Short Fiction: The Dilemma of Length.

English: Atmosphere of Mars taken from low orbit The Galle "smiley" crater can be seen to the left (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Are you plotter or pantster? I’m the latter, whether writing long or short fiction. This morning, with no thought in mind, other than that I wanted to write a science fiction short story, I sat at the keyboard and turned out 1,000 words, set on Mars, before breakfast. It was a little slower than normal, as I needed to search for international names for my characters (I make this easier by using a table I’ve developed over the years. It holds 10,000+ first names from all over the world, colour coded for gender, and noted with countries of usage for the names listed. It’s easy to search for names for a specific nationality by doing a search on that country. You can access a free copy on my blog, here.)

Later this morning, my wife and I took a longish walk in the local countryside: we enjoy regular fresh air and exercise for mental as well as physical wellbeing). This sort of gentle activity is an excellent opportunity for rumination. I carry a voice recorder to catch those ideas that pop to the surface as we walk, often in companionable silence.

The story I’d started was jostling with the natural landscape for attention. And, as so often happens when relaxed, a sudden idea struck me. The story is more suited to a greater length than the short story I’d envisaged. It’s an obvious candidate for a novelette; I guess at around 30-40,000 words. Now, because of the way I write, this isn’t a problem for me. I’ll have to re-write the beginning, since I no longer have to introduce 8 characters in such a short space, but that’s all to the good. It was the character numbers, an essential element of the story, that had caused me to pause in the writing. The solution was simple. Write a longer story.

And the purpose of this piece? Simply to illustrate that you don’t have to fence yourself in with story length if an idea isn’t working as expected. Examine it at leisure and decide whether it’s simply the chosen length that’s forming a barrier to creativity. My other sci-fi novelette, The Methuselah Strain, started out as a short story but it soon became clear I needed more space to examine the themes and develop the characters. So, don’t let word numbers confine you. Instead, allow the story to find its natural length and then find the suitable market for it. The current sci-fi novelette I’m developing will become a self-published ebook initially instead of the magazine-bound short story I’d started. Be flexible. It works. And the magazine story I’d intended? No matter: I’ll write another when the idea strikes.

What Will 2014 Bring?

Last year, around this time, I produced a blog post on my writing activity during 2012. Because I find it useful to detail my activities, and it may interest those who follow the blog, I’m repeating that exercise today for 2013.

It’s been a peculiar year in many ways. Socially and professionally there have been many events and changes. I retired from employment in April and celebrated my 65^th birthday in May. In September, my wife and I celebrated our 25^th wedding anniversary and, in the same month, our daughter reached the milestone age of 21. In December, my aunt reached the great age of 100. So many reasons to celebrate, and the freedom to do so in terms of travel and time.

I changed from PC to desktop iMac, an investment I’ve really appreciated in spite of a few disappointments (Apple’s definition of ‘intuitive’ is clearly not the same as mine!). But, in many ways this has been a positive change. I’m still learning, though. And, possibly the single most irritating aspect is the lack of a # on the keyboard, an exclusion that makes hash-tagging Twitter and Facebook posts far less simple than it otherwise would be: Apple take note!

I spent a good deal of time editing the first 2 volumes of my fantasy trilogy, since Fantastic BooksPublishing have accepted the work and will be publishing volume one, A Seared Sky – Joinings, soon. I also spent a lot of hours writing book 3 of the series. This year will see the editing of that volume, of course.

I wrote a few short stories and entered a couple of contests, though fewer than I intended. I made a start at writing poetry, and this is an activity I intend to increase over the coming years: it’s a different skill from prose writing and has a beneficial effect on that, developing the understanding of metaphor and simile as well as encouraging brevity.

On the admin side, I’ve continued with research and compilation of details of writing contests and you can find this regularly up-dated information under the Writing Contests tab above. Hope it’s useful.

Much of December I spent in experimentation on social networking. (The chart illustrates the portion of time spent on this) Really, I did this to confirm suspicions I acquired last year about the effectiveness of such activity for an author. It seemed to me that the apparently ubiquitous ‘author platform’ may be less than effective in actually garnering readers and selling books. This year’s activity has confirmed those suspicions and I shall be curbing my social networking activity this year to concentrate on writing, submitting and publishing stories, since it’s apparent that those writers who achieve wide readerships are the ones who publish more work. As I enjoy the actual writing more than any other of the activities that surround authorship, it will be a pleasure for me to take this turn.

I’m also intending to read more. I read 53 books in 2013 (most of them I reviewed as well) and I’ve set myself a target of 52 books over the year, using the Goodreads Reading Challenge as incentive for this.

