Adventures in LuLuland: Writing Shorts

Sunday, February 1, 2015

Writing Shorts

I'm not a long winded author. In fact, I mostly write short novels. Little Birdhouses, my current work in progress, may be the exception. However, until a week or two ago, I'd never written shorts. I've been playing with flash fiction for the last few weeks. I've found I really enjoy it, but I have a hard time finding appropriate endings.

Endings are hard to write. I often rewrite an ending several times before settling on one. I let my characters lead me, but sometimes they don't lead me in the right places. I'm a "pantser," meaning I don't plot. I simply write from the seat of my pants. I generally, in my head, have an idea of where the story is going. I sometimes will jot down the next sequence of events on a piece of scratch paper. You should see my notes: a jumbled mess. Organization is not my forte.

Today, I'm working on a 2,000 word flash fiction/short fiction piece. It's for another contest I'm entering, and I'm having a hard time wrapping it up. I have until Friday (next) to publish it, so I do have some time to work with the ending. The thing about shorts, is it takes skill to get your point across. It takes skill to come up with the perfect ending, to get across your point in such a limited amount of space. The story needs to have impact within its short confines. I think that's hard to achieve, but when you do it can be amazing. Shorts have a way of giving a reader a snippet of life, like a memory. Shorts often stick with you for a long time, because they DO make such a big impact. I'm envious of many short writers who can do it so flawlessly, and I hope to be able to write shorts like them some day. With practice, maybe I'll get there.

And as a little teaser, here's a little video from Youtube. This is incorporated into my short, which will be posted on this site before next Friday! I hope you come back to read it.