I discovered this week that one of my 420-character submissions to Short, Fast and Deadly has been accepted and will appear in issue 25. I'm very excited about this, and the whole process was made doubly enjoyable by the polite and charming editor, who was good enough to respond to me within 24 hours.
Moreover, the other two 420-character pieces I wrote have given me great ideas for things to work up into proper short stories, which is excellent.
I'm struggling a bit with writing at the moment. My day job isn't something I can do on auto-pilot, and it's mentally exhausting. I'm finding it very hard to work all day, then come home and write. Not because I haven't got time, but because my brain is exhausted by the time I get home. Back in the distant days before I went to university and I did bar and retail work, this wouldn't have been a problem, because although I was physically shattered after a shift, my brain was raring to go. Now it's the other way round.
But, of course, I haven't got the option to give up work, so I need to find some sort of strategy to cope with this.
Friday, 30 April 2010
Tuesday, 27 April 2010
Brevity
This week, I have been mostly writing briefly.
Given my day job, which entails writing a lot of press releases, brevity is something I've tended to prize in my non-fiction writing. I also suffer from word-count OCD. So, if I've been given a word limit of 1,000 words, I like to write exactly 1,000 words. Not over. Not under. Exactly.
That doesn't mean I never ramble. I do. But I do like the challenge, the skill, of making every word matter. I actually think it's an underrated discipline. Many people, after all, can craft beautiful stories with vivid and evocative descriptive passages. But how many of them could convey the same thing, equally beautifully, in half the number of words?
With that in mind, and thanks to my good friend RS Bohn, who pointed me in the direction of a competition on deviantART, I've been writing some six word stories. Six word stories are nothing new, of course, but this is the first time I've tried writing any. I'm not sure I was entirely successful in what I was aiming to do with them, but I enjoyed the attempt. Also thanks to RS Bohn, I've written a few pieces of flash fiction. Not with a word limit... but with a character limit. 420 characters apiece, including punctuation and spaces. That's about the maximum length of a Facebook status update. For anyone who wants to practise telling a story clearly and briefly without losing the atmosphere or a essence of the piece, I can't recommend this exercise enough.
Given my day job, which entails writing a lot of press releases, brevity is something I've tended to prize in my non-fiction writing. I also suffer from word-count OCD. So, if I've been given a word limit of 1,000 words, I like to write exactly 1,000 words. Not over. Not under. Exactly.
That doesn't mean I never ramble. I do. But I do like the challenge, the skill, of making every word matter. I actually think it's an underrated discipline. Many people, after all, can craft beautiful stories with vivid and evocative descriptive passages. But how many of them could convey the same thing, equally beautifully, in half the number of words?
With that in mind, and thanks to my good friend RS Bohn, who pointed me in the direction of a competition on deviantART, I've been writing some six word stories. Six word stories are nothing new, of course, but this is the first time I've tried writing any. I'm not sure I was entirely successful in what I was aiming to do with them, but I enjoyed the attempt. Also thanks to RS Bohn, I've written a few pieces of flash fiction. Not with a word limit... but with a character limit. 420 characters apiece, including punctuation and spaces. That's about the maximum length of a Facebook status update. For anyone who wants to practise telling a story clearly and briefly without losing the atmosphere or a essence of the piece, I can't recommend this exercise enough.
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