Friday 21^st August 2020

In order to relieve some of my creative boredom right now I’ve started doing some work into short stories.

Whilst I’ve had some short stories meet with success over the years, it’s not an area where I feel completely comfortable. I’m still very hit and miss with the short stories I write. I think it’s because, in part, I try to write short novels rather than an actual short story per say.

So it made sense to sit down today and do some research on short stories to see if I could gather any real insights. I made a lot of notes and some of what I discovered was interesting. I’m just not sure whether it was actually useful or not. In fact, probably the biggest breakthrough of the day was learning how to enter equations (in this case, one to get a rough idea of story length) into my notetaking app.

But, sometimes it’s a case of absorbing information and see whether anything subconscious comes through. I’ve got an idea for a take on the traditional fantasy story I want to do, and hearing several short story writers describe this form as the last chapter in a novel, has got me thinking about an approach.

So the plan is to try and write it over the weekend. I’m currently pretty busy in the evening helping a friend get to level 100 in Fortnite before the new season, so I’m not sure how much time I’ve got to do this.

The idea for this story is to tell the story of an injured warrior who society has written off now he no longer has all his limbs. Having had serious injuries that left me with long lasting disabilities has meant that I know how much of a fight some people with disabilities have every single day. Couple this with society’s attack on the ill (they’re always seen as benefit scroungers when many balance full-time jobs) means I want to tell a story about a disabled fighter.

I have a strong idea for the plot as I really know how this story ends. What I need to do is decide how I’m going to tell it. So at the moment, it’s really to get a strong idea of theme.

I’d traditionally seen this story as very linear. Hero goes to inn, hero meets adventurers, hero ventures out to the farm. I may have even written a draft where he was working on a farm.

What I want to do now – driven by this last chapter idea – is have him just venturing out to the farm. There can be visual markers that can call back to the inn and the adventurers as if they were earlier chapters. I’m not sure it will work but I’m interested to try this little experiment.

So currently, I’m thinking about theme and structure. I’m trying to distill this story down to what essentially matters, but the idea is to try and write it over the weekend. I’m giving myself permission to fail on this one so if I come up with some crazy ideas I might go for them, just to see what happens.

In the meantime, I’ll look for further insight into short stories and see if there’s anything else I can learn.