Welcome to short stories, flash fiction, and microfiction

So, you may have decided to try your hand at writing during this time. Awesome! More stories and voices are always welcome - especially from fresh and innovative writers. Are you looking to record your memoirs, start a blog, draft a play, or work on fictional prose? What kind of story do you want to tell? Who are you telling this story to?

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.

Welcome to a Writer's Fear

I would love to one day see myself on a best selling author's list. Or even have a novel or short story I've written turned into a popular movie series. I hope to one day have people look back fondly on my work like I do with stories written by J.K. Rowling and Terry Pratchett.

I know I'm not the only person who has these types of dreams. It doesn't matter if they are about being a writer, a movie maker, a musician, or any other type of creation.

I've been told that I can write well. I've been told I have a wild imagination. I've been told that I am a good story teller. I've been told a lot of things about my writing, nearly all of them good.

Yet there's always this nagging voice in the back of my mind that causes me to doubt myself. Between writer's block and fear that my stories are no where near good enough for strangers to read, I struggle to finish short stories and novels (or if I do finish them, then finishing the rewriting and editing).

I don't make it a secret that I write fan fiction (no not the 50 Shades of Grey kind). It's where I've been experimenting with my style and different genres. I've gotten some great feedback on most of my stories. However, I've stopped rereading them.

Why?

Because when I go back and read those stories, all I see is where I could have improved them. I notice all the small changes that I could have made that would have made my work better. I also start to sometimes think that what I've written is silly and that maybe I shouldn't have posted them at all.

Doubt is my worst enemy.

Even this blog can be a struggle sometimes. I have posted once a week consistently (with one or two skips) since 2013. I've had many posts that I've started and then promptly deleted. There have been many weeks where I've wondered if I should click that "publish" button because once I do, anyone can see it.

 Will people laugh at what I have to say? Am I writing anything worth reading? Is this even good?

Don't get me wrong. I know negative feedback is going to happen. I can't grow as a writer without negative feedback. I just find that there's a difference between being told that a few things in my writing don't work versus being told that what I've written is complete garbage. It's that fear of being complete garbage that always makes me pause (and occasionally ask someone for a second opinion) before hitting that "publish" button.

I've recently joined two writers groups. I've submitted a few samples of my writing and I've gotten the constructive feedback that I need (what does and doesn't work). Each time that it was my turn to submit, I almost said "never mind, I actually don't have anything to share."

Thankfully I didn't back out. I got the feedback that I needed to make improvements to future drafts and I'm looking to publish a short story (more developments to come). It helps my confidence to know that people like some of the things I write.

It might be totally irrational, but one of my biggest fears is that I'm not writing anything worth reading.

Finding that confidence might be the toughest challenge that I face, that or editing. I have very little patience for editing.

If you enjoyed this post (or it really pissed you off), please like, share, and/or leave a comment. I love hearing from my readers and I hope you guys like hearing from me. Until next week.