Tag: short story

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Back Into Short Story Writing

I’ve been unwell for the last five days or so. It’s been frustrating in many ways, having to stay in the house most of the time. On the other hand, it’s given me the impetus to work on some writing.

The work referenced in this entry was published under a pseudonym on a well-known website. For the avoidance of doubt, I’m still not at a stage where I wish to claim ownership of this, so the references to the plot will be vague.

A year ago this month, I finished writing a series that was supposed to be a one-off but ended up as 24 parts. I was partially spurred on by the positive reaction to the previous parts, plus I was able to take the existing characters to different locations where they met new characters, which generated new plot points.

In the intervening time, I’d had another promising central idea plus a few unused plot points that couldn’t be put into the first series. I then spent some time figuring out how to differentiate the two universes.

In April, the elements fell into place and I published a new story on the same website. I made it clear this was not related to the previous series, but I did believe there would be a second part, so I left the ending open enough to allow for that.

And that’s what I’ve been working on while I’ve been in the house. I think this series will be five parts long, so significantly shorter than the first series, but I don’t yet know where this will take me next.

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A Short Spell of Reading

I have a group of pals who hold a readathon approximately every three months, typically coinciding with the equinoxes and solstices. It used to be an intensive twelve hours but has settled down into a more relaxed two-day format.

Ahead of the most recent one on Friday and Saturday, I went to the library and found two short story collections, namely:

  • Her Body & Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado.
  • The Rental Heart and Other Fairytales by Kirsty Logan.

I started with the Kirsty Logan one. I’d enjoyed her novel The Gracekeepers, and I even met her at a launch on its release. But the esteem in which I hold the novel didn’t translate to that collection.

Back in July, I wrote an entry about short stories and how readers need to feel satisfied before the end of the narrative. I also prophetically ended the entry by saying I would park the thought for the moment with the intention of returning at some point. This is that point.

In the case of the Logan collection, I’d like to turn to a different metaphor. Each story is a jigsaw puzzle rather than a picture. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that, and a few of the stories worked. However, it’s necessary to make sure all the pieces are there so the reader can mentally assemble them and this didn’t work in a lot of cases. A story about a coin-operated boy simply baffled me towards the end.

I’m only part-way through the other collection, but all the pieces are present, so I’m enjoying the stories much more.

Taking the time to read has also encouraged me to continue with other projects. For instance, I submitted a 50-word-story to a competition run by the Scottish Book Trust. I’ve then continued some overdue work on my stage monologue. Who knows what else I’ll manage to tackle when I next dislike a book?

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How to End a Series That Was Never Meant to Be a Series

For the last three years, I’ve been writing a fantasy series under a pseudonym on a well-known website.

To set your expectations, this has been purely a passion project. I’m not at a stage where I wish to claim public ownership – and I might never be. As such, there will be no links to the series in this entry and only vague references to the plot. However, I feel now is the time to bring the series to an end, so I’ll be discussing the mechanics of this.

Back in September 2020, I published the first part, intended as a one-off story. It received a positive reaction, plus I found there was more I could do with the characters. I went on to write a sequel, then a third instalment, then a fourth. All the while, I’d been peppering my introductions with hints that the next story might be the final one.

In the early days of the series, my greatest hurdle was adding characters and moving them to new locations once the plot was exhausted in the first location. I was able to do this by taking unnamed side-characters from the first two stories and applying some retroactive continuity, known as retconning. Around the fifth story, the series had grown enough legs that it could stand up as its own self-contained universe.

Three months ago, I posted my 23rd part, and the 24th will definitely be where it ends. It’s taken so long because I wanted to tie up the loose ends while taking all the necessary space to explore that ending. So while most parts of the series have ended up between 1,500 and 2,500 words, the finale is likely to touch 5,000. There is even a circle back to the early days with the surprise return of two characters.

After that, I’m considering compiling the parts into a single volume and giving it some more editing, but that’s a long way off at this stage.

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Janae and Jenny Join a Gym

On this blog, I don’t generally post poems or stories. Instead, I look mainly at what’s behind the writing. There’s a simple reason for this. Once a piece has been published online, most publishers won’t consider it. After all, how would they expect to sell books if the text can be found on a website?

I’m today making an exception because I’m unlikely to send the featured story to any publications. It’s dedicated to a poet pal called Ross McCleary, who – incidentally – has been published by Stewed Rhubarb.

Every day, Ross features running jokes on his Twitter account. These are too numerous and nuanced to discuss in detail, but one of these is a weekly critique of the You Be The Judge section of The Guardian, where readers are invited to voice their opinions on an issue dividing a friendship or relationship.

On Friday, it was a couple who attend the same gym but have very different attitudes to working out. I quipped to Ross that I could write a short story with the title Janae and Jenny Join a Gym. He replied simply that he wouldn’t read that.

