March's WIP: DONE, in spite of 2 weeks of "no phone/no notes" issues! I AM UNSTOPPABLE! |
I used to think I couldn't write a short story to save my life. All
of my ideas blossomed into multi-chapter affairs, which in turn spread
the story out so far as more and more details filtered in, that I would
get burned out and either wind down to a lame finish... or I would end
up not being able to finish at all. Even the "flash fiction" one-shots I
would attempt consistently ended up longer than the traditional
>1,000 words, even if such a thing only took me a couple hours.
Then
I invented the Suggestion Box challenge. There would be no way for me
to over-plan, because I HAD to get it done in one week. At the same
time, having four elements to tie together helped ensure that the story
could become a reasonable length. The Suggestion Box taught me a thing
or two about story development. And even when I compiled all the lists
from that series into a longer, 5-part story for NaNoWriMo, I had plenty
of words to use, and I just went for drawing it out as long as I could.
It went fairly well, and I had a couple pretty interesting stories to
make the word count.
The one story, "The Legacy", told about a
girl whose father is a theoretical physicist and her mother is
the daughter of a well-known explorer who spent most of her life
searching for the Fountain of Youth. The explorer's daughter never quite
forgave her mother for being so absent, and so she resolved to keep her
own daughter close and to never travel, herself. All that changes when
the daughter discovers the Persian silk scarf the explorer sent her, and
notices the code that her grandmother had designed into the scarf, and
that leads them to a safe deposit box that holds the map to the
Fountain, and access to the funds necessary to be able to make the trip.
Of course, by the time the mother gives in and agrees to let the
daughter pursue the map and the fountain, it's too late for her, and by
the time anybody actually finds anything in the location on the map,
even the daughter is too old to travel.
The second story, "The Vega Effect", is connected to "The Legacy" because the scientist father
ends up being the foremost pioneer in space colonization efforts, so
naturally, space colonies and terraformers would regard him quite
favorably. This story out of all the others really tapped into my horror
side (mild-ish though it may be...) since it involves a Terraforming
Investigator tasked with the job of figuring out what killed everybody in
one settlement, and he only finds out after the pilot who brought him
all this way ends up betraying him and he ends up succumbing to the very
same plague without ever getting to the bottom of the mystery.
Of
course there are way more details than that, but you get the basic
gist: complex, widespread plots, well-populated and definitely not going
to fit in less than 10 thousand words apiece.
Four Years Later... (present time)
Sometime
about the end of last year (or the beginning of this one), I
volunteered to be part of a charity anthology benefiting the
International Bipolar Foundation in memory of Carrie Fisher and Debbie
Reynolds. At first, I viewed it as the perfect opportunity to polish up
one or the other of these stories I already had written, thereby costing
me minimal effort to be published yet again!
Then I found out that the word count limit was 7,500 words.
So
there went any chance of me just touching up an existing story and
calling it good. If I was going to end up rewriting the whole thing
anyway, I figured that combining elements of the two stories was the
best way to deal with this situation.
But how in the world was I going to do that... with LESS words than even one of those stories??
Breaking It Down
To solve this issue, I had to think of each story as a series of parts, and not one indivisible unit. A few years back, I used The Suggestion Box as my example for a "How To Story" post... now I'm going to try and use "The Starborn Legacy" as the example for "How To Short Story."
The
first part was setting: both stories begin on Earth, but the focus in
"The Legacy" shifts to an undiscovered "buried city" that is the site of
the Fountain of Youth, while "The Vega Effect" centers, of course, on
terraformed colonies in another part of the galaxy. I decided that since
the anthology would have a "celestial" sort of theme, a far-future
space colony would be a good choice for the setting.
From
there I needed to move on to the premise: which would I use? The
mysterious dying colony and the grumpy, sarcastic pilot with something
to hide, or a mother and daughter trying to relate to one another, with
emotional baggage from an absentee explorer matriarch in the family?
After a bit of deliberation, I picked the mother-daughter story, with
the added twist of the scientist father being part of the team
investigating this failed colony where everyone just dropped dead all of
a sudden. There would be the drive to figure out why they collapsed,
and the possibility of an explanation or a cure—on top of the
mother/daughter drama.
Which leads us to the
conflict: Where would my principal story land? On the one hand, I have a
treasure hunt that the mother and daughter embark on together, to show
support for one another when they finally come to an understanding. On
the other, I have a lone investigator who winds up missing the hints and
clues dropped by a character who is revealed to have been somehow the
villain all along, and that particular story does not have a happy
ending.
Solution? With the shorter word-count space, I could
only build up the relationship conflict so much, before I had to go
right into the climax. Then, there was also the dimension of actually
bringing the "mysterious virus" to bear on the actual characters,
throwing them even closer to the peril. The result of this turned out
even better, as instead of the "Fountain of Youth reveal" adapted from "The Legacy" being
something cool but irrelevant, I was able to actually figure out a way
to make the discovery of Natalys relevant to my characters. I also
turned being Starborn into something awesome and positive, instead of
freakish and terrible.
As for what remained of
the resolution... well, okay, by that time I had gone over my word
limit, so it was just a matter of giving things closure as quickly as
possible. It didn't end up as detailed as I would have liked, but I
think it will suffice. For now, it is off to Beta readers, and I am
optimistic that they will assist me in figuring out what is extraneous
verbiage and what I should have been focusing on.
Conclusion
So
there you have it! Everything you need to know about "The Starborn
Legacy"! I hope I didn't spoil it too much. And I hope you will consider
picking up a copy of the book when it releases! It's a good cause, and
the authors and artists involved are great!
In
summary: A short story has far less to it than a full-length story. The
"3-Act" plan (Intro->Problem->Solution) is still effective, even
in the confined space of only a few thousand words. And even long,
drawn-out stories can be simplified effectively.
Catch You Further Upstream!
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