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I'm trying to teach myself to write short stories, I think it'll tighten up the rest of my fiction, and help me tone down this habit of mine for run-on sentances.(like that one) I've got a few anthologies checked out from hte library, and I intend to study them intesely, but I have no idea how to write a short story. So what I need from all of you is some pointers about shortstory writing in general.
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Well I know it isn't exactly a 'tip', per se, but the book "Writing in general and the short story in particular" by Rust Hills is pretty good. I'd recommend it. Posts: 1621 | Registered: Apr 2002
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A book I've found helpful is Damon Knight's Creating Short Fiction. I also found reading Hemingway's short stories -- especially his Nick Adams stories -- to be really helpful because that's the short story in it's purest form. Science fiction and fantasy short stories tend to be longer and more complex than the average literary short story. So if you can study the form in its purity, you can easily expand on it.
The one tip that has helped me most is what Flannery O'Conner said about short fiction: short fiction has only one story whereas the novel has several stories. A good study of this tenet would be to compare "Ender's Game" the short-story to Ender's Game the novel. Of course, even "Ender's Game" the short-story is longer than a short-story (I think it's a novella), but you can probably learn a lot from the study anyway.
Good luck.
[This message has been edited by Balthasar (edited April 24, 2003).]
Short Stories and other stories have a completly diffrent setup. In order to make a good one, you generally have to start out with the intention "I'm gonna do a short story, tonight."
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Well, really basically the idea is that a short story is often just a snapshot of someone's life, or of an event or experience. So you don't need to really go into great length about the characters past, or his previous experiences, unless they pertain, very directly, to the story you're telling.
Also, the shorter the piece gets, the more important it is to have a dynamite first sentence. In a novel they say you have a page or two to grip the reader -- for a short story, it's often just the first sentence.
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Remember that when you are writing a short story, you can express a certain theme or moral that could be detailed just as well in the short story as in a novel. It really depends on how well you can express the intended theme with a limitation on length. Some short stories are better off short, because they can get right to the intention of the author in short length. Just because it is a "short" story, doesn't mean that the theme or intention behind you writing this story has to be short or unimportant as opposed to one expressed in a novel! -------TROGGIE ^_^
Posts: 3 | Registered: Apr 2003
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quote: Ok, how do you set up a short differently than a longer work?
This is why you need to read a lot of short fiction -- which it seems you are already doing. And then when you think you know what it is, you try to write it and discover you don't really know what it is. You repeat this process until it clicks. Sooner or later it will click.
Phanto's right: If you're going to write a short story, you have to sit down and say, "I'm going to write a short story." And it's true, in a short story you can't explore a person's past--unless, of course, you're writing an episodic short story.
I'm not so sure that the shorter the story the better the first sentence has to be. Hemingway, a master of short fiction, wrote a story called, "Indian Camp." The first sentence is: At the lakeshore there was another rowboat drawn up. Not too dynamite. However, here's the opening paragraph:
quote: At the lakeshore there was another rowboat drawn up. The two Indians stood waiting.
That's more intriguing. Without a doubt, in short fiction you need to have a good beginning.
What I've found helpful in writing short fiction is to focus on the ending first, and then figure out what I need to do to get my characters to that ending, and how to do it in the least amount of scenes. Because you don't have a lot of space in short fiction to flesh out your characters, you really, really need to know them before you begin. So once I get my ending, I start thinking about my characters -- who they are, and how they came to be where they are. I write character sketches, and then re-think the ending in light of these sketches. Then I figure out where the best beginning is and how many scenes I think I need to get from the beginning to the end. Then I try to combine scenes to make it even shorter. And then I start writing.
Yes, it's an extremely analytical way to write, but short fiction is much more arduous than long fiction. William Faulkner said that a novelist is a failed short-story writer. But if you can write good short fiction, you can write good long fiction.
Oh yes, one more book I would recommend: Understanding Fiction by Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren. It's a book of short stories followed by analysis. Very, very insightful. I found it used on Amazon.com for $7.50.
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my personal opinion is that in a successful short story, no word is wasted. everything that happens needs to happen for a distinct reason, or it's cut out. include only what sets the mood and tone and provides information related to plot development (and character development if it is ABSOLUTELY necessary for plot development*). the best short story is one you can read ten times and still discover new connections between its elements afterward. but again, that's just my opinion.
TTFN & lol
Cosmi
*i know, i know, there are those character-centered stories out there and those who say every story is a character story and so on. in such cases, the development of the character really becomes the plot.
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