So for the benefit of everyone else in the world, here’s that story.

The story

It was straight out of a romcom, the way they met. The short version is that Jenny Aitkin and Janae Atkin both began working at the same time in separate departments of a multinational company. After months of each accidentally receiving emails for the wrong person, they finally met at the Christmas party, had a good old laugh about the situation – and quickly became a couple.

That was a year ago. I discreetly checked the calendar. Whatever had initially attracted them must have long worn off because they’d now spent half their relationship coming to me.

‘Your trouble is,’ said Jenny, interrupting herself to turn to me, ‘her trouble is, every time we go, Janae is constantly scrolling on her phone. We’re there to work out.’

‘I pace myself. What’s the point in burning yourself out on the warm-up?’

‘We were in a high-impact class.’

‘I told you I wasn’t ready for that.’

I raised my hand. ‘Hang on. What did the instructor say about this?’

‘Nothing,’ said Janae, ‘just got on with the class.’

‘But the other people, the other regulars, they’ve all noticed. They’re full of praise about what I’m doing, but she wouldn’t know that because she never pays any attention, too busy taking pictures and… God knows what.’

‘All right,’ I said, ‘let’s not throw around accusations. Let’s drill into this a little further.’

I asked Janae to talk freely without interruption under the pretence of giving her side of the story. In reality, it was a distraction. Over the last six months, I’d made a couple of key observations about the relationship between Jenny and Janae. Firstly, to my mind, they acted like an animated DVD menu. Unless someone actively pushed a button to interrupt it, you would hear the same drivel coming back around every couple of minutes.

I nodded tactically at her version of events. Speaking by herself, she always stuttered quite a bit, as though she was missing the regular counter-argument from Jenny.

‘Go on,’ I encouraged, after a particularly long pause.

‘Wait,’ said Jenny, ‘where the hell is all this coming from? This is all out of the blue.’

‘Let her speak,’ I soothed.

Which brings me to my second key observation. In older couples, it’s common to see a high level of co-dependency. Yet these two were both under 30 and both in the unwavering mindset that a couple must do everything together. Of the many ethical issues associated with being a counsellor, none of my practice colleagues ever discussed the issue of keeping a couple together for the sake of repeat business, even if they were each other’s biggest problem. In fact, it would be out of order for me to suggest splitting up.

So I’d encouraged them to join a gym, suggesting they might benefit from spending 30 minutes – maybe an hour – on different equipment, then exchanging notes later on. I knew full well they couldn’t, although I didn’t predict how wildly different their attitudes would be.

Speaking of partnerships that weren’t working, I’d wanted to break away from this practice for a couple of years now, run things my way instead of gaining approval the other counsellors. I saw an opportunity here. For the last six months, every penny I’d received from these clients was paid into a savings account by standing order.

If they stayed together long enough, they were going to buy me a deposit on my own business premises. I’d already made enquiries about reserving the business name: Russ Norloch: Relationship Counselling.

I noticed we were less than five minutes from the end of the session. It was time to play one of my favourite moves: the holibobs card.

‘Okay,’ I said, ‘you’ve been a couple for a year now. It occurs to me you’ve not been away together yet, am I right?’

‘That’s right.’

‘May I suggest a short Christmas break somewhere nice – a long break if you can spare the time. I think you both deserve one.’

‘Oh we do,’ said Jenny. ‘I’ve got trip ideas coming out my ears.’

Janae turned to face her. ‘Really? That’s news to me.’

With six more months of arguments virtually guaranteed, I said, ‘Have a think about where you want to go, and I’ll see you both at the next session.’

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Where to Start?

I’m attempting to write the 22nd instalment of a short story series. It was supposed to be a one-off piece, so to reach this point is a tremendous achievement. But because of the existing body of work, this plot in this part has to be consistent with the rest. It therefore needs to include two particular elements:

  • A small piece of wrap-up from the previous story.
  • A scene where one of the characters makes amends with the rest of the group.

The trouble is that these elements need quite a bit of explanation. They’re slowing down the plot, even when I start in the middle of the action and refer back to them. At this stage, I might have to take the story in a different direction, as long as it fits with what’s gone before.

The good part is that there’s no particular deadline for this piece of work. It’s for a private group and I’m under no obligation to write anything. In this case, however, a deadline might be useful to focus my thoughts. Maybe I can impose one on myself and come up with a workable solution.

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Expelling the Exposition

Last week, I was inspired to write a short story, but it needed a lot of background information to be included before the action happened. As I was planning it out, though, I couldn’t figure out how to explain it without boring the reader.

In the years I’ve been writing, one technique I’ve found to work is simply to write the story, exposition and all. Afterwards, it’s usually a case of taking a step back and trying to carve out a structure from what’s on the page.

