Why I’m Doing the Short Story Challenge and What I’ve Learned So Far
This year, I’m doing a Short Story Challenge. Initially, the idea of this was that I would analyse a classic short story each month and write a story based on what I learned. I only ended up analysing one classic story, but I am writing plenty, and since that was the main point I’m happy.
Also, because I now have a reasonable number of stories, I was able to take up Charles Barouch’s idea of a single-author collection as part of his scheme to promote HDWP Books’ Theme-Thologies.
So what do I hope to gain from this?
1. Practice. The storytelling part of writing is, I know, my weakest skill, and short stories are a good way to work on it in a concentrated way. And with the HDWP collection, I’m working with an editor who isn’t my usual editor (and who I’m not directly paying for), which is good for my development.
2. Exposure. Selling a short story to a magazine is like being paid to advertise your writing. So far, I haven’t sold to any major magazines, but I’m submitting, and have had an encouraging personalised rejection.
3. Credibility. Even being able to say that you’ve published with a small press carries more credibility in some quarters than self-publishing. Being able to say your stories have appeared in X, Y and Z magazines likewise builds social proof: gatekeepers have acknowledged your writing! (Which you and I know is nonsense, but it’s still how perception runs.)
4. Momentum. I’m a bit stuck on my next three novels, and writing short stories in between means at least I’m doing something while I figure out how to move forward with them.
5. Backlist. Having a good backlist appears to be a positive for authors these days – people seem more open to trying a new author if they have multiple titles out – and short stories can help increase the total.
6. Money. Per-word rates for even the top story magazines are not great, compared with the glory days of the pulps, but you can potentially pick up a few hundred dollars here and there. It all helps with the cover art and editing expenses.
7. Ideas. I have a lot of them, and don’t do much with most of them. If I’m regularly writing short stories, I can use the best ones. This inevitably uncorks the flow of ideas, and I get more and better ones.
8. Variety. Although most of my stories so far are in the Gryphon Clerks setting of my novels, I’ve started writing a few that aren’t, and it makes for a refreshing change and helps to keep me from burning out on my setting. There’s a particular mindset I have to get into, and a large amount of backstory and setting detail I have to hold in my head, to do a Gryphon Clerks story, and there are things from my everyday life that I can’t use because it’s in a secondary world. Those restrictions are removed if I do a story in another setting.
9. Failing fast. I can try things at short length and see if they work. If they don’t, no big.
10. Seized time. Particularly once I get further into a novel, I can only really work on it when I have a chunk of time to dedicate to it, because it’s larger to hold in my head (and I like to use Scrivener, which is only on one of my computers). I can work on a short story when I have half an hour to spare.
Fellow short story writers, anything you’d like to add?
#shortstorychallenge