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Adding a post to this thread because I've read so much of the last one and all of this one. I'm a short story writer/blogger. This year I've spent most of my words into the potential soggy kleenex that is my first full-length manuscript. I'm ~35k in and having fun, yet constantly convincing myself that everything is terrible and I should go back to cereal reviews. To break up the monotony I recently entered Lit Reactor's Horror Story comp with a short story I came up with and pumped out in just over a week. Problem was I was in novel mode and ended up writing 5k for a comp that limited you to 4k. The point of this info dump is, I learned so much about what is superfluous in my writing when I was forced to cut out 20% of my story. If you ever want to find out how much of your story is fluff I highly recommend you make a copy of a chapter and then make it your mission to strip out 20% of the word count without losing the overall narrative or characterisation. You'll probably feel like crying for a lot of it, but for me at least it gave me an unexpected perspective on word economy. ... And I'm writing this up procrastinating going back to my novel after a week of short story-ing.
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Jul 23, 2012 12:12
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Ever wonder if your short story or opening chapter has real "hook"? Here's how to test: Go to http://omegle.com/ Paste the opening line Wait a few seconds, paste the next line. Wait a few more seconds, and paste the rest of the opening paragraph. If you can elicit an "and then...?" from a decent ratio of mostly randy american teenagers, chances are you have a good opening. Or you at least write good YA Fiction.
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Jul 26, 2012 13:14
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Here's a new topic. Is short fiction that makes you think/draw your own conclusions dying? It seems like it is, if you accept the opinions of most critiques found in online writing circles. The most common "criticism" I see across all contributions is "this ended abruptly", or "I didn't know the background information". I don't remember all the published short stories I was assigned to read during my creative writing topics at university, but I do recall a lot of them ended abruptly or with no resolution. Some threw you in the deep end and forced you to read the clues and invent your own back-story. Is having some mystery and ambiguity out of fashion now? Or is this just an opinion held by haven't-made-it writers with grandeurs of trilogies? My opinion, in the past I have been guilty of being too ambiguous, but I think there's nothing wrong with a short story ending with unresolved tension if you've said what you want to say.
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Aug 30, 2012 03:09
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