I plan to spend a good portion of my writing day revisiting
the parts of my short story that I’ve already written in the hope of improving
the narrative pace. Given that I usually
write novels and not short stories, I’ve always had trouble switching over to
the kind of pace demanded by shorter pieces.
I’ve come up with a strategy for dealing with this. Hopefully it will help.
Step 1:
Write an outline detailing all of the major plot points of the piece. This will give me an idea of whether I have
realistic expectations regarding how much I can realistically fit into a short
piece. There’s also the bonus of being
able to determine the best order of events right off the bat.
Step 2:
Determine about how long I want the story to be. Having a good estimate of page length or word
count should help me as I write by keeping focused on moving the story along
instead of getting bogged down by tangents.
Step 3:
Decide the most crucial scenes that I want to devote the most time and
attention to and write a rough draft of those first. Once I know approximately how long those are
going to be, that should tell me whether or not I have a chance of achieving
the desired length with the rest of the scenes written and added in. If I think it’s going to go too long, then I
need to revisit the outline and decide what, if anything, I can cut.
That’s what I’ve got for now. Hopefully it’ll be a good start.
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