing and revising is an essential skill. A short story is a good format to get critical. Check every word and sentence. Way easier to do this in short story and find your weakness. Do you jump around in your verb tenses? Use too much passive voice? Have favourite words? Lover of adverbs? A short story is an ideal format to polish those editing skills.

Serendipity

You may create something beautiful and make some reader fall in love with short stories again.

Meet Seana Moorhead

Seana Moorhead is an aspiring writer and is working on completing her first fantasy novel. She moved to Grey County in 2002, having a passion for outdoor adventures, including kayaking and wilderness camping. Suffering from a book addiction, she reads almost anything that grabs her attention, leads her into another world or teaches her something new. Seana lives in a bush lot near Owen Sound, Ontario with her partner and three dogs.

Does Size Matter

Gwynn Scheltema

A couple of weeks ago, I shared my thoughts on writing short fiction and in the comments, someone asked, “How short is short fiction?”

That’s a loaded question because, like poetic forms, short fiction comes in a host of forms and lengths and changes with the times.

This sample list of interesting short fiction forms and their word counts comes from a seminar I gave a few years ago at the Ontario Writers’ Conference:

Six word stories

Should provide a moment of conflict, action, and resolution that gives the sense of a complete story transpiring in a moment’s reading.

@twitterfiction

Fiction in 140 characters or less.

Expresso Stories – 25 words or less

A literary form for today’s frothed-up, on-the-hoof, want-it-all-now consumer lifestyle: complete stories that take no longer to read than an espresso takes to slurp.

Hint Fiction – 25 words or less

A hinting story, should do in twenty-five words what it could do in twenty-five hundred, that is, it “should be complete by standing by itself as its own little world.”

Trifextra – exactly 33 words

Stories written from prompts, and having something to with the number three.

Trifecta – no fewer than 33 and no more than 333 words.

A competition in which writers are given a one-word prompt, use the third given definition in the Merriam-Webster dictionary to write a story between 33 and 333 words.

Minisaga, mini saga or mini-saga – exactly 50 words [AKA ultra-shorts or microstory.]

Started by The Daily Telegraph and used in business as an educational tool to stimulate creativity. They are often funny or surprising and are described as “bite-sized lessons for life and business.”

Dribble Fiction – exactly 50 words

An offshoot of Drabble with the word count reduced to 50 words.

55 Fiction – 55 words

From the New Times short story contest. 55 Fiction has: a setting; one or more characters; conflict and resolution.

Postcard Fiction – usually 50 words or less but up to 250

Literary exploration, usually inspired by photographs and able to fit on a standard size postcard.

Micro fiction – under 100 words

A complete fictional story in a limited number of words in any genre.

Drabble Fiction – exactly 100 words

Originated in UK science fiction fandom in the 1980s. Drabble calls for brevity, testing the author’s ability to express interesting and meaningful ideas in a confined space.

Feghoot or Shaggy dog story – usually 100 to 250 words

Usually sci-fi, centers around or concludes with a pun, has a title character in a dangerous situation, any place in the galaxy, any past or future time. Can involve the travelling device with no name, represented as the “)(“.

Haibun – usually 100 to 1000 words.

English haibun is of one or more paragraphs of prose coupled with one or more haiku. It may record a scene, or a special moment, in a highly descriptive and objective manner or may occupy a wholly fictional or dream-like space. Accompanying haiku has a direct or subtle relationship with the prose.

Short Story 1000 to 15000 words.

Word count varies with publication form: collections, anthologies, magazines, or journals; print or on-line; genre or not. Print costs for journals, magazines and anthologies usually keep the count between 2000 – 4000.Genre stories for anthology collections can go to 7500 words. Single author collections often have one longer story up to 15000 words coupled with shorter stories.

Novellette – 7500 to 17500

Novella – 17500 to 40,000, sometimes 50000

Bottom Line:

Write your story the length it needs to be without thinking about word limits. Decide afterwards if you want to edit it to fit a certain count.

If you hope to sell your story, figure out what magazines or anthologies would be the best fit for the content/genre/style of your story, then look up their submission guidelines.

For contests, don’t ever exceed the stated limit.

Thoughts on short fiction

Gwynn Scheltema

With the shortest day of the year around the corner, I thought I would write today about short fiction. I began my writing journey writing short stories and poetry and in many ways , I think the two are alike.

Here are some of my random thoughts on writing short fiction. Interestingly, the same perspectives can be applied to writing poetry.

Short stories are like poems in that they steer the reader into reading the piece more than once, and the reader finds something new on each reading.

A “mainstream” short story can be about anything: a mood, a character, a setting, even a flashy writing style. A genre short story is about an idea. The fictional elements—character, plot, setting, etc.—are only there to dramatize the idea.

