I’m working on a collection of short stories right now. I’ve completed 3 of them so far, and my goal is to finish 10. They’ve been a lot of fun to write. The approach to writing short stories is a lot different than novels.
With writing novels, I’m eager to expand the world, to create layers of intrigue and suspense. It’s exciting to build the sequence of events, to add twists and turns in the narrative. There’s so much to explore in a novel, so many things that could happen.
With short stories, the approach is more like exploring an idea through a limited number of scenes. The twists and turns arrive much quicker, but one must be careful not to let them happen too fast or else it’ll spoil the surprise.
Instead of including a plethora of details as I would in a novel, I’m capturing the essence of the scenes, of the characters. When everything comes together, it feels as if it needn’t be long at all.
Fallton Havenstonne 