Tuesday, 27 January - SWG Meeting - Anthology, Anthology, Anthology

The Savannah Writers Group will meet on Tuesday, 27 January at The Atlanta Bread Company at 7 PM. As always, these meetings are free and open to the public.

Unfortunately, we have received a cancellation from our previously scheduled guest speaker, Elaine Duree.

Instead, the focus of this meeting will be our upcoming anthology!

Speaking of anthologies, one topic that comes to mind is writing short fiction. The average anthology does not allow for pieces with a high word count. I came across a lovely blog entry dealing with that very topic.

You've heard of short and sweet? Well, in my experience, writing concise work is very difficult! There's nothing sweet about it!

Let's see what Tom Dullemond has to say on the matter.

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PUTTING THE SHORT IN SHORT STORIES

I’ve heard it said that super short fiction is easy to sell and hard to write. I wouldn’t go so far as saying it’s easy to sell, but they sure got the second bit right.  

As a primarily shorter fiction writer, 3,000 words is a long story for me, although in fairness whenever I do need to write a 3,000 word story I find myself railing at the constraints. “Just another 500 words, that’s all I need!” But what about really short fiction, of say 1,500 words? Or really really short stuff around the 500 word mark? How do you even write a story like that? Or once you have a story that’s just a few hundred words too long, how do you cut it down without losing all those beautiful word babies?

If you have no problems writing to word limits then you’re lucky; you can stop reading this article now.

For the rest of you, I have one word: Focus! Focus focus focus.

I write flash fiction for a regular bi-monthly SF column, with a 500 word limit that I inevitably push out to 600 words. When you’re writing flash fiction at that length you don’t have a lot of free space to fill with superfluous but infinitely interesting background information about your characters and worlds and plots. You have to be ruthless.

Writing short fiction is all about efficiency, and the shorter your story the more efficient you need to be.

Here are three things to help cut down your story wordage:

• Plot Focus

Focus on the one thing your story is trying to say. The longer your piece, the more nuance you can explore in your plot. Conversely, a 500 word flash piece leaves very little time to introduce the scene and characters, start the plot, and nail the conclusion. There is no room for subplots or exploration outside of the core concept of your piece.

• Characters

Keep them to a minimum. I’ve started flash stories with ‘a group of children’ and then named about four of them so there could be an interesting conversation on the way to the story conclusion. My editor threw the extra characters out: the story was more than capable of making its point with just two characters. I grumbled and moaned but I had a word limit to hit and, well, she had a point.

• Efficiency of Language

There is no room for thematically appropriate purple prose in super short fiction. Start trying to make each word count for more, make your verbs do more of the descriptive and mood-setting work. When you are throwing verbs around stuff is happening, characters are doing things. Try to hitch your world building and description to your plot-progression.

This is also where clever word choice can help you show rather than tell the reader about your world.
Obviously these points are broadly applicable to writing in general, depending on the kind of atmosphere you’re trying to achieve, but when you have that dreaded word count ticking up to 2,000, 1,500 or even 500 words they suddenly take on an entirely new level of importance.

Good luck, writer!

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Tom Dullemond stumbled out of university with a double degree in Medieval/Renaissance studies and Software Engineering. One of these degrees got him a job, and he has been writing and working in IT ever since. Tom has sold short fiction to a handful of anthologies and is co-author of the Pandora’s Paradoxes middle-grade fantasy series. He writes a regular flash fiction column for The Helix science magazine.

Poly geek, writer, IT nerd, skeptic and devoted cultist of the Great Old Ones.

Find Tom at his website, Dark Sylvan Ungulate, or on Twitter @cacotopos.
You can read Tom’s story “The Stitchcancer Poppet” in Fictionvale’s Episode Five: Of Magic and Mayhem (also available on Amazon).