The Challenge of Writing Less

After publishing three novels, I'm comfortable with the format. I prefer the shorter end of the word count range, between 70,000 and 80,000 words. I think this permits a complex plot to evolve and characters to develop without intimidating the reader. The hardest part is often writing the 150-200 word blurb to attract those readers in the first place!

Earlier this year, I was invited to contribute to a pair of short story anthologies. Dark Fairytales for the Unloved promised original stories told in a fairy tale style. I hadn't written a short story in decades, but I jumped at the opportunity to hone my craft.

Short stories require a very different approach. You can't just do what you do for a novel with ten percent of the words. You don't have time to lure the reader in, to set the scene, to build your world, or develop your characters. The action, whatever it is, begins with the first word and never lets up.

The best advice I recall on writing short stories came from Roger Zelazny, author of Damnation Alley and the Amber novels. "Write your story as if it's the last chapter of your novel," was the general gist. Somehow you have to write such a chapter in a way that the reader can extrapolate the essentials of all the unwritten ones preceding it. All most readers care about is the satisfying conclusion anyway, so just give them that.

It's exactly as difficult as it sounds.

But as writers, we shouldn't shy away from difficult things. Quite the contrary, embracing such challenges makes us better writers. The remit for the three anthologies I've now contributed to was 5,000-15,000 words, and I intentionally stayed as close to the low end as I could. I cut ruthlessly, resisting interesting tangents and complexity of plot. Distinguishing one fully-formed and believable character from another was my biggest challenge. I've learned a lot, and I hope that will improve my novel writing too.

The two Dark Fairytales for the Unloved anthologies are out of print, for reasons I'll explore in another post, but I hope to make my stories available in another format one day. Paranormal Playground just released, and if you're inclined you can pick up a copy and see if HIVE, my tale of a haunted AI assistant, hit the mark.