I do, however, expect to exceed this target.

The chart at the top of this post shows the proportion of time I’ve spent on the various activities during the year. It’s noticeable that the activity on which I’ve spent most time is networking. Whilst there’s some satisfaction and much pleasure to be gained from interacting (not to mention the way it can help others), I have my doubts about its real value in relation to the activities of an author. The coming year will see a great deal more actual writing, editing, submission and publishing. I’m a writer, and writers write, after all.

So, to the comparison figures, where I list ‘achievements’ for the year. I gave a list for 2012, which I’ve repeated here, so we can see the comparison with 2013. Please note, it’s the left hand column that shows this year’s activities.

2013                                                                            2012

Published work:

None!                                                                          Sensuous Touches, an erotic anthology.

Heir to Death’s Folly, a gothic horror short story.

Rebirth, my contribution to the sci-fi anthology, Fusion,  published by Fantastic Books Publishing.

Writing Contests:

2 entered. No success                                                 4 entered, 1 short-listed.

Social Networking as at the end of each year:

2013                                                                            2012

Blog:

1181 posts                                                                  1062 posts

491 followers                                                              447 followers

181,769 page views                                                    85,511 page views

29,250 visitors identifying location                           18,882 visitors identifying location

Facebook:

Author Page: 569 ‘Likes’                                            379 ‘Likes’

Personal Profile: 1,795 Friends                                  1,599 Friends

Goodreads:

1,001 books listed as ‘Read’                                       882 books listed as ‘Read’

177 Reviews written                                                   130 Reviews written

125 titles in ‘to read’ list                                             136 titles in ‘to read’ list

3,231 Friends                                                              2,118 Friends

LinkedIn:

2,958 Contacts                                                           2,274 Contacts

Pinterest:

1,123 Followers                                                          662 Followers

7,305 Pins on 33 boards                                            4,774 on 32 boards

Google+:

559 in my circles                                                         336 in my circles

413 circles including me                                              183 circles including me

Twitter:

8,759 Following me                                                    5,110 Following me

8,758 I Follow                                                            5,012 I Follow

22,033 Tweets                                                            11,823 Tweets

As you can see, my social networks have all expanded quite significantly. However, this increase has had little impact on the number of books I’ve sold, which is you can expect less social activity this year and more in the way of writing. I’ll continue to record that here on the blog.

By all means add me on your social networks: I’m cutting down on the activity, not stopping it completely! Let’s see what 2014 has to offer, shall we?

Related articles

• 2014! New Year, New Goals!
• Start as we mean to go on!

My Writing Process - Blog Tour

Today is Blog Tour Day where authors answer questions about their writing process. Linda Acaster, novelist, writing tutor, and professional editor, posted last week, and I thank her for my invite. Check out her writing process here: 

As for my post: welcome. Can’t get many of you in here; the box room of a small bungalow isn’t big enough to house all my books, desk and equipment, never mind a group of interested visitors. One day I’ll get that house with a view over the sea, a large study and the antique desk I deserve. Until then, perhaps best if we continue to meet in the virtual world, or I might be accused of emulating the Black Hole of Calcutta!

1) What am I working on?

Last month, I took part in the NaNoWri Mo challenge (if you’re not familiar with it, have a look at the November posts for info). My project was the completion of the 1^st draft of book 3 of the fantasy trilogy I’ve been writing for a while. Now I’m about to start the lengthy and involved process of editing that raw draft to make it into a piece of writing that people will want to read. It currently stands at around 195,000words. Whether it will grow or shrink depends on what I decide to exclude and how much further description I include. Whilst I’m doing a first draft, I tend to concentrate on story and leave the details of setting and atmosphere until I start the editing stage. I think that’s one of the reasons I enjoy editing almost as much as the initial creation. I am also working on other writing projects: a novel in embryonic form, still growing in the subconscious; short stories, and I’m exploring poetry as a way of expressing some of my emotional responses to injustice, beauty, environment and other issues that arouse my passions.

2) How does my work differ from others of its genre?

Genre? Did someone say ‘genre’? I’m all for rules, when essential, but the idea that a book can be somehow labelled in any sort of precise way is anathema to me. Yes. Works of art can be pigeon-holed as ‘portrait’, ‘landscape’, ‘abstract’, ‘figurative’, etc. But I don’t think anyone would then subdivide these identifying labels into ‘male portrait with feather in hat’, or ‘landscape painting including characters from a mythical scene taken from Greek legend’. Okay, I know I’m exaggerating a tiny weeny bit, but it seems to me that the simple labels, ‘Romance’, ‘Mystery’, ‘Thriller’, ‘Crime’, ‘Historical’, ‘Sci-fi’ and ‘Fantasy’ ought to be enough for most purposes. The rest is just an effort to encourage readers to restrict themselves to very narrow forms of storytelling. And that is hardly healthy for readers, is it?

