dabbling their feet in the water
Dec. 29th, 2009 10:09 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
aamcnamaraToday I finished the last of the stories I told people I would write for them last year. So now I just have to write the ones requested this year, which so far number twenty-three, not counting the two people who've said they want one but not given me a prompt.
So far, these stories have been as short as a few hundred words, as long as 1500. I used to write stories this long, when I was about thirteen--then again, my "novels" weren't much longer. As I started to figure out how to show, not tell, how to develop characters and plots, the length stretched out.
My short stories tend to hover on the low end of the range even now, but they're a normal length. (My novels are now novel-length.)
And then I started this project. I don't get much in the prompts: a couple of nouns, maybe. Sometimes there's a full sentence of description, which is usually, oddly, harder to write--more restriction. At any rate, there isn't enough to write a full-length short story off the top of my head, fleshed-out characters and plot and setting. I've never been great at working off prompts.
But a quick minute of brainstorming usually brings up a scenario, a place, a person, and the point of these isn't that they are the best or the most thought-out stories in the world: the point is my friends getting a story that I wrote for them, the point is the act of writing them.
In that state of just-writing-it, maybe even purer than exists for NaNoWriMo, there have been some unexpected moments of grace. Sometimes the whole thing feels flat, but that's okay--sometimes it curls up in itself, or twists out at the last moment into something beautiful.
Because they're so short, the vast majority of their work is done in implication, in subtext. But in obvious subtext, because there isn't enough time to build up the soundless structures that hold up a full short story, or a novel.
So, since I was thirteen, I've kind of come full circle. I'm going to loop back out again as soon as I get back on campus next week and start trying to buckle down and write The Urban Fantasy Novel. Since I have 23 left to write, though, I'll probably keep writing shorter things for a while, too.
And, who knows? Maybe after I'm done with all of them, I'll start writing flash fiction. It's a fun length.
So far, these stories have been as short as a few hundred words, as long as 1500. I used to write stories this long, when I was about thirteen--then again, my "novels" weren't much longer. As I started to figure out how to show, not tell, how to develop characters and plots, the length stretched out.
My short stories tend to hover on the low end of the range even now, but they're a normal length. (My novels are now novel-length.)
And then I started this project. I don't get much in the prompts: a couple of nouns, maybe. Sometimes there's a full sentence of description, which is usually, oddly, harder to write--more restriction. At any rate, there isn't enough to write a full-length short story off the top of my head, fleshed-out characters and plot and setting. I've never been great at working off prompts.
But a quick minute of brainstorming usually brings up a scenario, a place, a person, and the point of these isn't that they are the best or the most thought-out stories in the world: the point is my friends getting a story that I wrote for them, the point is the act of writing them.
In that state of just-writing-it, maybe even purer than exists for NaNoWriMo, there have been some unexpected moments of grace. Sometimes the whole thing feels flat, but that's okay--sometimes it curls up in itself, or twists out at the last moment into something beautiful.
Because they're so short, the vast majority of their work is done in implication, in subtext. But in obvious subtext, because there isn't enough time to build up the soundless structures that hold up a full short story, or a novel.
So, since I was thirteen, I've kind of come full circle. I'm going to loop back out again as soon as I get back on campus next week and start trying to buckle down and write The Urban Fantasy Novel. Since I have 23 left to write, though, I'll probably keep writing shorter things for a while, too.
And, who knows? Maybe after I'm done with all of them, I'll start writing flash fiction. It's a fun length.