Writing Workshop Lessons: How to Write Short

Bullet points on what I learned

I wasn’t going to share or even talk about my zero draft because that’s the draft that you know is, uh, stinky. 💩 Mine tend to have literal holes in it, places where I have left notes to my future self like “[describe this]” or “[how did they get here?]”

Then I noticed an interesting parallel between the first and last draft. In the middle drafts, I had cut down my opening a lot trying to get under the word count. After the editor’s comments I decided I’d cut too far, and I rolled the opening lines back to the opening of the tomb, so to speak.

With one key difference: my first draft had our intrepid thieves using nanobots to help them. The final draft used ropes and pulleys. Why? Nanobots are definitely cooler and in line with the genre.

There’s a time and place for cool ideas, to be sure. Nanobots would be perfect if the nanobots actually contributed to the end of the story—maybe even caused it. In this case they merely added words to a story I was already struggling to keep under the limit. If I took the final version I ended up with and added the nanobots back in, that might be, what, 500 words? Then I have to mention them again later. 1000 words?! The nanobots are cool but they’re not worth a quarter of the final length.

Oh, and about the length. Length was something most of the workshop participants learned about. The original challenge was 1500 words. My final draft? 3,900 words.

Learning how my plot translates to length is exactly one of the reasons I signed up for the workshop, and I talked about that here.

So to recap, I’ve learned that

1) Cool ideas not necessary to the plot are a trap, and

2) Not all cuts are good cuts. At some point you must let the story be as long as it needs to be. Which brings us back to the planning stage, and:

3) Stick to one scene per 2000ish words.

If I wanted to write a new flash piece to meet the 1500 challenge (say, for a magazine submission), the first thing I would do is make sure that my story is ONE scene. I sort of thought it was one scene, since I do plot things out. Yet realistically, lowering themselves into the hidden room brings them to a second scene, even though it’s sort of the same room. Oops!

Woah, woah, back up. Can’t we fit two scenes into 1500 words?

I’m sure you’re thinking you’ve read such stories before. Okay, but were the stories, by any chance, heavily dependent on shared experiences, such as being set in our world—or did it use tropes? For example, if the main character is a werewolf, perhaps you’re able to guess that pretty quickly, and you can assume many things about how werewolf magic works, and the writer doesn’t have to spend hundreds of words on what a werewolf is.

Yeaaaaah, about that. I love me some tropes, but I’ve noticed a strong tendency to pursue the ideas that require backstory, descriptions, and exceptions. It’s fine to love those ideas, but I need to admit that’s what I’m doing, and make sure I’m not overloading the story, and that I’m realistically projecting the word count needed to pursue weird ideas. This is a little like 1) except in 1), the cool ideas aren’t part of the main plot. That’s why you can cut them and you hardly bleed at all. Here we arrive at 4: Weird ideas require more words. Tropes and shared experiences require fewer words.

If you have to scrap a weird idea from 4), you basically have to start over.

This particular story has a projector that can show the past. Not weird at all, right? I also had to describe the strange artifacts they found in the hidden room, though those did lean somewhat on actual history/dead mythologies. Things I didn’t have to explain included the ability to travel between worlds (with a passport), hiding from & fooling oppressive governments, or the aforementioned dead mythology.

One last thing I could have done, but I simply didn’t want to. I had two characters on screen. I have no trouble focusing on one main character, but I find it more interesting if they have someone to talk to, and in this case it was a colleague or friend they had known a long time. How they think about this other person can show you a lot about the character. But a second character does, of course, use up more words. Most of the other workshop writers also had two or more characters on screen, though one clever dude didn’t bring the second character in until the very end. That gave the MC someone to think about, but gave the actual second character fewer words. Brilliant, really.

It’s natural to want two characters, but 5 would be right out for such a story, and it IS possible with just one. My character could have gone it alone, and all the major plot points would remain the same. I would have lost a character arc/theme though, and with all the other oopsies like having two scenes, I figured I’d already dug my hole. These lessons were for future me, so I can wrangle things into place before I fall in love with all the extras. So that I know what I’m doing to myself, next time.

So here we are with a story just under 4k, and these notes for keeping your stories trim:

1. Cool ideas not necessary to the plot are a trap.

2. Not all cuts are good cuts. At some point you must let the story be as long as it needs to be, or change the plot.

3. Stick to one scene per 2000ish words.

4. Weird ideas require more words. Tropes and shared experiences require fewer words.

5. Fewer characters means fewer words. Do you really need that character? For longer works, the same can apply to too many themes, too many side quests, and too many surprise bad guys (bait and switching the Big Bad).

Remember that cutting these things leaves us more room for other complexities. For example, my characters think they have found one thing, but it turns out to be something else. I also kept in a fair amount of backstory, like why they were running, and other strictly “unnecessary” details that my beta readers loved. This goes back to #2. Keeping the other parts of your story trim gives you more room for the best words.

All-in-all I’m very happy to have a short short story! The last story I had published was over twice as long, as is the story in an upcoming anthology. There are more than two characters, a hidden underwater selkie village, and lots of creepy magic. I’ll drop the link as soon as I can!

To read previous posts in this series, go to Word Count and my terrible opening, and Writing Flash, it’s a Hoot