So, my work differs inasmuch as I stray outside the normal boundaries set by those who wish to attempt to restrict me to a specific genre. Breaking Faith is a romance featuring an element of the thriller and the mystery novel. My current fantasy trilogy, A Seared Sky, is an epic fantasy tale involving a quest within an invented world and all that implies, but including elements of the thriller, romance, crime and philosophy. Does that answer the question?  

3) Why do I write what I do?

My inspirations are multitude. My interests are wide. I’m a storyteller at heart, so I want to spread my imagination’s offspring to as wide an audience as possible. I write because I’m compelled by some weird internal guiding entity to express myself in the written word. My mind is full of ideas, characters, thoughts and questions and, since they excite, delight and intrigue me, I hope I can share those emotions with readers as I marshal them onto the page in the form of stories.

4) How does your writing process work?

I’m one of those writers for whom plot is a cage, so I write by the seat of my pants. For short works, I sit down at the keyboard and write. Usually, a story emerges. Sometimes, that story is usable, after a bit of editorial work to smooth the raw edges. If it isn’t, I discard or completely re-write it. With longer works, I am visited by an idea that demands attention. This can be something as simple as a question that floats out of the ether at a particular time. For example, Breaking Faith arose from a simple question that entered my mind as I stared into the depths of a slightly sinister natural hole in the ground: ‘What if there was a woman’s body down there?’ I’ve no idea where this came from, or why. But it was the trigger for the story. I generally start with interesting characters I’ve devised in advance. Then I work out a very, very loose framework on which I can hang challenges for my characters to face. I generally know the end, but I never know the journey I will take to reach that destination. I think it’s this lack of pre-ordained form and structure that prevents me entering the lucrative world of crime writing. That requires an approach that involves the solving of puzzles and the laying of false and true evidence along a trail. And that is too much planning for the way I work.

The current trilogy came out my questioning why it is that religion, as a general rule, is so fixated on sex and nudity and why, since most worshippers seem to be generally good people, those in charge are so often very far from good. But, avoiding the urge to preach my own version of what should be believed, I’ve turned the themes into a story that moves through landscapes and entangles many disparate characters into its multiple threads to take the reader on a ride that I hope will make them gasp, sigh, laugh and cry. Emotion, after all, is what reading is all about, so it is also what writing must be all about, too.

Monday 9th December: a very different author explains her writing process: Lynne Constantine is co-author of Circle Dance, a novel about two Greek-American sisters thrust into life-changing circumstances. There should have been two more authors to continue this tour from here, but, well, authors can be dreadfully unreliable you know!

Lynne Constantine’s love of the written word began early. An avid Nancy Drew reader in elementary school – the highlight of her week was going to the store with her father and buying the next book in the series. When the day arrived that she was able to solve the mystery half way through – she reluctantly set them aside and moved on to other books. For as long as she can remember, she has been prodded to “get her nose out of the book” when vacationing with friends. Her love of mystery and suspense is as strong today as it was back then and she is a voracious reader of thrillers and suspense.

She wrote her first book, Circle Dance, with her sister Valerie. Circle Dance was a legacy of love fueled by the desire to pass on to their children the traditions and experiences unique to them as second generation Greek Americans. Lynne was raised in a close-knit family surrounded by extended family and “adopted” family through the Greek community. Both she and her sister wanted to leave a legacy for their children and future generations of a bygone era.

Lynne attended Hellenic College where she earned her undergraduate degree in Human Development. She went on to earn her masters degree in Business Administration at Johns Hopkins University. She has an extensive marketing background and over eighteen years of business experience. She left the corporate world in 2000 to pursue her writing full time. She has written for magazines and journals but her true passion is fiction.

A native of Baltimore, Maryland, Lynne relocated to the New York area with her husband and children. In addition to her writing, she is active in her church and local community. She serves on the board of her town’s Women’s League – a philanthropic organization dedicated to helping women and children. She is passionate about education, reading, health, and wellness. She enjoys traveling, spending time on the beach and talking walks with her family and their adorable golden retriever.

Lynne is currently finishing up her next novel – a thriller.

Related articles

• My Writing Process - Blog Tour
• The Writing Process Blog Tour
• My Writing Process Blog Tour