At the moment I am writing a lot of shorter fiction, well saying that the story I’ve just finished the 1st draft of is almost 20,000 words and I don’t think that I’ve written a story under 8,000 words in the last year. When I started writing me and Owen dived head first into a novel (Project Phoenix), like bulls in a china shop.  We had no idea about how to write anything let alone a 100,000 word novel.  Once we’d finished the first draft and realised just how crap rubbish it was we started looking at our other projects that we had at the time.  At that time though I had a few other projects that were screaming in my head to be let out so I wrote a couple of them but then went back to looking at Project Phoenix.  Then at christmas 2009 I had just had a relationship collapse.  It had been a very important relationship and my response to it (the first response) was to go and buy a new laptop, on Xmas eve.  (My second response to the break up was to buy a BMW) Back to the laptop, so that Xmas eve, and christmas day, and boxing day I wrote a complete short story.  I think it was about 6000 words give or take, before I did a few tweaks.  That was the second story that I had written in my short story series, the first I had written about a month before.  It was that second story though that really opened up a lot ideas with this world and it escalated over the next six months.  It took about a year to really get flowing with the words though and by the end of last year I had five completed (well, 1st drafts) written in that universe and other story ideas were coming out.  I wrote one which was solid sci-fi which is going to be one of the first two that I am going to start submitting.

What have I learnt from short stories?  Well I think one of the biggest things was that I learnt to write in 1st person.  Almost all of the short fiction that I have written has been in this narrative, but I struggle to write any longer form in 1st person.  I also learnt how to finish a story.  This was something that I always seem to struggle with.  I had started a number of projects with Owen and neither of us had finished anything except Project Phoenix.  I was also writing fiction that was set in areas that I knew.  So I didn’t have to imagine any surroundings as I was writing.  Even if I didn’t put much detail in about the areas that these were set in it made it so much easier knowing what the locations were like.  I still think that is a weakness that I have, I can see some great locations and settings in my head, I just need to learn how to describe them better.  I also learnt character developement, how to let the story carry itself and to trust myself.  I also learnt that I can write when I don’t feel like it.  I used to think that if I forced myself to write then it would be worthless and I’d delete it the next time that I looked at it.  That is a load of……….. (Insert word of choice) When I’ve written when I didnt feel like it I’ve wrote some pretty good stuff.  Some of it may not have been perfect but it was not as bad as I thought it had been.

I know a lot of writers out there don’t write short fiction in any form but for me writing short fiction is a great pleasure and I’ve learnt so much from it so I don’t think that I’ll be stopping any time soon 🙂