One idea is enough for a story. Two is more than enough. Three is too many.

The more extraordinary the idea, the more ordinary the language. For experimental writing choose everyday events. The stranger the idea, the more real the world must seem to be.

Know whose story it is, who is telling the story, and why.

The short story is a controlled release of information. Never rush or compact it. The fewer the words, the more air it needs to breathe.

Symmetry is more important than plot. A short story must make a pleasing shape, and close with a click. Repetition is good for symmetry but must be used sparingly, like salt.

One world only. Dreams are out of place in a short story.

One POV is enough. Two is more than enough. Three is too many.

Go easy on character descriptions. Nobody cares what your characters look like. They only need to be able to tell them apart.

Leave stuff out. It’s what’s left out that makes what’s left in do its work more effectively.

Withhold as much information as possible for as long as possible. When the reader knows everything, the story is over.

The Making of a Short Story

Gwynn Scheltema

I wrote a short story last week that forced me to write outside my real-life comfort zone. My story was for an anthology being put together as part of the many commemorative events to celebrate Canada 150. The submission call was for an “immigrant story”.

I’m an immigrant. I came to Canada in 1982 to escape a country that had been embroiled in a civil war for more than ten years and which had recently gained independence. Unfortunately for my family, the other side won and leaving seemed the best option on many fronts. But this blog is not about that and I didn’t want my immigrant story to be about that.

The story I wanted to tell was how it’s the little details in a new life that are the hardest. Finding jobs and a place to live are huge, seemingly insurmountable problems, but they are expected hardships, things you can brace yourself for and work to overcome. But just when you think it is all going well, that you’re getting ahead, some small detail surfaces and derails you. That’s what I wanted to write about.

I’m a private person, not given to public displays of affection or emotion. I cry in private. But for this story, I wanted to zero in on an emotional moment and portray it without being melodramatic or cliché. But how to do that?

The emotional mirror

Most readers, even though they may not realize it, read to mirror their own lives. Have they felt that way before? What would they do in a similar situation? How is this situation different from their lives? A story about events of that civil war would be different from an average reader’s life, but would it connect with readers on a human, emotional level? The key to making my story work was to focus not the events the reader couldn’t relate to, but on the emotions the reader could relate to. The emotional mirror.

To resonate with the reader, I had to identify the emotion I wanted the story to illustrate and the reader to feel. In this story, I wanted to show the feeling of being out of control, disoriented and emotionally afraid when the logical mind tells you there is nothing to fear. All emotions that everyone has felt at some point in their lives.

Let it unfold…slowly

Peter Selgin, writer and professor at Antioch University’s MFA Creative Writing Program, gives his writing students an exercise: Write two pieces each about 250 words long. Piece One should rivet the reader; Piece Two should bore the reader stiff. Each student reads both pieces out loud.

“In almost every instance the result is the same,” he says, “The ‘riveting’ piece bores, while the ‘boring’ piece holds interest.”

Why? Peter explains that, “In their effort to grip us, beginning writers tend to rush: They equate their own adrenaline with that of the reader. Conversely, when trying to bore, the same writers take their time; they don’t hesitate to lavish 250 words on the subject of a wall of white paint drying. And—to their consternation—the result holds our attention.”

So for this story, I chose a small incident that happened over a short period of time, but I slowed down the telling, letting it unfold moment by moment. By not hurrying, there was room for the emotion to build, for inner thought as well as outer action.

Envision it

As I wrote, I closed my eyes and imagined the scene in my mind. What could I see above, below, to the sides? What people and things were in my periphery? What could I hear, smell, touch, what was the quality of the light, temperature of the air? What emotion was I feeling at each point and what did that emotion look like in gestures, actions and reactions? Show don’t tell.

Match style to purpose

Writers have two roles in every piece they write. One to tell a story; two to craft it well. Having decided on the subject matter and how to let the story unfold, I summoned up craft I’ve learned over time.

To heighten the feeling of disorientation, of not fitting into a new world, of being out of control, I edited to make the sentence structure disjointed in places, short and fragmented in others and even syntactically out of step at times.

I made sure to use smell and texture or touch where I could as these senses tend to be more emotionally charged than sight and sound. I used setting details to echo the atmosphere of the fear that the narrator was feeling.

Whether my story was successful, I won’t know until it’s accepted and published, but I felt good about it when it was finished and that’s always a good sign.

DID YOU KNOW

Among the workshops Writescape has offered is one on writing short fiction, “Does Size Matter?” Gather your group. Pick your topic and your date. And we’ll bring Writescape’s workshops to you. Choose from our Workshop Catalogue, or contact us to provide a custom workshop to fill your needs.