I recently reconnected with some old projects, and was a little upset when I read them.
One of the mistakes I’d made was incorrectly anticipating story length, and now it feels like those old stories, that I thought were done and buried, have risen from their graves to haunt me.
Not only did I take some too-big concepts and try to write them into short stories, but I’ve got a few longer works that should probably be trimmed dramatically, because my work is better and cleaner when I begin with a short story format.
While some novels seem so complex that one could hardly try to distill their concepts to a single sentence, others are easy to peg on the first try. What makes it so hard to nail down a concept? And once you have a concept, what length of story will tell it?
I began my life-long journey with martial arts at the age of eight, when my mother enrolled me in my first judo class. Being a very small boy, she thought that it would give me strength and confidence. It gave me those, plus much more.
Once you’ve agonized your way through a story or novel, you breathe a sigh of relief that your task is finally done. But the truth is, the hard word is just beginning.
“Finish what you start” is some of the best advice one can give a burgeoning writer.
This is the fourth entry in my Cover to Cover series which follows a story idea from inception until potential publication.