So, welcome Liv Rancourt, short story writer extraordinaire.
Writing Short Stories
Congratulations, Cora, on your Sisters In Crime panel
experience. I know that was a lot of fun, both for you and your audience! And
thanks for the invite to be a guest on your blog.
You asked about my experience
writing short stories, and since I did a lot of that in the last year, I’m
happy to share what I learned with your readers.
Between December of 2011 and December of 2012, I had eight
short stories published with two different publishers. Four of them are in
anthologies from Still Moments
Publishing, and the other four were published independently by editor
Rayne Hall in her Ten Tales series. Each project was different, and each
one taught me something I’m now applying to my longer WIP.
I basically treated last year as graduate school, and
thought of every short story as an assignment. I wrote paranormal, historical,
horror, and contemporary romance, in both first and close third person points
of view. I learned that working from the POV of a 15 year old boy in 1810 New
Orleans is a huge challenge. I learned I don’t know diddly-squat about the
standard tropes for horror writing. And I learned how important it is to limit
the number of characters in even a longish, 10,000 word short story, or you will lose and confuse your readers.
On the plus side, I realized how comfortable I am writing
contemporary romance from a snappy first-person POV. I can write from third
person if the piece calls for it, but it’s nice to know I have a go-to skill
that almost always works.
My story The Santa
Drag first appeared in the Christmas
Treats: Santa’s Nice List anthology in December 2011, and then was
re-released as a stand-alone
$0.99 short in December 2012. In between, I got to make another editing
pass, which was a cool way of seeing how much I’d learned. I trimmed several hundred words from a 6000
word short story because I realized they didn’t add much to the plot. Some bits
got reconfigured and worked back in, but overall the stand-alone version is
leaner and more fun to read.
IMHO ;)
That experience illustrates one of the keys to writing a
short story. You don’t have the luxury of 100,000 words to build your world and
develop your characters. Every-Single-Word-Has-To-Count. Choose details that
both reinforce your scene and illustrate your character. Trim unnecessary
dialogue tags, and don’t tell the reader what they already know. Edit like a
demon and don’t waste space.
Another key is to keep your plot tightly focused. Deal with
one main conflict, with maybe one or two secondary threads, and limit the number
of characters involved. A cast of
thousands – or even ten – won’ fit into five thousand words. If you’re
struggling with this part, then the story might be too big for the format, and
you may need to think in terms of a novella-length piece or even a novel.
Most compelling plots are built around a model like Joseph
Campbell’s The
Hero’s Journey. You can do that with short stories, too, but you only have
space to show some of the steps. Reference the other steps, so that your reader
has a sense that your story has a bigger context as you hone in on one section
of the model’s arc.
Like everything in writing, “the rules” aren’t cast in
stone. These are just some of the tools I picked up that I hope will help you
in your work. If there’s a specific technique you want to try – writing from a
different POV or using a historical setting, for example – put it in a short
story. You’ll have the chance to practice without committing hours of time and
energy to a project that might just end up as a learning exercise.
Short stories and novellas are popular e-book sellers, so
it’s a format that’s worth exploring for its own sake. If I apply the correct
persuasive techniques to my beta readers, I can turn around a 5000 story in
under two weeks. (I’m lucky that most of them will work for chocolate, or
sometimes cocktails.) Some ideas simply work better in a short format, and I
keep a list of possibilities handy, to work on between more extensive projects.
Writing short stories takes discipline, but it’s fun and well worth the effort.
Liv Rancourt writes paranormal and
romance, often at the same time. She lives with her husband, two teenagers, two
cats and one wayward puppy. She likes to create stories that have happy endings,
and finds it is a good way to balance her other job in the neonatal intensive
care unit.
Liv can be found on-line at:
Blurb:
Molly,
a forty-something single mom, tangles with the wrong guy and gets a hell of a
hickey. That blotch is really a demon’s mark, and she’ll have to face the three
things that scare her most to get rid of it. First, Molly loses her job and
then she has a near-sex experience with her philandering, not-quite-ex-husband.
Worst of all, she has to sit by a hospital bed, wondering if her son is ever
going to wake up.
The
Powers That Be assign Cass to help her. He’s an angel who’s trying to earn a
seat in the celestial choir by helping out a human in need. Vanquishing the
demon would be his ticket up, but only if he plays by the rules. He’ll never
earn his wings if he loses his heart to the lovely Molly. But she has even
bigger things to worry about. She stands to lose her soul.
Forever And Ever, Amen is available from Crimson Romance, Amazon, Barnes & Noble,
and ARe
Liv
Rancourt
Writer
Let's
have a devil of a good time!
