A Short History of My Short Stories

I started my writing career by writing novels. In sixth grade, I started a rather weird grand novel that didn’t go very far; in seventh grade I got to read in English class my twenty-page magnum opus that was the beginning of a novel or set of novels which I developed in my head most of the way through college. In eighth grade I started a novel which ended up with three drafts, the third of which I finished my first year in college. In college I wrote one novel, and then wrote about a third of another.

I did a short story or two in the meantime – in junior high writing class, in college writing class – but I wasn’t particularly enamored of doing them. I had big ideas; I wanted to write big stories. I wanted to write whole series of big stories. I wanted to be the next Tolkien, and create worlds for my novels that were so detailed and complex that it seemed like they really existed. Okay, a short story or two was good, but it wasn’t my true calling. I wanted to create works that would pull in readers for hours and keep them spellbound for weeks.

I still do. Novel writing is still my first love, and I have now been working for decades on improving my work. But somewhere between my first rush when I realized I could wield power through words, and the point at which I started thinking I might really be able to publish, I started thinking about publishing strategy. And what I came up with was this: I was more likely to be able to get short stories published than novels, but having a publication history would make it easier to get novels published. So I started working on my short stories.

When I started working with non-school workshops, my short story output increased a great deal. I wasn’t quite ready to float my novels through a potentially hostile environment (not all workshops have to be, and my first was a mixed bag, but I wasn’t ready for the kind of critique I would have gotten at that point.)

So, for both of those reasons, I started writing short stories. At first they weren’t great. The punch a short story needs in order to be effective is very different from the development of a novel, and I was so focused on the long story that I had trouble formulating a shorter and punchier tale. In addition, I’d come up with what I thought were great ideas, ones which had funny endings or unique ideas, and discovered that others weren’t nearly as enamored of them as I was. It was tough to bring my budding ideas into a workshop, only to hear why they didn’t work. And frankly, they didn’t.

My first real inkling that I could do this was getting a favorable personal rejection from a major magazine (I later rewrote that story and it got accepted as the first story in an anthology). So I kept on writing.

Transitioning out of one workshop, searching for others that would give me what I needed, trying to find beta readers – all of these things took time and effort. I started picking back up with my novels in the early 90’s, and suddenly things started to work. I began to be able to use words with the precision I wanted, and to have a good idea of what effect my word choice had on my readers. That was exciting; not having to write by ‘feel’, but by understanding of how to create imagery, atmosphere, theme. And though I was working hard on getting novels done (five of them) I continued to write short stories, keeping in mind my strategy: short stories first, then novels.

What I chose to write about was different than what I had tried to do earlier. I started looking at what made short stories work, and why many novel writers weren’t good at shorts. I looked at fairy tales and folktales, and tried to figure out what made them so powerful. I started looking at new angles on old themes, making new stories out of old. I tried to make intriguing characters that carried a strong plot, and learned to create an economy of details that still contained powerful imagery but did not bog down the story. Most importantly, I focused on streamlining what I wanted to convey with my stories. And they got better.

I am still a bit better at the longer shorts stories, but I have learned a thing or two about the shorter ones. My first two publications came at about the same time (two stories bought by the same publisher for different magazines) and they were both quite short. One of them was an incident in the life of a secondary character in one of my novels; one of them was a six-hundred word story I’d written for my oldest niece when she was ten because she loved dragons.

I realized that I could do this. And I have. I’ve even gotten a couple of personal rejections from the top magazine in my field, which is the next best thing to getting an acceptance. (No annoying form letters!)

More than that, my strategy was right. The first longer piece I got published was actually solicited by my main publisher, who was also glad to look at my novel (my first but hopefully not my last!) that I had been working on. My short stories have continued to sell, though I don’t churn them out at a furious pace, and I have been consistently published by small presses. I’m still looking for that big sale to a major publisher, but I can say that I’ve gone through the publishing gauntlet and found worthy of publication from more than one source.

It’s helped improve my desire to write short stories as well; within the last few months I’ve written four, and re-written an older one for a charity anthology. That may not seem like a lot, but I’m also in the middle of two novels which are more than a little tricky, plus working on a self-published anthology of some of my short stories.

Because I’m proud of them. I’ve taken what I didn’t think I could do well, and made it into something which gives me a signature style. And the interesting thing is how much learning to write short stories has improved my novel writing; being able to work with a scene that needs to be tight and effective is so much easier when I know how to economize my words. I don’t mean that my novels are terse – they’re fairly descriptive, and not everyone’s dish – but I’m so much better at finding the core in any scene which needs to be shown to the reader in order to make the impact I am shooting for. So it’s a love affair both ways: novels to short stories to novels.

I don’t know what my next short project will be – but there will certainly be one. And maybe one of these days I’ll get a major publisher to take notice.