It looks like Blogger ate some of my homework. Here’s the rest of the above post:
“Writing Short Stories: Harder than a Novel,” by Jess Lourey
Have some of you already corrected the grammar of my title? “Hard” implies physical hardness (or, if you’re a romance writer, a plot resolution). My title isn’t referring to the state of being solid but rather the level of difficulty short story writing entails. However, “Writing Short Stories: More Difficult than a Novel” wasn’t really catchy. My current title isn’t either, but it’s shorter, and that’s my point.
Shorter is harder. (stop it, romance writers)
I first discovered this when I was asked to submit to Resort to Murder, an anthology featuring Minnesota writers. Every story submitted had only one requirement: the crime HAD to be set on a real Minnesota resort. At the point in my writing career (ha! I have a writing career like a candy striper has a medical career) that I received the request to contribute, I had only written one short story, and it wasn’t good. It was a self-involved college-era foray into faux-meaningfulness. The title was, “A Search in El Espejo,” where El Espejo was a fictional town, but since it is Spanish for “the mirror,” the story was really an allegory for a deep, soul-searching journey. The whole thing brings to mind my favorite Flannery O’Connor quote:
“Everywhere I go, I’m asked if I think the universities stifle writers. My opinion is that they don’t stifle enough of them.”
I wrote “El Espejo” over a decade ago and figured I’d learned a lot since then. I had published two novels in my Murder-by-Month series, May Day and June Bug, and the third, Knee High by the Fourth of July, was about to be released. Hooking on the promotional angle, I decided to write the Resort to Murder short story featuring Mrs. Berns, a great minor character in my series. If people were introduced to her in the story and liked her, hey!–they might check out the whole series. With that mercenary goal in mind, I set to work.
And. set. to. work.
I couldn’t get started. I felt like I had to tell my life story in 4 words or less. Or like I had to paint the American flag but couldn’t use blue or red to do it. Or as if I had been called on to make spaghetti without pasta.
With short stories, you are required to include all the elements of the novel–great character development, visceral setting, witty dialogue, a clever mystery, suspense, resolution–but you get to use about 2% as many words to do it.
C’mon. Are you kidding me?
Totally lost, I fell back on formula. I researched the sub-genre known as the “locked room mystery,” wherein a murder takes place in apparently impossible conditions–no one could have entered or left the scene of the crime, and the death was definitely not a suicide. It makes for a neat little package of a story, so I wrote one of those as best I could. Only, my short story was set in Minnesota, so it wasn’t just a locked room mystery; it was “The Locked Fish-Cleaning-House Mystery.”
Agh. I bround out that short story. I did it, but it hurt. Am I the only one who thinks that short stories, both the writing and reading of, are less fun than novels? (and p.s., forget I said that if my excellent short story, “Beauty Is in the Eye of the Newt,” gets picked up by a publisher; I’m a slow learner).
Jess Lourey, author of the Murder-by-Month series, the guest blogger for today, has just released August Moon, the fourth book in her Lefty-nominated Murder-by-Month series. Of August Moon, Kirkus Reviews writes, “Another amusing tale set in the town full of over-the-top zanies who’ve endeared themselves to the engaging Mira.” Of this review, Jess Lourey writes, “Another vaguely encouraging review set in the sea of milquetoast blurbs offered to nameless authors at small publishers.”
Jess will be touring the West Coast with mystery author Dana Fredsti in May and hitting the Midwest in June. Check her website (http://www.jesslourey.com/appearances.html) for more details on dates and locations. The first person to email her through her website with the name of the best-selling mystery of all-time will win a free signed copy of Knee High by the Fourth of July, her Lefty-nominated mystery.
Jess Lourey, author of the Murder-by-Month series, the guest blogger for today, has just released August Moon, the fourth book in her Lefty-nominated Murder-by-Month series. Of August Moon, Kirkus Reviews writes, “Another amusing tale set in the town full of over-the-top zanies who’ve endeared themselves to the engaging Mira.” Of this review, Jess Lourey writes, “Another vaguely encouraging review set in the sea of milquetoast blurbs offered to nameless authors at small publishers.”