Behind the Curtain - Writing Advice
| Subscribe to Dean Murray's Mailing List |
|
Joining the mailing list will let me keep you in the loop as new stories are released. Additionally, people on the mailing list will get neat extras from time to time. |
I'm becoming a little more enamored of writing short stories than I've been in the past. Some of my earlier dislikes are still in full force. You can't really accomplish the level of characterization in a short story that you can achieve in a novel. Also, there are aspects of plotting and pacing that I think many of us tend to just wing when we sit down to write a short story. Since we can fake it, oftentimes we do, and consequently never strengthen those skills. My novels tend to fall apart if I don't put the requisit thought into those types of things though, so the simple act of writing a novel tends to help me acquire more breadth in some of those areas.
A short story on the other hand has some very important things going for it. First, it's much easier to get people to commit to reviewing your short story. Moreover, because the short story represents such a smaller time commitment, people are much more likely to do a good job of critiquing the short story. When you're trying to sharpen things like your dialog, your creation of a sense of place, and your scene construction, it's hard to beat the quality and immediacy of the feedback on a short story.
Editing a short story is also a much easier, and consequently much more effective generally than editing a novel. It's relatively easy to sit down and look for instances of a particular weakness over the course of five pages. When I try to do the same thing over a eighty-thousand word novel I find that by the time I'm several chapters into the book I'm so caught up in the story that it's hard to remember I should be editing.
Lastly, a short story is much less of a commitment in terms of time and energy than a novel. There are simply times when there is too much else going on in one's life, and it isn't practical to grind out the 100+ hours required to get a book roughed out. I'm a fan of doing something, even a little of something, rather than nothing, so if a short story keeps me writing where I'd otherwise have temporarily have thrown in the towel I'm very much in favor of the idea.