Tuesday, May 1, 2012

Short Stories


Back when I was in high school, I took a creative writing class. Or perhaps I should say the creative writing class since it was the only one offered. Anyway, it was pretty broad, covering poetry, character creation, and fiction writing. Even back then I had the dream of being a famous writer so it was a lot of fun to write a short story.

It came out at a grand total of twenty pages. Most of my classmates’ came out at six.

It was then that I realized I would never be a short story writer. I remember having to shorten the ending because the thing was due the next day and I was out of time. Am I verbose? Loquacious? Simply a big-story planner? All three, most likely.

I can’t do short stories. It’s just not in my blood. In recent years, the shortest thing I’ve written, with the exception of flash-fiction pieces for a certain Campaign, was a forty-thousand word novella, something I would probably expand rather than cut back on.

Of course, this doesn’t mean I don’t like short stories. Some of my favorite pieces are shorts. I admire them in the way one admires a great work of art. Obviously I’m never going to paint the Mona Lisa or Starry Night. But I can still understand their greatness.

And that’s my writing story for the week. Your turn. Do you do better with long fiction or short fiction? If you do both, is it easy to switch back and forth?

9 comments:

  1. It's hard for me to write short stories. I think I've just trained my brain wrong.

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  2. I tend to write shorter fiction. Even my novels tend to run shorter in word length, and I have to find ways to bulk them up.

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  3. I like to read short stories, but I don't tend to think in a short story way. I'll write what I think will be a short story, but it just keeps growing in my mind, and I end up continuing it.

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  4. I'm the opposite. I don't like to read short stories, but my writing ends up short. My "novels" top out at 45,000 words. Perhaps that's why I haven't finished anything.

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  5. I can do short stories, mostly based very much in humor, but my thinking and style of writing is very much in the novel format.

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  6. I've never been able to write short stories. I can't even write a short grocery list. I'm amazed I can blog.

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  7. Thanks for visiting us on our first day back! I never thought I'd be interested in writing a short story, especially since I've only read one collection of short stories in my life. However, I recently read fellow blogger Rachel Morgan's first two in a series of novellas and now my interest in novella writing is piqued. They also made me start thinking about giving a short story a try, to see how I do with character development and plotting. That said, her novellas reall could be put together into a trilogy of novels, imho, and that's probably where mine would end up too. Soooooo...long response made short: long fiction. :D christy (oooh, also, i'm in love with Rachel's books: Guardian, Labyrinth (so far).

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  8. I can't really do short stories either. I had to do them for one of my creative writing classes and most had to be 2 to 5 pages. I hated having to stay within the limits.

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  9. I've always written short stories. Now that I'm trying to write a longer piece, it's a bit of a struggle because my brain just can't think big! Will take some time to learn how to write a longer piece.

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Please validate me.