I’m quietly working away on my nonfiction book, The Craft and Commerce of Short Story Writing, and thought you might like an excerpt from the first chapter: Why Write Short Stories?
The famous and prolific short story writer Ray Bradbury offered this advice to all beginning writers: write a short story a week for a year. His reason was that it provides quick turnaround, quick feedback, quick practice–and it’s unlikely that you’ll write 52 bad stories in a row. (He actually said “impossible,” but I wouldn’t go that far.)
Traditional publishing is famous for its long turnaround times for novels. Not only might you spend several years writing your first novel, but you could spend several more years (perhaps many years) searching for an agent, submitting to publishers, and waiting for them to come back to you–only to receive the answer “no,” in most cases. Some people are lucky enough to get a quick “yes” response, but it’s certainly the exception. Even once the answer is “yes,” there’s a further process of up to a couple of years to get it into the hands of readers.
In the meantime, you may not get much feedback on your writing, apart from anything you can get from a critique group. You could carry on writing, making the same mistakes, and have to spend a lot of precious time going back and correcting them later, if you don’t just scrap what you’ve written.
Short stories, by contrast, will get you much quicker feedback. Much of the time, especially at first, it will be nothing more than a form rejection, but later in the process you can get valuable personalised rejections (at least from some markets), and the even more valuable feedback of making sales and going through editorial critique. What’s more, the turnaround time for all of this is usually measured in months, rather than years.
All of that means that you can use short stories as a trial run for your ideas, and see what catches on without investing the time you would for a novel or series. As the startup entrepreneurs say, you need to “fail fast”–find out what works and what doesn’t work, so you can learn and move on.
For example, I have a project I call Makers of Magic. This is going to be a single-author collection of stories about people who use magic: wizards, witches, sorcerers, necromancers, alchemists and so forth. I managed to find 13 distinct terms, and the goal is to write 13 stories, sell as many of them as possible, and when the rights revert, combine them into a collection.
Not only does this give me a theme and a goal to work towards, but it allows me to try out 13 main characters in a dozen different settings (two of the stories are in my Gryphon Clerks world) and see which ones catch people’s imaginations. I can take different approaches to tone, voice, style and theme. The magic user can be the protagonist, the antagonist, or even a side character.
Some of the stories sold quickly. Others I’ve had difficulty selling at all. All of that is useful information. And it means that I can play, explore possibilities, and enjoy taking a variety of approaches to a subgenre (the “wizard story”) that I personally like to read.
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I’ll post a few more excerpts from Craft and Commerce as I work on it. Meanwhile, back to writing the actual short stories.
