  Short Stories
This week: What Size is Your Story? Edited by: Jay's debut novel is out now!  
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What Size is Your Story?
Here's one method to project the potential size of your story, if you're not sure how to estimate something beforehand!
Do you have a lot of trouble with your stories outgrowing your original expectations? Here's one way to break it down. |
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So, a friend of mine has a problem - - their stories keep expanding into novels.
Now, this wouldn't be so bad, in theory, except that it keeps happening, which is distracting when the one thing you want is to actually finish something.
There's no hard rule for how long a story should be, but there are some rules of thumb that you can use as a rough guideline for how large you can reasonably expect a story to be in order to gauge what you might be in for in terms of time commitment and set pieces. These will vary, depending on your chosen genre and your own personal writing styles, so of course these are just possible parameters that can help prevent you from overshooting on the size or complexity of a piece before you even begin! Keep in mind also that these rules go completely out the window if your story actually HAS gone off into novella or novel territory.  I originally read this in a blog entry about a class taught by Mary Robinette Kowal, and I found it pretty helpful with some tweaking and a little wiggle room to account for style and so on.
I find that this works whether I'm using a rigid story action outline, but really, even if you are writing by the seat of your pants, it should be worth thinking about the rough number of scenes or setting pieces your story has, as well as how many characters have major speaking roles. Sure, these things can evolve, but being able to project that a story has certain expectations with regards to volume can help keep you from overcomplicating too short of a story.
Setting: how much of the story relies on where it is told? For genre pieces, this might be a significant portion of your story. For every scene change, you will probably have a few hundred to a thousand words to establish each scene, so make the most of your setting! Compounded with setting, plot can be part of the wordcount as well, but it's up to the author to get the plot to do as much of its own heavy lifting as possible. Estimating 500 to 1000 words per distinct set piece, depending on the conventions of your genre, is a good way to project.
Characters: This can be tricky, but the number of named speaking characters will vary your wordcount as well-- since the number of speakers means that you'll need to establish traits about each of those characters and so on. And then of course there's dialogue between those characters, and interaction with aforementioned set pieces, so there's some overlap, but budgeting yourself a good 1000 words or so for every character in a short story.
So a good rule of thumb for a 5,000 word short story, for example, would be two or three distinct settings and two or three distinct named characters. Certainly you CAN write fewer words than that, for example, but it's a safe number of words to budget that the story will take you.
In a similar vein, writing a flash length (1,000 words or less) story for a contest such as The Writer's Cramp - Poetry Week! , you can assume that one or two settings and one or two named characters will work well, assuming none of those elements takes a lot of explanation, and that more than that may bite into the available word count to make sure that your plot comes across on the page as well!
This can be an interesting exercise to test out with a story that isn't quite clicking correctly, too. If you do a quick tally of your named characters and distinct settings and it comes out way off, it may be easy to look at those numbers and realize that you need more connective tissue (ie, words) in the story to harmonize your elements. It's less of a concern extrapolating in the other direction: certainly you can write a LONGER story with fewer characters or settings, too.
Until next time,
Take care and Write on!
~jay
for more reading on this, check out this blog entry from one of Mary Robinette Kowal's students: http://lstaylor.blogspot.com/2016/01/short-stories-explained-siwc-2015.html |
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Feedback from last month's editorial: "Idea Generation"
chord0 writes:
hello
A lot of my stories have come from prompts and contests, here in Writing.com. Also some of my poems have come from ideas from contests here or lists of words from newsletters at Writing.com. Lately I have written an Essay on one of my travels to Paris and also writing about some of my other travels to Mexico in the past and travels in Cuba when I grew up as a child there. I also read different types of fiction and write book reviews on it; science fiction, historical fiction, plays and dungeons and dragon adventures. There are so many sources of inspiration all around us, past and present.
I enjoyed the stories in this newsletter
gchord0
Glad you enjoyed it, gchord! I like that you've found lots of ways to stay inspired, too!
Quick-Quill  writes:
In the 9 years I've been on WDC I never had a problem writing stories for prompts or coming up with ideas. No so this past couple years. I'm not sure the problem I just hope it goes away soon. I struggle to find a plot even with the prompts.
Sometimes prompts are difficult when they aren't quite hitting you at the right point. I've found that writing with no prompt at all can be its own kind of prompt-- just filling the void with words until I find a few that sound nice when they clack together...
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Short Stories: May 25, 2016 Issue [#7655]
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