Keep It Short Part 2

Believe it or not, I finished my short story and submitted it to the Spellbound bookstore contest today, one day short of the deadline. Whew! My husband was a big help, with a lot of good suggestions, as I rewrote it several times. I think it's pretty good now and we'll see what happens.

Now I have a much better idea about what makes a short story different than a novel. I touched on this last week, but here it is in a little more detail:

1. Character development happens a lot more quickly. It seems you've barely identified the character before you have to demonstrate how that character evolves. I'm used to letting a character evolve over chapters, not paragraphs.

2. You have to get to the point quickly ... and you can only have one or it's going to get messy. This is very hard for me because I usually have a bunch of points I want to make and I'm not that fast at getting to any of them. I had to listen closely to my character to find out what she wanted to tell me about her wishes and decisions for this story.

3. Almost everything in a short story has to be there for a reason. In a novel, I can have some scenes that might set the tone or give you a little more insight into a character but aren't strictly necessary to the story. In the short story, I couldn't do that. I had to cut out all kinds of descriptions and sidetracks. Now almost every word has a reason: a "lonely" item reflects its owner, a spreadsheet showing the character's job at the beginning is used to show what choice she must make later, etc. This was more of an issue in this story because I was limited to less than 1,000 words, but I think it's true in most short stories.

4. My favorite aspect of a short story, though, is that you can pay close attention to every sentence because there are fewer sentences to work with. I went a little crazy with metaphors, but I really enjoyed getting to use more of them and stretch myself a little. I included more details in some scenes than I might have done if I was in the middle of a long chapter. Whether it made the story better or not might be up for debate, but usually more detail means a stronger story.

This does not mean I'm going to stop writing novels! I might try this again, but I think I'm too hooked on novels to give them up in the near future. I leave it up to you if that's good news or not!

Thanks again for reading my blog. Please spread the word about my Penumbra series!