Summer Writing Lessons

This summer feels like it has lasted way longer than three months. An entire month was spent studying and preparing for my qualifying exam, but it paid off and I passed!! I cannot express how much of a relief that is. But that's not what you are here for; this blog is about writing. I've done a lot of that too.

July was all about writing short stories. Sometimes it felt like I wasn't even reading what I wrote. I've looked back and I hardly remember writing some of the things from the beginning of the month. It was a race to put out as many short stories as possible to get points. Amidst the madness of earning points, I ending up refining my writing in ways I hadn't anticipated.

Short stories are hard for me. I love my soaring epic fantasy plots and so challenging me to write things under 500 words is a challenge indeed. It forced me to focus on one, maybe two, instants in time. It is a snapshot of a story, yet it must also tell a story by itself. This is a little bit easier in fanfiction when you can use established characters that readers will know, but when you start going into more bizarre AUs, they might as well be original characters. It forces me to think carefully about indirect characterization. Can I hint at their personality in the way they speak? Not just their word choice, but what they notice. What about body language while they speak, or even describing the surroundings they find themselves in.

Possibly the story I did that best in was The Warlock's Creation. In these few lines I hoped to tell you about the protagonist's feeling of being an outsider, not belonging. His longing to find a world where he could be appreciated for what he had rather than mocked for what he lacked. I think I did alright.

For all his cleverness, he had forgotten his umbrella. He was quite sure his grandmother would scold him and send him for a hot shower when he got home. ... Someday he would step through a painting. Vanish into a world where magic was but a legend. He kicked his feet as he walked, splashing water everywhere.

As part of our friendly competition during July, we had prompt tables. I've done this previous summers and I barely managed to finish one 9 prompt square. But I am competitive and those earn me bonus points so I stretched myself. It was still hard, but I found this easier to create the short stories. The crazy prompts weren't inspiring any plot for a grand story, but I could come up with ideas about what characters were like, what they valued, and how they acted. And for a short story, sometimes that was all I needed.

While this ability to write to a prompt might not be useful when I am working on novel length stories, I do have side characters. Previously I would just throw out a name for a person who worked in the kitchens and maybe one small defining detail, but this doesn't do them justice. As an author, I should know more about that character than the reader knows. In the future, I aim to pause when I need a new side character and write 300 words about them. No strict fields to fill in, just anything that comes to mind to give them a bit more life, even though they may only appear for one page in a story and then potentially get edited out in a later draft. If I have learned anything while writing Twin Tales it's that small characters keep wanting to return.

My month of short stories is over, but I hope I can use these lessons to improve my longer stories. After all, what is a novel but a collection of short scenes.