In this case, I had a character that should have arrived at a place by 6pm and was uncontactable by phone until 8pm before finally showing up at 9:30pm. I initially had the action take place at 8pm, with the characters holding a conversation between that time and 9:30pm.

Looking back over what I’d written, I realised I could dispense with the 8pm call and set the action nearer 9:30pm. That had the effect of both reducing the explanation and intensifying the surprise as the arrival was now completely unexpected. I also placed much of the exposition into dialogue instead of descriptive paragraphs.

That meant I could start the action earlier and it took off with gusto. I wrote so much that I was able to split the narrative, with a cliffhanger between the two parts.

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Thinking Time

My main way to consume novels and other publications is to listen to the audiobook version. This allows me to walk or run or be otherwise active at the same time, so I tend to read paper books only if there’s no other option.

However, I also go through periods of not listening to anything, and I’m currently in one of these periods.

I mentioned in my last entry that I’d been unwell, but that I was able to finish a short story I’d half-written. I’m feeling much better, and I’m back to leaving the house for much longer periods. I’ve been using this time to think about the sequel to that story, and now that’s coming along nicely.

I’ll eventually be ready to go back to the audiobooks, but I can’t see that happening for a little while yet, at least until that sequel is completed. But when that day comes, I’ll be able to pick up from where I left off.

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The 5am Story

One of the pieces of advice often given to beginner writers is to keep a notepad and pen by your bedside to write down any ideas that occur in the middle of the night. I’ve said a few times on here that this has never worked for me. Yet something happened last week that helped me with a current project.

I woke up before 5am on a couple of occasions last week, and was unable to get back to sleep. It’s a dangerous distraction to switch on your computer at that time, but I decided to give it 20 minutes, then head back to bed.

Instead, I ended up solving a problem with a story that wasn’t coming together properly. There were a lot of solid plot points that were difficult to arrange into a logical narrative. This was also part of a series, so there needed to be a little explanation for those who hadn’t read the previous instalment, but not so much that it slowed down the pace.

The breakthrough came after about ten minutes, and once I’d arranged the first few paragraphs into the right order, the rest followed. It’s now up to more than 1,300 words with more to follow, and the next story in the sequence will include the points I had to leave out of this one.

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Writing Prose Again

When I first began writing in 2010, my output was exclusively prose. I was in a writing prompt group where I would regulary produce short stories. Around the same time, I was producing longer works through National Novel Writing Month, normally known as NaNoWriMo.

My step into poetry happened around three years later. It coincided with being single for six months after a long-term relationship, but I can’t say how much that influenced me. Since then, I’ve crafted my poetry more and more to the point where I almost exclusively write verse.

Recently, however, that has started to reverse, perhaps because my poetry group is taking a one-month break. I’ve drafted one piece that will probably end up being no longer than 150 words, and I’m planning another with five characters who will likely dictate the length of the story before I know it myself.

NaNoWriMo is a contest to write 50,000 words in November. It’s not widely known outside this circle that there is a less formal contest at other times of the year known as Camp. April saw the last one, and we’re currently in the July edition. In these months, you pick your own word count and type of long-form piece.

However, I’m not writing these stories as part of Camp as I don’t intend them to be terribly long. What I’ll be doing instead is keeping aside my existing longer pieces and working on them during November.

What I have to do now is find a way to keep up my prose momentum from now until then. That said, the excitement in the group tends to swell around November, and that helps a lot.

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Rejected, but not Neglected

I’ve been invited to appear on a new podcast called Story Circle Jerk. It was started by my pal Kai Durkin to showcase short stories and music, either self-written or from others. We’ll be recording our episode at the end of the month, giving me a deadline to prepare material.

One part of my appearance will be an interview about my open-mike evenings. I’ll have to do some preparation for this, so I cover the all main points without overloading the listeners with information.

The other part will involve me reading one of my own short stories. The one I immediately reached for was a piece called Him, in which the narrator talks about seeing his life replayed through his own eyes after his death. I wrote this in 2014, with its most recent revision dated 2018.

Between these dates, the story was rejected by six different publishers. However, I’ve also read it to an audience on a number of occasions during that time; I deliver it in a slow and stark tone, inspired by Salman Rushdie reading Concerning The Bodyguard by Donald Barthleme. As such, it seems to work better on stage than on the page so I still have faith in it.

The story will need to be revised a little. The way I start the process is by reading it out loud, not to an audience, but to myself. If it sounds excessively wordy, or if I find myself unable to follow a plot point, it needs to be revised. This particular piece, however, shouldn’t need too much changing for Story Circle Jerk.

Another podcast I can recommend is The Beans Podcast, run by three friends. Be advised that it’s not specifically about writing, but covers many topics, from advice columns to caffeine to nuclear bombs.