Thursday, February 08, 2007

On writing short stories

For Creative writing the next large project (I think...a fiction essay is mentioned on the syllabus but I don’t know what that entails) is the short story in two drafts (rough and final of course).
I haven’t written very many short stories over the course of my writing career. Perhaps that is because I don’t read many of them. I’m not exposed to them. I’ve been reading full length novels for most of my life.
Be that as it may... I have to write a short story and I am almost completely stumped as to an idea. Actually as I sit here and type this an idea that I had earlier just returned to me. (I think I’d forgotten it...help me remember Juliette and her father) Anyhoo...
We read a past student’s work today in class (who just happens to bear the name of the university but is not the president :D) and it was pretty good. There were some overall aspects that I didn’t like but could easily learn to deal with them. I absolutely loved the second scene. But one of my biggest problems with the whole thing was the way the story neatly rose and fall. Everything wasn’t resolved of course as a less talented writer may have been tempted to do but something in my craves a full story...novel length.
We’ll see how this project goes.
I almost forgot that I was going to post my scene of conflict. I’ll do that for the next post.

2 comments:

Em said...

I'm like you in that I've spent most of my time reading full-length novels, though I do have a soft spot for short stories. There's just something about the punch of a well-written shorter story that thrills me - my favorite is "The Most Dangerous Game" because of that ending sentence. (I used it for a typography assignment for that reason, and it was fun.) Wouldn't it be great if short stories were published individually alongside novels? They'd be a lot cheaper, of course, and it would be neat to go to whatever genre you like in a bookstore (literary fiction, scifi/fantasy, whatever) and each one have a little short story section. I'd totally buy them - collect them, even, if they were published by a certain company and had a unity of design.

Hmmm, maybe I could start a business predicated on this idea...

eva said...

Yeah...definitely.
I like that idea. If they're cheaper then people might be more apt to randomly pick up one, buy it and read it. :D
Heh... and then there would be the ones that would buy them on purpose. :D