Short fiction writing frustrations

Writing a short story is not easy. Well, not for me at least. Not at this point.

I’m working on a story that I’ve had in mind for some time now. It contains situations I’m personally familiar with and the plot is a bit surreal. Not fantasy or science fiction or anything. Just spooky and kind of gothic.

Anyhow, the problems I’m encountering are multiple and unexpected. I’ve always known that some elements about writing a short story would be a challenge. Finding “le mot just” (the right word) is an act of patience and contemplation and intuition. But it’s surmountable. Also, deciding narrative development; I knew this would be a thorn for me because of my shitty organizational skills. (Which is something I will need to improve upon, note to self).

But I’m finding different problems already. The first is length and pacing. I read that short stories generally have between a thousand and 7,500 words, depending on who is judging. Even if a couple thousand more is acceptable, that would seem to be a very long short story. Well, MY story, which is barely begun, is already past the 2,000 word point. At this rate the story will easily exceed 20,000 words, putting it squarely in the arena of novella or novelette.

I suppose that would be okay. But I do want a short story, one that, as Poe suggests in his definition of the short story, “can be finished in a single sitting.” Although single sitting lengths have changed over the years, I’d still like someone to be able to read my story in no more than two sittings maximum. What can I do?

Well, this brings me to my second problem, which is cutting and editing. Actually, it’s a more global issue than editing. It’s a lobectomy essentially—a huge swath of my story is, must be, perish the thought, in line for the chopping block. That means character elements I have developed, scenes, dialogue, setting—much of it should go if I want to get things down to a reasonable length. And also if I want to have a story that moves somewhere. Because I’m not yet ready to approach a novel or novella, I think that going for punch and economy of words is the best route to take.

So what do I do? Any suggestions? I have a couple of ideas; wanna hear ‘em? Okay. My first is to cut the parts but save them for another story somewhere, sometime. Put them in a drawer for later use when I’m looking for ideas, scenarios, scraps of dialogue or minor/major characters to employ. I think this may be a good approach. I know that good writers— all functioning writers—all trim their stories, cut off the dead branches, in large quantities sometimes. It’s still a difficult process for me. And my question is, Do they SAVE their aborted baby writings? Stem cells for stories? Or do they bury them, incinerate them and only leave traces for retrieval from the memory? I’ll have to check into that.

Another idea is pretty basic, and that is to study some short stories alongside the actual writing of mine. That way I can get a good idea of length and pace while composing. The risk though is that I will end up copying or emulating the writer I’m reading while I’m writing while reading the reading. Does that make any sense? Who’s on first?

The last idea is to go back to theories, philosophy of writing (Poe’s treatise “The Philosophy of Composition” and Anne Lamott's great book on writing “Bird by Bird” come to mind), books about writing short fiction, and reading collections of short stories—just read the shit out of them. Perhaps I’ve been reading too many novels recently. This could be the case. However, my mission now is to crank out a story, even if it’s not the best. A big part of becoming a true writer is learning to just write, not to critique everything as it happens. I’ll get nowhere if my editor side takes over my creator side.

So I’m going back in the tank and I am really going to try my hardest to finish this story (which I’ve drawn out for toooo long now, weeks and weeks and weeks) by tomorrow or the next day, lofty expectations be damned. And when I come back to it and say “this and this and this need fixing” I will accept the fixes and also the overall imperfection of the story. Wish me luck!