There are a lot of options to chose from when you decide to take up writing as a hobby. I’m particularly found of working on different styles of poetry (there’s a lot more than limericks, haikus, and sonnets...many don’t even rhyme). Knowing what story you want to tell can help you narrow down what form to choose.
But before you sit down to write that 500,000 word epic novel, might I make a case for a slightly more manageable type?
This being the short story.
The short story is one of my favorites to read and write. As a kid I had many anthologies spanning multiple genres from horror, fantasy, and even biblical. These short stories were easy to read and often had really cool fully illustrated pages.
As time passed, I moved from the short stories, thinking them only for kids, until I was much older and picking up my first copy of Edgar Allen Poe stories. One book of short stories lead into two, then ten, and now I’m kicking myself for only valuing the novel for so much of my life.
I find short stories to be a lot easier to write then novels. Novels require a lot of time to plotting, character development, editing, and revisions. Short stories require all of these things too, but at a much smaller scale - which I find more manageable.
My first publication was a very short story that’s in an anthology. The story I wrote wouldn’t have fit in a longer style. I also wrote the story on a dare.
The short story has the bare bone structure of a novel, but on a compact scale. To practice, I started writing and practicing the form using fanfiction. This is here I learned more about pacing, writing comedy, and found a lot for scaring people. It also allowed me to receive feedback from commenters.
Yeah, fanfiction might have a bad rep, but this practice was invaluable when I was a new writer. However, fanfiction is copy right infringement (unless that work is in the public domain) that most authors don’t mind as long as you aren’t making money. It wasn’t long before I wanted to write my own original stories with my own characters, get published, and make money. In this case I started to go to writer’s groups to workshop these stories and get feedback from different people, some who had already published.
This is where I learned about the three main types of short story.
- The traditional short story - traditional short stories are anywhere from 1,000 or 1,500 to 7,500 words. Occasionally you’ll find a publisher who will take a short story around 10,000 words, it htthese stories are usually considered novellas.
- Flash Fiction - most flash fiction is between 500 to 1,000 words. Some publishers consider anything under 1,500 words to be flash. They have a beginning, middle, and end - just like short stories. I love flash fiction, but it is a challenge to write.
- Microfiction - known by other categories or names such as drabble or dribble in fanfiction communities and two sentence stories on places like Reddit. Microfiction can hover around 100 words to as few as 50 or as high as 500 words. These stories still need all the trappings of a short story (beginning, middle, end, character development, and plot).
Guess what, you can get all three types of short stories published and get paid for writing them. However, if you’ve never written a flash or microfiction, you might want to get some peer or professional feedback first before submitting to publishers.
Flash fiction and microfiction are incredibly difficult to write despite their short length. Each word matters and must be used strategically. It can be tough cutting out two or three sentences that you thought would rock the literary world all in the name of meeting a word count.
However, short stories are not for everyone. Some people have a need to write longer prose. That’s okay too. Hopefully, you’ll give consideration to short stories, flash fiction, and microfiction on your journey to write during these crazy times.
Until next week.
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