August 29, 2022
Do you ever write short stories? What do you see as the biggest difference in the writing process between a short story and a full-length book?
Novels are my primary form, but I have explored and published a few short stores. I wrote two of them for collections that are no longer available. But for every book I’ve written, I’ve reached a point where I’ve wondered if I’d get enough words to call it a novel. (50,000 words is the figure often used to denote a full-length novel, but that number can vary by genre.) Short stories have the opposite challenge—fitting the plot and characters into few enough words. (Usually between 1,500 and 10,000.) Considering my longest book, the Ranger’s Dog Tags, is about 90,000 words, and the shortest, The Fall of Jake Hennessey, ran 52,000, you can understand the difficulty I have writing something much shorter.
What’s the difference? The writing has to be tighter. Descriptions need to be hints and not long strings of flowery phrases. Same for the characters—there’s no room for lengthy speeches or action scenes to build their personalities. Everything has to be compact.
But creating those short stories helped me become a better writer. They forced me to show, not tell, and made me reach for the thesaurus to find the exact word instead of settling for one that was close enough. Those changes slow down my writing speed, but also translate to less editing. One of the short stories took me almost six months to complete. I’m currently writing at the non-breakneck speed of one book a year. (Compare that to authors who strive to complete a book a month. Every month.) They also forced me to do more plot development before I put words on paper, although I remail a pantser (writing by discovery.)
While I don’t expect to ever adopt the short story as my default writing style, I wouldn’t object to writing another one if the right opportunity presented itself. I enjoyed the experience.
How do the other authors on this hop feel about the short story form? You can find out by following the links below.
As always, until next time, please stay safe.
August 29, 2022
Do you ever write short stories? What do you see as the biggest difference in the writing process between a short story and a full-length book?
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