Hello, darklings!
Firstly, please enjoy the lovely Shouki, the eldest cat in my residence. This is where she sleeps on my desk.
Well, I have the site in pretty decent shape. Feeling pretty good about the content here. I’m still working on a short story to put up for a writing sample, that way people can get a lick of my style and decide if they like it or not. Looking forward to sharing it!
Confession time: I’m not good at making short stories. At all. They turn into novels on me, like wet gremlins propagating more scenes. A new story and characters gives my muse a sugar rush, and before I know it the plot bunnies are escaping me. That’s what happened with the novel I have nearing completion. It started off as a spoof of a girl meeting the devil without the romance trope, and it turned into a full chapter book.
So I tried to think about short stories I’ve read and enjoyed, and how other creators pulled it off. I have two Legends books on my shelf that are excellent compilations of fantasy authors. I also thought about Netflix’s Love Death + Robots and The Ballad of Buster Scruggs. I considered famous shorts like The Lottery, The Yellow Wallpaper, and To Build a Fire. And I realized that a short story is a snapshot.
Usually in a short story, people don’t solve the huge trouble going on. We don’t get a full dissertation on the characters and world. We get a scene of a short time frame in it, focused on one problem that the characters are coping with in that environment. Sometimes the characters aren’t mighty heroes or villains. They’re often people that show us what happens to most when they run into the featured scenario. Sometimes they survive. Sometimes they don’t. The good shorts have layered meanings that provoke thought into what the environment means for those characters and what that means to us, the readers.
So to capture a short story, I need to learn how to capture a snapshot that shows a small window into a world and problem. There is a very short timeframe to get a reader to be interested in the characters involved. The word count is short to take them on a journey of discovery to an ending that satisfies. I won’t pretend that I can create something as clever and layered as some of the greats, but sometimes the more enjoyable short stories aren’t so deep, simply well told.
I just have to trick myself into showing one scene while keeping the character’s backstory and the vast world to myself. I have to go about it like I am taking just one chapter out of a greater work that I really enjoyed writing.
So far, that’s working. Maybe if I keep to this process, I will finally break my inability to write short stories.
Hope you have a marvelous week, darklings.
Comments