My Problem With Short Stories

Yzabel / January 12, 2006

I’m going to come out of the closet for this one and admit that I haven’t been very talented with short stories. Yet.

While working on novels is all nice and well, these take time, and I’m not going to sit on my bottom waiting for the world to go on running. This is the reason why I’ve also been turning to ‘calls to arms’ for short stories, in order to have something else to munch on. A certain amount of French magazines and anthologies regularly hold these, and if chosen, the story goes the publishing road. Sure, it’s not much in itself. However, it seems fine enough for a start, as well as a sort of introduction to being published, right?

Except that short stories frustrate me to an extent that I can’t even describe, and that I end up scratching what I write and throwing it to the trash can without looking twice. I don’t even remember the amount of ideas I’ve abandoned, or put aside ‘for further use’.

I don’t lack ideas. I just wonder if there’s a way for me to make this format more bearable. Truth be told, I’d like to write short stories, to be skilled in these, but I always, always bump on the problem of ‘too much or too little’. It feels like there’s not enough room for me to develop my characters and ideas; it feels like I create either too much about them–thus turning the story into material for a full novel–or not enough, coming up with flat plots only.

I think I need more practice in the art of short stories, that’s a fact. I hope that I’ll someday get to master these, and to be able to write good ones. After all, I like reading some, it’d only be logical that I try my hand at writing them too!

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Comments

  • fredcq

    I started off writing short stories even though, to be honest, I don’t like reading them. I am more into reading novels.I learned a lot from writing them. My original idea was to put out a book of short stories based in the same fantasy world. It would be a series of stories about the same characters that all tied to gether in the final story. I ended up writing 5 stories and then dropping the idea. The world setting was good but it needed major changes. I basically cannabalized all the good stuff from those stories and put them into my novel.

  • Chris H

    How long is short? Maybe you’re too ambitious in the length? How your strying to write long short stories?Go kamikaze and aim for 300 words only.

  • Chris H

    What the? I think I meant to write “How long are the the short stories you’re trying to write? (I musta slipped on the copy/paste keys. Weird)

  • Benjamin Solah

    I began with short stories, but I believe they are quite hard because every sentence has to matter. It is easy to write a short story, it is really hard to write a good one.

  • Yzabel

    (Sorry for the delay in commenting, I’m away from home for the week-end.)’Short story’ for me would be about 4k-5k words–writing short-short stories is even worse for the moment, since I have less room than ever to develop things. When I try to anwer a ‘call to arms’, it depends; they usually have requirements, such as “between 5,000 and 10,000 words” or “less than 2,000 words”, so I’m not working with any fixed amount, in fact.Indeed, they seem harder. On the other hand, there should be a way in improving in this… just like there was a way to improve my writing in the past months 🙂

  • Karen Lee Field

    I’m with you on this one, Yzabel, I find short stories hard to write too. As Benjamin mentioned, every sentence matters, so does every word.I think the main problem is trying to fit too much into the story. A short story should be “a slice of life” type thing, and it should cover a short time period.Anyway, most of my short stories end up novels. 😀

  • Yzabel

    That would likely be my main problem, too–I think I try to cram too much in too little place, and this is why it feels so hard. Now to learn how to work on “slices of life” and not on the “too much”…

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