Mark Twain's Apology

Mark Twain famously wrote, in a letter to a friend, "I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead."

A man after my own heart.

My problem, though, isn't so much about a lack of time; I don't know how. Anything I write tends toward saga very quickly. There are some aspects of the writer's craft that I do well -- dialogue, character building -- but brevity is not one of them.

There is a short story contest I want to enter, and to that end I've been working on a few stories that I began in a writers' group a few years ago. The few people who have read them, though, have not been impressed. To help me in this endeavor, I've read a few blogs that cover short story writing.

The first question is "What makes a story?" Any story. A story needs to be more than an incident or a series of vignettes. But a short story needs to create character in few words and may need to abandon a description of setting altogether. Typical story structure features a protagonist with a problem, who tries to solve the problem and fails (perhaps repeatedly), until he makes a final attempt. At this climax, the protagonist tries one last time, to either succeed or fail.

This is very difficult to achieve in only a few thousand words.

The "Hero's Journey" can be entirely contained within a short story, but not all steps need to be described in stand-alone scenes. Steps can be implied or inferred rather than described explicitly. Philip Brewer writes, "For example, lots of stories can be thought of as the first few steps on the Hero’s Journey: a challenge, a rejection of the challenge, and then an acceptance of the challenge. The acceptance of the challenge is the climax of the story. The “validation” segment of the story should imply the rest of the Hero’s Journey. The reader should end the story knowing that there will be a road of trials, that evil will be confronted, and so on."

Larry Brooks makes a good point, as well. A short story needs to have all of the core elements of storytelling -- concept, character, theme, structure, scene execution, and voice. "To pull this off, the short story writer needs to be perhaps even better at one specific aspect of the storytelling craft than the novelist. The short story writer needs to be mission-driven. The writer’s intentions – which implies a clear understanding of why this story needs to be written – requires a clear, concise objective before it can work."

And right there is where I fall down. When I write my novels, I have an idea, and usually an ending, but I generally don't know what will happen between the first page and the last. My characters often steer the story.

If I'm going to write a successful short story, I'm going to need to be in control. I'm the writer, after all.